Globalisation is among those terms whose meaning is hard to pin down, as demonstrates the difficulty in assigning it a date of birth. Still, it does seem clear that, in its earliest phase, the term involved temporal disjunctures which might last from days to months, or more - what we call transport globalisation. Since the invention of the telegraph, messages have travelled more quickly than messengers, and it has been possible to link globalisation to the use of new communication technologies, in the form of telecom globalisation. This article discusses the analytic distinction between transport and telecom globalisation.

This article examines the television coverage of Uruguay's November 1999 presidential elections. The country's unusual situation constitutes an obstacle to Uruguayan mass media democracy and pluralism, particularly to Uruguayan television. One of the two broadcast programmes analyzes demonstrates unequivocally that Uruguayan television and, specifically, some of its journalists fail to be independent when covering a public consultation. As a result, many of the voices which comprise the nation are left out of its television programming.

The question of inequality is at the heart of questions of democracy and public space, from Greek antiquity - where public affairs were the matter of an agora of equals, even as women and slaves were excluded from said agora - to modern public space, in which long-running practices of exclusion were justified by the premise that only citizens freed from economic and other constraints were likely to reason on behalf of the collectivity. Here we examine inequality as it pertains to Internet applications for participating in public space. To do so we examine both collective uses, by looking at organisations' Web sites, and individual uses, through participation in discussion lists. The public spaces produced through these Internet practices are opened up to an ever-greater set of groups and individuals, but also lend themselves to an intensification of inequalities between groups and between individuals. It is in this context unsurprising that the activist organizations whose goal is to decrease inequality in the world wonder openly about methods for collective appropriation of computer networks.

In the context of technological convergence, computational platforms provide media with the tools for interactivity - a notion at the centre of this article's preoccupations. The notion of interactivity is examined first from the linguistic standpoint of the utterance, that is, of the user's actualization of pre-utterances which already exist within the apparatus. Applying a discursive exchange model to interactive multimedia, we come up with reactivity, not interactivity. Theoretical computer science associates this type of reactive interaction with alternative algorithmic structure. Combining the two approaches - linguistic, for the user's non-reactive intervention, and computational, for the prevalence of interactive algorithmic structure - suggests that we are dealing with another type of interactivity which, no longer the initiative of a single apparatus, takes effect on the user side, formed through her or his own discursive contributions.

Late capitalism has a capacity for remaking aspects of the political experience as market relationships. This includes the electoral act and formation of voter opinion, but also the production of discourse through information and communication technologies, the representation of individual behaviour, and consumer "tactics" or practices. How might this process be understood as the colonization of political experience ? Starting from the introduction of industrial stakes and of marketing logics into the political sphere, our case study of "citizen" portals for political information posits the colonization of political experience as the industrial standardization and serial production of a political process co-produced by the citizen-consumer. This process is integrated into a discursive mechanics of rationalization and normalized by information and communication technologies, themselves wrought through, penetrated, and transcended by the logics of marketing and the strategies of the market.