International Journal of Cultural Studies 14(4)

347361 The Author(s) 2011

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DOI: 10.1177/1367877911403246
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Beyond connection: Cultural cosmopolitan

and ubiquitous media

Article

John Tomlinson

Nottingham Trent University, England

Abstract
In his media ethics, Roger Silverstone was particularly sceptical of the idea that increasing mediaconnectedness in itself is set to improve our overall moral condition or to foster a cosmopolitan
cultural outlook. In arguing that we need to go beyond connection, he raised the broader issue
of the cultural condition that an intensely connected environment is establishing, and posed
questions of the kinds of relatedness, the sense of belonging, the moral horizons and awareness
of responsibilities that such a condition entails. This article takes an historical approach to
these issues by considering how mediated connectivity may have been regarded, particularly in
relation to the ideas of internationalism and cosmopolitanism, during the 1930s. Considering this
earlier period of modernity in which media technologies and institutions were emerging as
significant shapers of cultural attitudes, but before they had achieved the ubiquity and the takenfor-grantedness of today can, it will suggested, offer a useful perspective on our own globalized,
media-saturated times.

Keywords
connectivity, cosmopolitanism, internationalism, media technologies, proper distance
the morality that media and communications technologies enable is easily, and often,
presumed to be a function of their capacity to connect. That is what they do. They bring us
together. And that connection is sufficient, it is said, for us to relate to each other as human,
moral, beings. It is transcendent. It is all we need. It offers us unimaginable possibilities for
controlling our lives. And, arguably too, possibilities for our own personal fulfilment. But I am
arguing that we need to go beyond connection, if we are to pursue a grounded ethics.
(Silverstone, 2003: 483)

Corresponding author:
John Tomlinson, School of Arts and Humanities, Nottingham Trent University, Clifton Lane, Nottingham
NG11 8NS, United Kingdom.
Email: john.tomlinson@ntu.ac.uk

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Roger Silverstones untimely death, at the height of his powers, robbed the world of
media studies of one of its most powerful and original thinkers. As best illustrated in his
last book Media and Morality (Silverstone, 2007), Silverstones media ethics were
deeply engaged, subtle, complex and wide in their scope. In his concept of the mediapolis he has bequeathed us perhaps the most significant framework so far for conceptualizing the complicated moral entanglements of globalized culture, media technologies
and media institutions.
In what follows I do not attempt to engage with either the full range or the detail of
Silverstones media ethics, so much as to draw on certain of its insights to explore a
particular issue: the prospects for the emergence, in the context of contemporary mediasaturated globalized existence, of a progressive, just, humane and plural cosmopolitan
culture. This question was without doubt close to the heart of Roger Silverstones intellectual and political project. In his discussion of globalization and cosmopolitanism in
Media and Morality he writes:
The media provide a technological and cultural framework for the connectivity, positive or
negative, without which the globe would be a mere shadow. It is within the medias framing,
in image and narrative, homepage and chat room, that increasingly the world is becoming
global and liveable. The question this raises, of course, is the possibility of envisaging the
media as enhancing a global cosmopolitan culture (Silverstone, 2007: 10, 12)

Silverstone was of course acutely aware of all the potential cultural and political problems attaching to the idea of cosmopolitanism and the figure of the cosmopolitan, but he
nonetheless believed that, used with care it will stand as an actuality for some, a possibility for many, and as a basis for a plausible moral foundation of a global civil society
(for all) (2007: 12). This view closely related to Ulrich Becks (2006) understanding
of cosmopolitan realism is also pretty much my own (Tomlinson, 1999, 2002, 2007)
and so I do not intend to engage here in a defence of the ideal of cosmopolitan culture,
but try to explore some of the cultural conditions for its promotion. Nor indeed will I
become very much involved in the difficult ethical issues issues of the negotiation of
plurality and universality, otherness and sameness, and dispositions towards the stranger
that Silverstones work illuminated with such eloquence and nuance. My focus is rather
on exploring the broad cultural context within which cosmopolitan moral agency might
be exercised. And this entails trying to establish some analytical purchase on the perplexing cultural condition defined by the intersection of the broad complex connectivity of
globalization with the dramatic transformation of cultural experience that arises from the
ubiquity of new media technologies in everyday life.
In the passage that I quoted at the outset, Silverstone was sceptical of the conviction
that increasing and increasingly sophisticated forms of connectedness in themselves
are set to improve our moral condition or even our capacity to exercise more control over
our lives. This is a scepticism I share, as I suppose do many, if what it amounts to is a
general scepticism about technological solutions to cultural and moral problems and
dilemmas. But Roger meant more in this observation. In arguing that we need to go
beyond connection, he was implicitly raising the broader issue of the cultural condition
that a media-saturated and intensely connected environment is establishing, and posing
questions of the kinds of relatedness, the sense of belonging, the moral horizons and
awareness of responsibilities that such a condition entails. In particular, he was concerned

