Globalization, networks and audiovisual spaces: Shifting representational relations in *Canada, Mexico and Argentina

The contemporary master myth of globalization is deconstructed and the realities of its impact on three national audiovisual spaces are analyzed by applying network theories. Cybernetic, Internet and Actor-Network theories are synthesized in an innovative network analysis framework based on three fundamental network models---oligoptica, agency and actor-networks---and their respective structures, powers and purposes. This network analysis framework is employed to identify shifting distributions of representational power through global networks and to evaluate the role of networks in enhancing or inhibiting self-representational agency. The thesis investigates distributions of representational power in two forms: political-economic representation, involving the representation of subjects as citizens by states and as consumers by markets; and, cultural-communicational representation, involving the encoding of the phenomenological world of objects and experiences in symbolic forms of film, video and digital media.

The analysis moves from the broad field of network theory to a detailed examination of contemporary theories and practices of political-economic representation in networked state-market-subject relations and of the growth of oligoptical global market power over states and subjects. This focus narrows to examine the construction of cultural-communicational representation in three divergent national audiovisual space networks---Canada, Mexico and Argentina---and their traditions, structures, institutions, laws, constituent media and artifacts as they are integrated into global market networks through neo-liberal structural adjustment programs. The analytical focus narrows to examine contemporary instances of insurrectional self-representational subject agency in film, video and digital formats to combat the concentration of representational power in oligoptical global market networks in each of the three globalized audiovisual spaces.

The thesis determines that the panoptical global information and communications networks have converged with oligopolistic transnational state-market institutions to produce a singular, expansionist, self-reproducing, hierarchical and paradoxically centralizing and decentralizing globally networked oligopticon that tends to absolute command and control, and that wages war on self-representational distributed subject agency networks. This war gives rise to an oscillatory and escalating mimetic dynamic between incommensurable oligoptical and agency networks. The thesis concludes with a synthesis of the implications of the war between oligopticon and agency networks for future struggles for self-representational political-economic and cultural-communicational power.