A metatheory of mediatization and globalization?

摘要

I appreciate the invitation to comment on Professor Sheldon Gunaratne's erudite and passionate call to engage with Eastern philosophy and religion to study mediatization and globalization. His article makes several important contributions. It reminds us about the limitations of Western-centrism to understand the planetary dimensions of communication and media processes. It foregrounds the need to widen the epistemological and conceptual horizons to study these issues across the world. It warns us about selecting monocausal explanations to comprehend complex phenomena that straddle political, economic, social, and cultural processes. Although important, the argument is not strictly novel. Communication researchers, including Gunaratne's distinguished scholarship, have long urged to integrate insights from non-Western philosophy and religion to challenge assumptions of Western theories and overcome their limitations. My interest here is to discuss the central themes in Gunaratne's analysis of mediatization and globalization and raise questions for future study.