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Since the 2010s, we witness the rise of populism and nationalism as part of a reaction against the global policies of the last 30 years in Western liberal democracies and beyond. This article seeks to unpack the rise of populism and nationalism and its relationship to social media. We review the relevant literature relating to the globalization paradigm and assess how it has influenced communication studies. The rise of the globalization theory coincides with key advancements in the post-Cold War world, such as the growth of international trade, the global movement of people, the increase in the number of international laws and forums, economic liberalism, as well as the rise of the internet and global digital communication networks. But while the global era denotes a cosmopolitan vision, economic insecurity, growing inequality in wealth distribution, as well as cultural change and shifts in traditional values and norms have brought about a broader concern that globalization is associated with a shift of power to transnational elites, whose impact upon common people's life and experiences is not fully acknowledged. Contemporary populism has been associated with nationalism, but also with the active use of social media platforms as alternative communication sites to mainstream media which is seen as having been captured by elite consensus politics. This complicates the relationship between truth and free expression in an age of social media, meaning that we need to account for the role of such platforms in the rise of populism and 'post-truth' politics, as well as its scope to advance the goals and strategies of progressive social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses cosmopolitanism as a theoretical basis for the investigation and analysis of the global corporate and state media's normative roles in human rights and democracy. Through the case studies of CNN and Xinhua's reportage of the Tibetan protests in 2008, the article observes patterns of ideological coalescence between western capitalist hegemony and the big western media conglomerates such as CNN. It argues that, as a good global corporate citizen, CNN undoubtedly made contributions in exposing human rights abuses in Tibet, but also unwittingly worked to advance the interests of a manipulative and unjust neoliberal international order that uses human rights as a political tool. This is demonstrated not only through CNN's selective articulation of human rights, but also the worrying coincidence between its ideological construction of the Tibet story and the rebuke of China's human rights record by the western governments and other western institutions. While Xinhua provided an alternative discourse to that of human rights, it was observed that whereas nationalism arguably protects China's revolutionary legacy and its modernization project, the discourse was also largely authoritarian and acted in contradiction to some of the constitutionally entrenched civil and political liberties of minorities while also raising cynicism about the Chinese government's commitment to international human rights laws that it ratified and acceded to. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Communication is the basic concept in explaining globalization. Globalization can be observed as the worldwide expansion of a functionally differentiated European society through intercultural communication. In this society, since the 17th century, intercultural communication has assumed the form of a modernist ethnocentrism based on values such as knowledge, pluralism and individualism. During the 20th century, historical changes created the necessity for new forms of intercultural communication. In the last decade of that century, a transcultural form of communication based on dialogue was proposed as a basis for cross-cultural adaptation, a creation of multicultural identities and a construction of a hybrid multicultural society. However, this transcultural form creates paradoxes and difficulties in intercultural communication, mixing the preservation of cultural difference with the search for synthesis. Consequently, a new form of intercultural dialogue, dealing with incommensurable differences and managing conflicts, is needed to create coordination among different cultural perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]