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with the problem that defines this present collection of how, in our telemediated
practices, we may find the proper distance morally appropriate to our technologically
achieved connection with distant others. I want to begin to engage with this agenda by
addressing two related questions.
First, why does the achievement of sheer connection come to have the aura of transcendent virtue that Silverstone correctly in my view identifies it as having within so
many areas of contemporary cultural discourse? As Silverstone realized, we have to separate out this question to some degree at least from the political economic context of
global capitalism within which all cultural practice and experience is inevitably situated.
This is because, without this analytical separation, we are liable to rush towards rather
superficial and even cynical answers: for example, that it is plainly in the interests of the
commercial producers of communications technologies that we regard their use as a
primary good. Now there is clearly an undeniable relationship between the current ubiquity of mediated communications and the dynamics of the capitalist market. And, furthermore, this relationship extends beyond the simple question of the marketing of
communications goods within a consumer culture. The enthusiasm with which the state
has embraced and promoted new media technologies, and digital culture more widely,
is arguably to a larger degree a matter of engagement and alignment with global market
forces than a considered and principled act of cultural leadership. But none of this
except on an implausible over-estimation of the capacity of short-term institutional
forces to shape moral and cultural attitudes can provide us with a satisfying answer to
the question of how the ideal of connection acquires its moral force. To approach this we
need to see how, in turn, this ideal emerged out of a set of cultural values which placed
communication and mobility at the heart of the project of modernity.
To explore this, I propose, in the following section, to step back from our contemporary period to consider how mediated connectivity may have been regarded particularly
in relation to the ideas of internationalism and cosmopolitanism during the 1930s.
Considering this earlier period of modernity in which media technologies and institutions were emerging as significant shapers of cultural attitudes, but before they had
achieved the ubiquity and the taken-for-grantedness of today can, I will suggest, give
us some useful perspective on our own times.
The second question follows predictably enough from the first. It is the question of
where the developmental trajectory of media technologies and institutions and of the
globalization process more broadly has taken us from the imagined world of global
connectivity of this earlier period. How, in fact, does the everyday practice and experience of being connected in the 21st-century world of Google, Twitter, Blogs, wikis and
social networking sites differ in form, mode and quality from that of the earlier period.
And what are the implications of these differences for the prospects of moral engagement
with the issues and dilemmas that globalization confronts us with?

We Live in Two Worlds

In 1937, the English playwright and social commenter J.B. Priestley wrote and narrated
a short documentary film for the British GPO Film Unit, called We Live in Two Worlds.
The film contrasts the old world order of international divisions and political hostilities
with what Priestley regarded as an emerging world of internationalism and cosmopolitan

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progress, driven principally by new transport and communications technologies.

Priestleys vision demonstrates not only the belief in progressive internationalism, but
also in certain high-modernist values and attitudes that were fairly typical of left-leaning
intellectuals of his time.1
The film begins with Priestley addressing his audience, pipe in mouth, from an armchair in his study:
Nowadays, we live in two worlds. I believe thats why we all feel so bewildered. The first world
is the one which we are always reading about in the newspapers, the world of separate states
and nations, of frontiers and passports and customs houses and armies. The limiting and
quarrelsome national world.
[Moving to a globe of the world]:
Now for the second world that we dont hear so much about. Its the growing international
world of universal trade, transport and communications. It goes on developing itself, girdling
the whole globe [Priestley spins the globe] in spite of all political disagreements and all national
differences.

Here in a nutshell is the films thesis. The globalization of trade and particularly new
technologies of mobility and communications is making the old world of separate nationstates redundant; it is literally transcending them. Technology is connecting humanity in
despite of the political divisions of the old quarrelsome world with its angry frontiers.
A rational, technologically achieved globalization (based on what Priestley describes
neutrally as trade rather than global capitalism) is set to establish a new more civilized
world, which recognizes no bounds except those of the great globe itself, and asks to
serve all men whatever their race and tongue just as air, sea and rain serve all men.
The rest of the 14 minutes of the film is filled with a sort of case study to illustrate the
thesis. The case is of Switzerland (Priestley moves to a map of western Europe), absolutely hemmed in by heavily guarded frontiers most notably of course by Nazi
Germany and fascist Italy. The choice of Switzerland was, to say the least, opportunistic.
The films director, Alberto Cavalcanti and photographer John Taylor had recently shot
footage of communications and transport systems in Switzerland for a commercial film
made in collaboration with Pro Telephon-Zurich and this is used, neatly, to illustrate the
films rather abstract thesis (Russell, 2009). Images of remote Alpine pastures and traditional Swiss folk customs no doubt all very charming and medieval are juxtaposed
with telephone engineers taking a cable up a mountain to connect a climbers hut with
Zurich and Geneva and with the whole world. Priestley, in his avuncular tone, underlines the point for us: You see, that telephone line has taken us from the first world to the
second. From nationalism to internationalism. There follow more images of industrial
modernity road building, railways the nerve centre of Europes transport air services that, ski above the mountain barriers, a telephone exchange, linking Switzerland
with England by the language of the air, by telegraph and telephone across all frontiers
by wireless across oceans and continents. As the film builds towards its climax, an
increasingly mystical voiceover intones repeated words and phrases: power, international world, no frontiers.

