Global Media COMM458

Group 1:

Amanda Cauthen
Melanie Page
Nikki Euliarte
Dacia St Angelo


Global new media company Google has agreed to actively censor a new Chinese-language search service that will be housed on computer servers inside China. Obviously this contradicts its stated desire to make information freely available to everybody on the planet, and it contradicts its mission statement: "don't be evil." As Mike Langberg at the San Jose Mercury News puts it: their revised motto should now read "don't be evil more than necessary." Contrasting this position was Google's decision defend its right to protect the privacy rights of the user from the US government, which argues that it should have the right to access information as part of its homeland security.

This situation raises an interesting situation with Google defending freedom of speech (US privacy) on the one hand and supressing freedom of speech (Chinese censorship) on the other. In doing so, this examination of the media focuses our attention on the important issues of roles and responsibilities of the media and business ethics of global media companies' operations.

1. What aspects of the media as a business play into Google's decision to localize its global media operations?
2. What aspects of social responsibilities play into Google's decision to localize its global media operations differently in the US and China?
3. How have similar global media operators like Google (and Microsoft and Yahoo) rationalized their decisions to differentiate business operations from their social responsibilities as global media companies?
4. What implications exist for Google, Chinese users and new media companies in general as a result of decisions by these organizations to glocalize their operations?

One way to approach these tasks is to assign a question to each member of the group. The deadline for final submission of your responses to the questions is Monday October 9 at 12pm. However, you will need to post your preliminary responses by at least Friday October 6 at 5pm to allow enough time for your peers to provide feedback, support and direction to help develop a comprehesive response to the issues raised above.

Here are some websites that will get you started (though you will need to show research beyond these resources).

http://rconversation.blogs.com/rconversation/2006/01/google_in_china.html

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,19149-2012784,00.html

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,70651-0.html

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,13132-2215218,00.html