The WTO protests in Seattle witnessed the emergence of an international citizens' movement for democratic globalization. With the tactical exploitation of television, the internet, and other technologies, Seattle also witnessed the enactment of forms of activism adapted to a wired society. In the wake of Seattle, this essay introduces the “public screen" as a necessary supplement to the metaphor of the public sphere for understanding today's political scene. While a public sphere orientation inevitably find contemporary discourse wanting, viewing such discourse through the prism of the public screen provokes a consideration of new forms of participatory democracy. In comparison to the public sphere's privileging of rationality, embodied conversations, consensus, and civility, the public screen highlights dissemination, images, hypermediacy, publicity, distraction, and dissent. Using the Seattle WTO protests as a case study and focusing on the dynamic of violence and the media, we argue that the public screen accounts for technological and cultural changes while enabling a charting of the new conditions for rhetoric, politics, and activism.

This essay, deals with the problematics that globalization poses for critical communication scholarship. Globalization challenges our understanding of culture and identity in ways that both open up new directions for communication scholarship and invite a rethinking of current ones. First, we discuss how difference is unsettled and re/staged in the context of globalization. Second, we address how uneven patterns of global processes are enacted through cultural practices produced by the transnational flows of images and capital. This essay explores several areas of contemporary global growth with the overall objective of demonstrating the urgency of rethinking the study of culture in critical communication studies.

Two media endeavours, the Heritage Minutes and the CBC documentary Canada: A People's History, hope to serve as a corrective to Canadians' lack of interest in their history and to bolster national identity. However, the producers do not want to appear propagandistic in a country where there is conflict about what the shape of the nation should be. They accomplish this by appealing to the “on the spot" authority of journalistic representation and the emotional immediacy of dramatic story-telling. They also emphasize the multi-cultural and multi-perspectival nature of Canada's past. However, ultimately these efforts exist within a larger narrative about the "story of Canada," where events of the past are framed in terms of their contribution or relevance to the present shape of the nation-state. In this way, these programs reveal their purpose and, as collective memory scholars might predict, press the past into the service of present aims.