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The result, though by no means a classic of the British Documentary Movement,

nonetheless offers insights into both conceptions of internationalism and the role of
communications technologies in a period before globalization was recognized as a
distinct consequence of modernity (Giddens, 1990), and before its rather complex
and unforeseen consequences began properly to emerge. Priestleys film, then, is most
usefully regarded not as a nave text, but as a more or less coherent thesis current
among a broad stratum of progressive intellectuals and cultural commentators during
the 1930s.
Perhaps the first point to note is the historical and international political context. The
timing of the release of the film two years before the outbreak of the Second World War
might be seen as particularly unfortunate for its optimistic and idealistic thesis. The
same year saw the increasing assertion of violently aggressive nationalism across Europe
dramatically illustrated, for example, in the attack by the Luftwaffe on the Spanish
town of Guernica and in Asia, with the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese war and
the Nanjing massacre. This, then, seems an unlikely period in which to advance a vision
of progressive internationalism. However, in a sense this very context of aggressive
nationalism and rising international tension and instability is deliberately inscribed in
Priestleys narrative. Bought-in footage of military displays from Nazi Germany and
fascist Italy make it clear that this film is also a mild attempt at anti-fascist propaganda
or, at the least, an exercise in what might be called cultural didacticism. Priestley is not
only demonstrating what he and many others saw as the rational transcendence of the
second world over the first; he is also persuading his audience of this during a period in
which political irrationalism looked set to engulf Europe. In a sense then he is adopting
the reassuring voice of common-sense reason, a role he was to adopt in a more conscious counter- propagandist mode when war actually arrived: in his famous and hugely
popular series of Postscripts, broadcast on BBC radio following the Sunday evening
Nine OClock News (Fagge, 2006; Priestley, 1940).
But setting aside for the moment this didactic element a point we will return to its
worth considering how Priestleys key trope of living in two worlds actually functions as
an argument about political and cultural globalization. In one very general way, we can
see resonances here with own times, with the way in which globalizing forces are juxtaposed and often counterpoised with localizing forces, and even with the way in which
mobility and communications may be viewed as deterritorializing dynamics. However,
there is only a passing recognition we all feel so bewildered of the potential complexities of cultural experience which were on the horizon and, for the most part,
Priestleys two worlds are presented as a clear-cut choice between a decaying national
order showing increasing signs of terminal pathology and of internationalism imagined
as a sort of technologically achieved utopia.
The argument is, in fact, structured around a classic categorical dualism and suffers
from all of the problems of other such dualisms. Most obviously the film constructs the
positive idea of internationalism via a contrast with the negative other the narrow
national world of angry borders. Internationalism as a social order is thus given virtue
almost entirely formally as escape from the constrictions of political nationalism, which,
it is suggested, inevitably lead to the stifling of human communal and creative impulses
and end in violence and conflict.

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Its easy to see why a left-leaning liberal intellectual like Priestley, regarding international politics in the 1930s, should take this position and others in his circle were much
more vehement. H.G. Wells, in texts such as The Shape of Things to Come (2005 [1933])
and The Open Conspiracy (2006 [1935]), was a strident advocate of world citizenship
and a world government, believing, as Patrick Parrinder (2005: xii) says, that nothing
less than global unity was needed if humanity was not to destroy itself. Compared to
Wells, Priestleys position is more gently expressed and pragmatic he once (affectionately) pointed out that: Wells was always writing in a rage because the 2000 million
people in the world could not instantly agree to work together, and yet was capable of
wrecking a committee of six within an hour (Priestley, 1962: 166). But, despite differences in tone and manner, the advocacy of both political, economic and cultural internationalism was pretty much an unquestioned part of the progressive intellectual atmosphere
at this time. A broad cosmopolitanism was a significant aspect of Bloomsbury Group
modernism as expressed in aesthetic terms by E.M. Forster, Leonard and Virginia Woolf,
and in both economic and cultural terms by Keynes. It was indeed regarded as a primary
implication of the exercise of reason. Thus the philosopher Bertand Russell, an advocate
of international socialism, writes in an essay on The Ancestry of Fascism in 1935:
The fever of nationalism is one form of the cult of unreason. The idea of one universal truth
has been abandoned: there is English Truth, French truth, German truth, Montenegran truth,
and the truth for the principality of Monaco. Until the deep conflicts of nations and classes
which infect our world has been resolved, it is hardly to be expected that mankind will return
to a rational, habit of mind. (1967 [1935]: 68)

