Media Cultures across Distance: The Transnational and Transcultural of Media Communication

This chapter by Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp discusses the role of media in challenging the territorial mentality or, to employ the terms used in the chapter, the ‘container model’ of the nation-state. Couldry and Hepp criticise this container model found in social and political theory, a model which can be likened to the territorial mentality that this volume roundly critiques, and reject assumptions that nation-states are purely expressed as territorial formations. In doing so the chapter undermines a key tenet of much nationalist thinking within democratic theory and politics, and suggests that the time-space compression facilitated by enhanced forms of media technology is intrinsic to the creation of a ‘new media world culture’ that operates beyond borders and state boundaries.