How do we regain the lost place of our life? Perhaps, as Artaud's own life suggests, by incessantly searching for it, again and again experimenting with our capacities, trying to find out what our body is capable of, capable of encountering, capable of experiencing — its ‘capacity to be affected’ (Deleuze 1992: 217). Perhaps this is precisely what living is all about, continuously searching for places that offer new ways of living. And perhaps we even have to lose ourselves first, our bearings, our lives, in order to find new dwellings where we can come into full possession of our power of action, and where new modes of existence may be invented.

This poses a twofold problem, which I consider to be the very crisis of experience, creativity and invention, of producing new life opportunities: instigating events, complexifying encounters, offering possibilities of losing and finding our selves ‘in this world, as it is’ (Deleuze 1989: 172). Losing-and-finding our selves in this sense, becoming imperceptible, saying ‘yes’ to what is strange and singular in our existence, to the intensities and singularities that traverse our body, is of course extremely risky, since there is no guarantee of ever finding our way home again. This is why many of us find it safer to perform this existential practice with an eye on worlds beyond this world, to escape into worlds of abstraction providing transcendent points of reference wherefrom this world, this life, becomes judicable.

In the midst of the delirium of Anti-Oedipus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari calmly inform us that we ‘always make love with worlds’ (1984: 294). This marks their final transgression of the repressive segmentation of contemporary critique: the segmentation of the libidinal economy and the political economy, desire production and social production, Freud and Marx. In the Oedipal triangle and its double bind, desire was forever betrayed and political critique was forever kept from connecting with the real processes of production. This impasse is still with us: contemporary sociology makes love with no worlds we are aware of; social and economic analysis in general is paralysed before the problem of liberating desire, criticising its capture and expressing its abundance.

But is it feasible to put together a book that makes love with worlds? It will, in any case, put us in the volatile position of the alcoholic engaged in the experiment of drinking, always searching for the penultimate rather than the ultimate drink. The penultimate drink is a limit of relative deterritorialisation (you change, but you don't leave), whereas the threshold is the ultimate drink that will make the alcoholic change assemblage altogether, progressing into a hospital assemblage or a suicide assemblage. The penultimate drink will enable him to keep on drinking, living, moving, loving, while the ultimate drink is the end (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 438).

Global Communication Policy regime: insert ‘public’ - press ‘Enter’

In the previous chapter we examined the competing logics behind the normative framework of the emerging information society as produced through alliances between private and public social actors representing interests in both the US and the EU. Although we identified two competing visions of IS, we showed how one coherent dominant discourse of the neoliberal IS emerged by the close of the twentieth century. We demonstrated the profound shortcomings of the dominant neoliberal IS policy discourse by highlighting the unevenness of access and narrowness of vision. We showed how civil society organizations have led the charge for equity in this process and have proposed a competing and democratic vision for change embodied in the WSIS Civil Society declaration (Civil Society Statement 2005). In this chapter, we explore the role of civil society as a new social actor in the shifting field of global communication policy, by taking a closer look at the novel institutional context of the WSIS. The space for civil society participation - however limited -allows new social actors outside state and corporate interests to raise claims about redistribution and recognition while negotiating the issue of legitimate representation. This chapter examines both the institutional constraints as well as the discursive parameters of this process.

This book is about communication and media policies in the context of globalization. Its central focus is the analysis of the conditions and the nature of the policies that have shaped and are actively structuring the world's communication infrastructure. In this book we argue that the processes of globalization have been accompanied by a continuous transformation of the communication and media landscapes around the world sustained by a complex net of interdependent factors. The changes experienced in media landscapes are facilitated by de facto structural changes in the mode of production and terms of international trade. These changes are also ‘normalized’ through a set of policy-making processes that increasingly involves new regulatory processes and institutional actors, signalling a profound shift in the role of nation-states in the policy-making process. We argue that these changes are not experienced as homogenous processes across the globe and draw attention to the cultural, social and political contexts that render such transformations distinct. However, we also stress, and indeed turn our attention to the fact that, there are overarching questions that cut across the specific positions of groups of societies, countries, cultures and even economies. We further argue that the study of communications and media policy needs to develop tools for making macro-level observations of patterns without losing sight of the micro-level of realities of experience.

This chapter provides a broad overview of the shifts in the field of global communication policy as the nation-state's regulatory power itself is reconfigured from the post-World War Two era to the current era of global integration. In historicizing the shift in global governance we highlight the various factors which led to the rise and ultimate decline of the Fordist mode of regulation. In the first section, we consider the continuities as well as the ruptures of the shift by focusing on the specific experience of the postcolonial state. We contend that these states, unlike their welfare state and state-socialist counterparts in the First and Second Worlds, were already integrated into an uneven international system of governance, well before the pressures of globalization. The post-World War Two project of ‘national development’ and modernization of Third World economies and cultures were very much at the heart of the most significant struggles in the field of global communication policy and provide a particularly interesting vantage point to consider the ideals and failures of the state's role in representing public interest. In the second section, we account for the turn toward the neoliberal information economy focusing on the transformation of the state in shaping national policy. We trace the evolution of North-South relations in this ‘flexible’ post-Fordist regulatory era by laying out the material and symbolic dimensions behind the ‘reregulation’ of global communication policy.