Regarding these ideas from our historical perspective, what is perhaps most striking is
how internationalism is so confidently asserted as a rational and in some senses an inevitable future for human society, but with scarcely any detailed speculation on its character. Here the dualism between the national and the international that organizes Priestleys
narrative is most in evidence. On the one hand, by dismissing the national world so easily, without giving any real attention to its cultural attractions and attachments for populations, he makes the rather typical rationalist-left mistake of dismissing nationalism as
a curious error in the otherwise rational unfolding of modernity, and of underestimating
the culturally binding power of national identity (Anderson, 1991). But whereas the
Marxist left tended to assume that the collective interests of the international proletariat
would displace attachments to nations, left liberals at the time tended to look to scientific
and technological progress. And, on the other hand, by investing all the virtue of internationalism in the demolition of the divisions of the national world as a sort of political
slum clearance project he fails to address the difficult task of stipulating what this second world actually consists of, how it will work, what its power structures are, and what
it means for peoples everyday life and for their sense of security, belonging and identity.
It is not as though Priestleys second world is entirely vacuous, but that it is constituted
in relation to an implicit modernist cultural narrative.
In fact this implicit narrative is really at the heart of the film, and Priestley is here typical of his time in the robust technocratic, optimistic, modernist position that he adopts.
Internationalism is imagined here in relation to a wider cluster of industrial-modern ideas,
which invest the new technologies of mobility, speed and communications with cultural

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and political virtue: most importantly here, the harnessing of technology to bridge distance. Indeed it is fair to say that the cultural (and in an implicit sense, the moral) vision
of internationalism in We Live in Two Worlds is almost entirely constituted by what
Silverstone identifies as the (supposed) transcendent morality of connection. Connectivity,
it was broadly considered, would beget (a certain order of) cosmopolitanism.

Media culture and the cosmopolitan imagination in the 1930s

In order to draw lessons from this example, we need, briefly, to locate it within its historical media-cultural landscape. The first most obvious feature of this is the order of media
and communications technology that offered the promise of connectivity. Leaving aside
print media rather too well-established and familiar to feature in Priestleys modernist
vision in 1937 this was pretty much limited, of course, to film, radio, the landline telephone and the telegraph. The BBC had made experimental television broadcasts in 1932
and launched the worlds first regular TV television service in 1936. But with television
receivers costing around 100 and reception limited to the 35-mile radius around
Alexandra Palace in London, this technology had to wait until the late 1940s properly to
make its cultural debut. So, though media culture was becoming an integral part of everyday life, and shaping values and expectations accordingly, there is arguably something of
a categorical distinction between this media world and our own, and this is particularly so
in terms of the sort of global connectivity the technologies were imagined to afford. The
distinction is not however one simply of the range or level of sophistication of media
technologies nor even of the level of their distribution among populations. It is rather a
question of how these media technologies figured in the cultural imagination.
One of the striking things about Priestleys film is how media and communications
systems like radio and the telephone are viewed as fundamentally the same sort of entity
as roads, railways and aeroplanes, with no particular distinction being made between the
modality of connection they afford. This interpretation recalls Zygmunt Baumans (2000)
famous distinction between the era of heavy or solid modernity and our present era of
light or liquid modernity. In the cultural imagination of heavy, solid modernity, a key
index of historical progress was the conquest of space by the application of powerful
mechanical technologies ponderous rail engines and gigantic ocean liners: In the
heavy version of modernity, progress meant growing size and spatial expansion.
Flying over the English Channel and then over the Atlantic were the milestones by which
progress was measured (Bauman, 2000: 115). It is just this sort of heroic vision of the
overcoming of the limits and bounds imposed on humanity by the natural world the
mountains, oceans and deserts that is depicted in the final frames of Priestleys film.
Insofar as media technologies become integrated into this progressive mechanicalmodern imagination, they are understood to function simply as other means by which the
conquest of space could be achieved. Using another of Baumans metaphors, they are
part of a hardware era of engineered, instrumental rationality, soon to be displaced by
the, software era of liquid modernity. The media and communications technologies of
the 1930s can thus be plausibly assimilated to a cultural imaginary in which they share
more with transport and delivery systems than with the sort of complex cultural spaces
we are used to thinking about today. The connectivity they were expected to provide was
as highways for the delivery of machine modernity.

