At a time when new technologies like satellite and cable television have dramatically expanded transnational flows of information, the regulatory power and ideological presumptions of the nation state are being challenged as never before. In post-apartheid South Africa, however, significant steps have been taken to establish democratic access to a rapidly reconfiguring public sphere. South Africa therefore offers a particularly indicative case study in the tension between trends towards globalization and local autonomy. This project situates initiatives to expand access to contemporary communications technologies within the broader problematic of democratic development in contemporary South Africa. By analyzing the role played by broadcast media such as film and video as the principal sites for the formation of national identity, new insights can be gained concerning the complex interactions of contemporary local and global forms of communication and identity.  

As technological advances in communication at the approach of the millennium expand contact zones and reconfigure perceptions of the world and its peoples, it is useful to compare and learn from the impact of similar phenomena a century ago, when the currents of globalization combined with unprecedented mass media penetration and the ascendance of visual aspects of media to create significant changes in the way Americans conceptualized their place in the world.