A whole generation of urban young people now in their 20s grew up with only a vague memory of a media system that consists of two or, at a maximum, three television channels. In Europe, children born in the 1980s have reached young adulthood with MTV and to a significant extent have learned about human relationships - and fashion - through Friends, Frasier, Big Brother and Sex and the City. The idea alone that their media lives could be limited to wildlife and historical documentaries seems absurd. The very thought that they - or more possibly their parents, since they still live at home - have to pay monthly fees to receive channels they do not watch is illogical. The suggestion that, not so long ago, there used to be a state monopoly over television seems archaic at best. Often, in the classroom it is difficult to generate support for Public Service Broadcasting (PSB) among students, who although they may know to appreciate that private television is largely about Hollywood and imitations thereof, do not necessarily have PSB on their agenda of glamorous entertainment. In the United States, where the project of public service television seems to be financially suspended in a vegetative state, because of the firm hand of commercial broadcasting, the whole concept of non-commercial broadcasting has been pushed to the margins of public discussion. This is not to say that Americans or young Europeans are oblivious to the politics of commercialization of the media.

Third-generation mobile phones, broadband connections, wireless applications, cybercommunities, cyberwars, cybersex, e-commerce, e-democracy, e-learning: this is some of the language that has come to describe the era of accelerated tele/communications and transactions. These terms have not escaped from a science fiction movie, although some of them have their origins in science fiction novels, but from the consultative papers of ‘think tanks’ and government policy documents. They have become part of everyday advertising, policy, newspeak and even casual conversation, in global cities across the North-South divide. These are the terms of a particular form of capitalist economic organization of social relations that adheres to two overarching qualities of the new Information Age: speed and universality. CEO of Microsoft, Bill Gates's Business @ the Speed of Thought (1999) not only embodies the ideas and policies that characterize the era of the Information Society and the Knowledge Economy, it also constitutes a manual for the direction of future technological development, policy, economic organization and even social relations. Speed, instant capital transaction across geographic nodes that would have taken hours and days to cross through physical means, almost ‘cancels’ the concept of time as an obstacle or expense for transnational companies. Spatial universality is also a new achievement for the global enterprises of the twenty-first century. Telecommunications have enabled those connected to premium translocal networks the liquidation of time/space. The beneficiaries of the transcendence of time/space are to be found among transnational corporations that can do business literally around the clock across the globe.

The three pillars for the construction of information societies are not telecommunications, equipment and software, rather info-ethics, digital education (with an approach on the use and social impact) and real and effective citizen participation in all the phases of the process, from the definition of public policy related to the information society and its impact to its implementation and evaluation.

The promotion of free software implies certain social, educational, scientific, political and economic benefits for the region. Open licensing models are essential for the free exchange of knowledge, which would benefit national development and the production of own local knowledge.

The promotion of the production of technological and organizational knowledge by Southern countries makes them proactive actors in neither the development of information societies and not passive agents nor mere consumers of developed countries' technologies.

We emphasize that the strengthening of democracies and the construction of citizenship is based on the recognition of the role of civil society as a political actor. For this reason, we express our nonconformity with the fact that at the Latin American and Caribbean Ministerial Regional Conference, held in preparation for the second phase of the WSIS, the multistakeholder mechanisms for participation and procedural rules established within the framework of the Summit were not respected. This has hindered the participation of civil society delegates in the discussions and meetings and appropriate access to the documents being discussed.

Telecommunications infrastructure has been described as the ‘central nervous system’ of the very process of globalization (Castells 1996; Mansell 1994). Access to telecommunications services is increasingly assumed as a minimum condition of participation in the ‘new economy’ with the telecommunications industry as the foundation for Information Technology (IT), new media and financial services. Global advertisements plastered on television screens and billboards are replete with images of seamless high-tech networks that instantly link stock markets, urban centres and ethnically diverse consumers together, erasing national economic as well as cultural boundaries. Beneath the glamour and the breathless pace of these new technological transformations are the equally stunning, if less celebrated, changes in the ways in which telecommunications as an industry is governed. Beginning in the 1980s and throughout the 1990s, the deregulation and liberalization of national telecommunications markets was seen as imperative by policy-makers across the globe. Today, we see a shift in policy discourse in at least the recognition that there are social obstacles associated with rapid global integration. The ‘United Nations Millennium Development Goals’ (see Table 5.2) acknowledges the centrality of access to communications technologies as vital to the eradication of global poverty and hunger. As such, access to communications is seen as a basic human need linked to participation in modern economic as well as political activity (ITU 2003: 73).

From the conception to its publication, this book has been a rich, enjoyable and, at times, frustrating transnational journey where we both learned a great deal, not only about our subject matter but also about ourselves. The road was longer than we anticipated, but only because life is unstoppable and all present: the book apart from the standard daily routines of leading full academic lives, the winter flues included, witnessed a research leave and multiple stays abroad, four house moves, the birth of a baby girl (Aisha), two job moves and a wedding, and throughout these life experiences our families and friends made the process more enjoyable. Our journey to this ‘Ithaca’ has made us richer in knowledge and friendship, collegiality and confidence.

This book explores the conditions and ideas behind global communications policies; our writing travels back and forth, across continents and socioeconomic realities to identify and analyze common policy concerns, conflicting interests, and the place and voice of publics. Throughout the writing process, we relied heavily on electronic communications to update information, track down electronic archives and conduct basic literature searches. We conceived and discussed the ideas in this book first online and then by telephone and continued developing the book in the same way, with only one brief off-line meeting.