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This context helps to clarify not only the way in which communicational connectivity
is grasped, but also the rather formal internationalism that Priestley and others at the time
seemed to espouse. For the curiously pallid understanding of the implications of the
emerging global media culture derives from the fact that the media are viewed not
primarily if at all as spaces of challenging cultural encounter or dialogue, but almost
exclusively as exit routes from the constraints of national divisions.
This is not to detract from the progressive moral-political complexion of internationalism at the time: as Bauman rightly says, heavy modernity is not only the era of the
imagined conquest of space, but also of territorial expansion and the, guarding of boundaries [by] dense and tight checkpoints, unsleeping border guards (2000: 114). The
radical agenda for thinkers like Priestley, and indeed for others much to the left of him,
seemed understandably enough to be defined by the need to dismantle the political
boundaries which were inhibiting the realization of a rational, universal modernity. And
in this Priestley and others were also responding to a growing tendency throughout
Europe for media institutions to be employed in the cause of nationalist propaganda. As
Asa Briggs notes, by the mid 1930s, Goebbels had, already fashioned radio into an
effective instrument of propaganda. The Peoples Wireless Set was designed to receive
German radio stations satisfactorily and to receive nothing else (1995: 440). And this
trend for radio to be used as a deliberate organ of state propaganda was felt in Italy, in
Spain, in Japan and elsewhere (Briggs and Burke, 2002: 224).
The culture of the BBC formed in its quasi-autonomous institutional relation to the
British state was clearly quite different, and indeed was beginning to develop an international perspective in its overseas services, but it nonetheless had its ethical centre of
gravity pretty firmly within a national outlook. BBC radio was, after all, delivered from
1930 predominantly via the National Programme, and its regional services were
absorbed at the outbreak of war into the Home Service. Though this national outlook
was of course benign in comparison with the fascist regimes of Europe, it was nonetheless built on a Reithian tradition that stressed the virtues of national tradition, Christianity
and patriotism, and which saw broadcasting as having a significant role in binding
populations into these values. One of the interesting features of the development of an
internal institutional discourse on media and morality within the BBC in the 1930s was,
indeed, the tension between these Reithian public service ideals and a quite different
moral vision expressed in broadcast talks by cosmopolitan-inclined Bloomsbury Group
intellectuals like E.M. Forster, Leonard and Virginia Woolf and most forcibly of all by
H.G. Wells. As Todd Avery summarizes it:
For Reith and public service broadcasting, the public good was ineffaceably articulated with
evangelical religion and nationalist ideology. For Bloomsbury, on the contrary, the good was
linked to a politics which celebrated both intimacy and internationalism in self-conscious
resistance to nationalist, religious and other authoritarian ideals. (2006: 44)

Understood against this background, the technological connectivity which We Live in

Two Worlds celebrates is one that appears to be on the side of the historical unfolding of
cosmopolitan modernity despite the regressive impulses of nationalist politics across a
broad front. This is expressed in a stronger form by Wells in the series of broadcasts
he made on the BBC during the 1930s. In one of these, Wells uses the language

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of time-space compression to argue for the inevitability of progress towards a world

society: All my life, I have seen the abolition of distance becoming more and more
complete. The whole world round can be brought together into one communion,
one close-knit freely communicating citizenship (Wells, quoted in Avery, 2006: 94).
But this perception of divisive nationalism as the central problem to be overcome also
defines the implicit understanding of cosmopolitanism which, though with different roots
for Wells and Priestley is in essence a vision of technocratic Enlightenment universalism,
largely untroubled by concerns over cultural difference. If we could bring to life Priestleys
imagined international world of connectivity, it would probably be populated by orderly,
rational, cooperative moral agents who had transcended all cultural particularity and shared
the same broad liberal-humanist, secular values. And the deeper problem is that this universalist vision is of course partly constructed out of a modernist disdain not just for nationalism but for other forms of redundant cultural localism as evidenced in Priestleys rather
arch commentary on Swiss folk culture: no doubt all very charming and medieval.
To summarize then, the version of cosmopolitanism emerging within left-liberal
thought and expressed through the media of the 1930s is characterized by a cluster of
core industrial-modern understandings, values and dispositions which imagine the future
as progressing, via technological advances and (implicitly at least) through technocratic
leadership, towards a rational and regulated internationalism. To its credit, this cosmopolitan imagination expresses the virtues of human solidarity, cooperation, antimilitarism and the application of communications technologies to communal purpose.
But the very universal cast of this cosmopolitanism benign though it is in many of its
aspects makes it relatively blind to the moral claims of cultural localism and difference:
indeed these issues barely surface within the moral discourse of the times.
One way to characterize this cosmopolitanism is, to deploy one of Roger Silverstones
central critical concepts, that it is a cosmopolitanism imagined without the perspective of
proper distance. It supposes that the universal good lies in the incorporation of humanity into common communicational space, but it fails to understand that this is a space
imagined within the narrow terms of its own cultural particularity. Focused as it is on the
demolition of obstacles to connection, it is a cosmopolitanism that aims to bring the
other, via a technologically achieved proximity, into a cultural proximity.
It is relatively easy, of course, from our cultural-historical perspective, to recognize
these failings in the early articulations of the relationship between mediated connectivity
and cultural cosmopolitan. But the point is not simply to mount a critique of this attitude
and of the particular appropriation of techno-connectivity that supported it. Rather, it is
to give us a certain point of perspective for scrutinizing this relationship within our own
radically different and arguably more perplexing media and communicational culture.
And one key aspect of this scrutiny must be the prospects that our contemporary modes
of mediation and connection afford for the establishment of a cosmopolitanism of proper
distance, which in Silverstones words, preserves the other through difference as well
as through shared identity (2007: 47).

Cosmopolitanism in the era of ubiquitous media

That the world and particularly the cultural and communications landscape has
changed so utterly in the 80-odd years since Priestleys film is obvious enough, but how

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are we to grasp the implications of these changes for, in Roger Silverstones words, the
possibility of envisaging the media as enhancing a global cosmopolitan culture? In the
space available here and so necessarily bracketing some huge and fundamental contextual shifts in the global economic, political and indeed cultural order I want to try to
pursue the theme of the promise of increasing mediated connectivity the core of
Priestleys optimism over an emerging cosmopolitan order. What does connectivity
mean for us today?
One compelling answer is that it has become an intrinsic, indeed a defining, aspect of
the institutional modernity we live within, and of everyday cultural experience: at least
for the populations of the developed world. The connectivity that contemporary globalization affords is, moreover, of quite a different order to that imagined by commentators
in the 1930s: involving an interweaving of complex institutional interconnections and
interdependencies, an increasingly globally integrated capitalist market, and a plurality
of technologies and modalities of cultural contact and flow.
It is within this complex connectivity of globalization (Tomlinson, 1999, 2007) that
the specific connectivity of media and communications practices needs to be situated, and
in a certain sense this context vindicates at least some of Priestleys vision of an increasing internationalization of life, beyond the bounds of nation states. Not, of course, that
globalization has either demonstrated the redundancy of the nation-state or involved the
emergence of the sort of overarching progressive technocratic global order that Priestley
envisaged. It goes without saying that globalization has been ambiguous in its costs and
benefits, and grossly uneven in its distribution of material and cultural goods. And it is
increasingly apparent witness the current crisis in the global capitalist economy that
global connectivity does not provide the economic and political stability that early optimists for an efficiently regulated international order might have predicted.
But despite all of this, there has been a real and significant movement towards a form
of cultural and political cosmopolitanism that can be attributed specifically to the connectivity provided by media and technologies. The political theorist John Keane summarizes the role that the globalization of media technologies and practices has had in
the creation of what he calls a theatrum mundi which informs a multiplicity global
public spheres:
These global public spheres the term is used as an idealtyp are sites within global civil
society where power struggles are visibly waged and witnessed by means other than violence
and war: they are narrated, imagined, non-violent spaces within global civil society in which
millions of people at various points on earth witness the powers of governmental and nongovernmental organisations being publicly named, monitored, praised and condemned, in
defiance of the old tyrannies of space and time. (Keane, 2003: 169)

Keane is careful to qualify claims about the political impact of global public spheres:
they tend to be issue-driven rather than addressing deeper structural alignments; they lack
a strong institutional base and means of integration with the operations of government
they are a voice without a body politic. Nonetheless he argues that these spheres of
globally mediated discourse are significant in making transparent the often obscure or
deliberately concealed activities of states or global corporations, and in denaturalizing the

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power relations of global modernity. In doing so he claims, global public spheres, despite
their institutionally amorphous nature, are coming to influence the suit and tie worlds of
diplomacy, global business, intergovernmental meetings and INGOs.
And, perhaps more importantly, Keane observes how, through engagement with the
narratives of a globalized media, individual lifeworlds are extended beyond the horizon
of the local, and people become, a bit less parochial, a bit more cosmopolitan. This,
he argues, extends to their sense of ethical responsibility:
when they are engaged by media stories that originate in other contexts their interest is not
based simply on prurience or idle curiosity or Schadenfreude. They rather align and assimilate
these stories in terms of their own existential concerns, which are thereby altered. Global
publics are taught lessons in the art of what can be called flexible citizenship; they learn that the
boundaries between native and foreigner are blurred, that their commitments have become a
touch more multiversal they learn to distance themselves from themselves; they discover
that there are different temporal rhythms, other places, other problems, other ways to live.
(Keane, 2003: 170)

Keane is surely correct in identifying the cosmopolitan promise attaching to the otherwise ambiguous cultural process of deterritorialization, and in locating this promise
within the cultivation of a subtly changing cultural sensibility, the tentative emergence of
a disposition to expand our horizons of moral relevance. And this is a perspective shared
by analysts of media representations. In a number of significant interventions which
challenge pessimistic critical accounts of media globalization, Lilie Chouliaraki (e.g.
2006, 2008) elaborates the potential of media representations for the cultivation of cosmopolitan moral disposition, suggesting in particular, how public action on distant suffering may become possible in and through mediation (2006: 847). In a similar vein,
Alexa Robertson (2010) in her comparative study of the place of contemporary television journalism as a vehicle for mediated cosmopolitanism, stresses the narrative function of journalism in engaging viewers imaginatively. For Robertson, the important
terms in the quality of reporting of distant events are the existentially related ones of
empathy, identification and perspective taking.
There is an obvious central difference in the way in which these writers understand
the cosmopolitan potential of media and communications practices from the way in
which Priestley envisaged it. Their discourse is elaborated around notions of dialogue,
value pluralism, reflexivity and empathetic imagination that are entirely absent from the
unproblematized universal modernism of Priestleys international world. In short, these
critical discourses engage, in various ways, with the hermeneutically complex agenda of
a cosmopolitanism of proper distance. The difference is not merely one of cultural awareness or sensitivity: it is categorical. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that cosmopolitan advocates today inhabit not only a different media-cultural environment, but also
a fundamentally different conceptual and moral universe.
However that is not to say that there is nothing whatsoever that connects us with this
earlier and, it must be said, vibrant, energetic and confident cultural vision. For there
remains in most considered contemporary accounts of the possibility of cultural cosmopolitan an understanding that cosmopolitan values and dispositions particularly
the requirement to raise ones moral gaze towards horizons beyond the immediate

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locality are not ones which are likely to emerge spontaneously. This understanding
implies the need for an educative indeed one might even say a didactic role for the
media. John Keane, for example, says that in their interaction with the media, global
publics are taught lessons in the art of what can be called flexible citizenship (2003:
170). Lilie Chouliaraki, drawing on the Aristotelian notion of the example provided by
the spectacles of public life in the moral education of citizens of the world, argues
that: It is this pedagogic function of mediation that renders contemporary media texts
an effective form of moral education (2008: 832). And Roger Silverstone, in the final
pages of Media and Morality urges the agenda of media literacy thus:
Media literacy emerges then not even in the relatively simple idea that we engage with its texts,
seek to read them, parse them, criticize them and the rest but that we need to engage with the
world they bring to our doors. [It] is a matter for educational and broadly social and cultural
policy. And it is a matter of pedagogy. (2007: 185)

The question this poses is one of how this pedagogic role is to be fulfilled by whom,
and in what institutional contexts? Here the comparison with the world of J.B. Priestley
is once more suggestive. For, as I noted earlier, the discursive position he adopts in his
film is one of a blissfully unselfconscious didacticism. Like most of the intellectuals of
his time, he takes for granted an instructive, cultural-regulative dimension to the media.
This is not to say that he assumes the same value frame as, say, John Reith did in constructing the public service ethos of the BBC. Intellectuals appearing in the broadcast
media in the 1930s, as Avery (2006) documents, displayed a reassuringly wide spectrum
of cultural values and moral perspectives. But the point is that, by and large, they felt no
inhibition in addressing their audience in a didactic mode. Indeed, they regarded this
access to discourse not as a prerogative, but as a civic duty, an aspect of a broader public
service ethic. In Priestleys case this assumption of cultural leadership was of a piece
with his progressive-modernist inclinations and his cultural universalism.
This mode of media address though it survived for a surprisingly long time is for
all sorts of reasons deeply unfashionable today and few would argue for its unreconstructed revival. But in recognizing this, we must also confront one of the dilemmas that
the democratization of media discourse via new media technologies has posed. This is
that intellectuals no longer occupy an unquestioned authoritative place in the mediated
public sphere and neither has the pedagogic role once assumed by them been clearly
assigned elsewhere. In a notable intervention on this issue, Jrgen Habermas puts the
issue like this:
On the one hand, the recalibration of communication from print and the press to television and
the Internet has led to an unexpected expansion of the public sphere of the media and to an
unparalleled expansion of communications networks. The public sphere within which
intellectuals moved like fish in water has become more inclusive, and the exchanges more
intense than ever before. On the other hand, the intellectuals seem to be choking on this lifesustaining element like an overdose. The blessing seems to be turning into a curse. In my view
this is because the public sphere is becoming more informal and the corresponding roles are
becoming blurred. Thus although the Internet has had a subversive effect on public spheres
under authoritarian regimes, at the same time the horizontal and informal networking of

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communications diminishes the achievements of the traditional public spheres. The price for
the welcomed increase in egalitarianism due to the Internet is a decentering of the modes of
access of unedited inputs. In this medium, the contribution of intellectuals can no longer
constitute a focal point. (Habermas, 2009: 53)

Habermass concern for the fate of intellectuals is not for the preservation of a privileged,
elite position of access to discourse: indeed he is directly critical of those media intellectuals who, have allowed themselves to be corrupted by the inducement to self
promotion (2009: 54). Nor, significantly, is he making an argument for the specific
expertise of the intellectuals, which he thinks has anyway been overtaken by a new configuration of politicians, experts and journalists one thinks here of the proliferation of
professional think tanks and lobby groups in the modern political sphere. What threatens to diminish the achievements of the traditional public spheres is the marginalization
of what Habermas understands as the key distinctive moral-cultural contributions of the
intellectual in the dialogue situation, namely, the courage to take normative stances and
the imagination to adopt novel perspectives without losing an awareness of her own fallibility [and] an avantguardistic instinct for relevances (2009: 55).
While it is not clear that we can lay all the blame for this marginalization of intellectuals on the communicational decentring tendencies of new media technologies, the
hugely extended and deregulated discourse space of the blogosphere pretty obviously
has significant limitations when viewed as a space for the cultivation of moral-political
discourse. Seyla Benhabib puts it like this:
Its certainly the case that the blogosphere and listservs create a kind of conversation. They are
quick; they move in real time and they permit the back and forth of exchange. But democracy
and democratic decision making is not just about an exchange of opinions and views, it is also
about deliberating about how to live together over a period of time. So it is important not to
confuse democracy with the unfettered exchange of opinion alone. [T]hese new
[technological] developments are certainly helpful in terms of challenging the monopoly of
existing powerful media, but they are not enough to organize people as citizens. (in WahlJorgensen, 2008: 966, emphasis added)

Much less, we can add, to organize people as the global citizens of a progressive cosmopolitan order, observant of proper distance. For here in particular, where the need to
establish rational consensual terms of dialogue is so urgent, it would be fatal to confuse
the celebration of mere plurality of discourse with the commitment to a deep critical,
dialogic pluralism. The cultivation of this sort of disposition requires that we move
beyond connectivity in a robust articulation of the core values of cosmopolitanism. And
we should not have qualms and scruples born of a misconceived relativism about
these values. For as John Keane reminds us, membership of a global civil society
though it is paradoxically founded in a non-foundational respect for cultural and moral
difference is nonetheless a contractual matter in which binding rules apply: it is intolerant of intolerance. Cosmopolitan pedagogy in the spirit that Roger Silverstone conceived it may, in part at least, be considered as the teaching of these rules of dialogue
as they must exist in, a common framework of intelligibility that encompasses the principles, means, modes and substance of disagreement (Keane, 2003: 203).

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In this respect we can perhaps take a final lesson from the example of Priestley. The
relatively simple, centralized, regulated media environment that he inhabited the paradigm of the broadcast encouraged a simple and, as we now understand, problematic
universalizing moral vision. But it also gave a certain robustness to critical discourse in
which some of what Habermas describes as the virtues of the traditional intellectual
the sense of what is lacking and could be otherwise; a modicum of the courage
required for polarizing, provoking and pamphleteering (2009: 55) could flourish.
Something of this confidence and assertiveness may need to be recaptured in order to
promote the cause of cosmopolitanism in what McNair (2006) has aptly called the cultural chaos of contemporary media connectivity.
Note
1 Although sometimes dismissed as a middlebrow, Priestleys status as a popular media intellectual in the 1930s is well established in LeMahieus classic study of intellectuals and the
mass media in the inter-war years:

Unlike Leavis and at least some elements of the Left, Priestley gained a wide following in
Britain in the 1930s by embracing and shrewdly exploiting the media. He disseminated
his work and made a handsome living by participating in virtually every form of mass communication. Mass communications helped him establish a national presence and then in various
ways, constantly reinforced it. In the culture of 1930s Britain it was hard to avoid J.B. Priestley.
(1988: 318)

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John Tomlinson is Professor of Cultural Sociology and Director of the Institute for
Cultural Analysis, Nottingham (ICAn) at Nottingham Trent University. His many publications on the themes of globalization, cosmopolitanism, cultural modernity and mediated cultural experience include Cultural Imperialism (Continuum, 1991), Globalization
and Culture (Polity, 1999) and The Culture of Speed (Sage, 2007). He is currently writing
Culture and Virtue: Capitalism, Media and the Fragmentation of Public Values to be
published by Bloomsbury Press.

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