International Communication-Delhi University South Campus

Reading material international communication
Global Struggle for Communication
Since the first systems of mass media and telecommunications emerged, their control and structure have been political issues. It has been well understood that the control over the means of communication is an integral aspect of political and economic power. Perhaps the most striking feature of our current age is the increase in prominence -- for economics, politics, and culture -- of technologically advanced systems of communication and information, that are often global in scope. Moreover, the global communication system is in the midst of a dramatic transformation that is reorganizing industries and revamping modes of regulation. Yet precisely at the historic moment that the social implications of communication appear at their greatest, the subject of how communication systems are controlled and organized and for what purposes is effectively being removed from the range of legitimate political debate, as communication is turned over to the market for profitable exploitation. (Robert W. McChesney. May, 1996 for summer issue of Monthly Review)


The Communication Revolution

Two trends mark the communication revolution. First, there has been a rapid corporate concentration within media industries, along with a strong drive toward globalization. Although film, books and recorded music have been global industries dominated by a handful of corporations for much of the century, media markets otherwise have been primarily national in scope. A global oligopolistic market that covers the spectrum of media is now crystallizing with very high barriers to entry. National markets remain and they are indispensable for understanding any particular national situation, but they are becoming secondary in importance. (Robert W. McChesney. May, 1996 for summer issue of Monthly Review)

Considerable fuel for the growth of global commercial media will be provided by the large increase in global advertising, much of which results from transnational firms' expanding marketing plans. Global advertising is dominated by the 200 or so largest corporations and is conducted largely by a handful of global advertising agencies based in New York, London, Paris and Tokyo.

The present and future growth of global media firms is being shaped by the widespread commercialization, deregulation, and privatization of domestic television systems. Until the 1980s most nations maintained these as nonprofit, non-advertising supported entities, which limited the capacity for a global media market to emerge. The current explosion in satellite digital television provides the basis for inexpensive global commercial broadcasting, and it will probably become a monopoly or duopoly in most parts of the world, based upon recent experience. This will not be a global market where everyone in the world will consume identical media products; it will be more sophisticated than that. But if the media products are differentiated by region, they nevertheless will be linked to global media concerns and determined by profitability. In short, the present course is one where much of the world's entertainment and journalism will be provided by a handful of enormous firms, with invariably pro-profit and pro-global market political positions on the central social issues of our times. The implications for political democracy, by any rudimentary standard, are troubling.

The second key trend is the development of digital communication and related technological breakthroughs such as wireless mobile communication that make communication much less expensive and more accessible. On one hand, digitalization encourages global communication as worldwide transmission can be nearly instantaneous and relatively inexpensive. It also encourages conglomeration and vertical integration because as all forms of communication turn to digital format, media products become more easily transferable between genres. On the other hand, digital communication can undermine the ability of communication to be controlled in a traditionally hierarchal manner, as it holds the potential of making it easy to produce and distribute high quality material. The most dramatic development along these lines has been the Internet. When one merely considers the social potential of these new technologies, and not the political economic context in which they are being developed, the prospects are breathtaking. (Robert W. McChesney. May, 1996 for summer issue of Monthly Review)


Digital communication also provides the basis for an eventual convergence of the media, telecommunication (meaning telephony primarily) and computer industries. As all communication and information, including data and voice communication, shift to digital format, there is no reason why telephone companies cannot eventually provide television programming over their wires and why cable companies cannot handle telephone traffic over theirs. At some point televisions can become personal computers and vice versa. Computer firms will provide the software necessary to make digital communication accessible and profitable.

This has two very important consequences. First, the combining the media, telecommunications and computer industries makes the resultant sector the largest and fastest growing component of the global economy. Based on market capitalization, three of the four largest firms and 13 of the largest 50 firms in the world fall in this sector. In the 1970s most of the world's telecommunication systems were nonprofit and state-owned monopolies. Today they are being privatized in perhaps the largest liquidation of public property in the history of capitalism. Most of the new for-profit telecommunication companies will be partially owned or formally affiliated with one of the three or four emerging global telecommunication networks.

The second consequence of convergence is a new air of uncertainty about the future of the media, telecommunication and computer industries. If the Internet or some digital computer network like it comes to eventually dominate, what happens to traditional media and telephone companies? Some technological determinists have taken the Internet to mean the end of corporate for-profit communication, because people will be able to bypass the corporate sector and communicate globally with each other directly. Although the Internet clearly has opened up important space for progressive and democratic communication, the notion that the Internet will permit humanity to leapfrog over capitalism and corporate communication seems dubious unless public policy forcefully restricts the present capitalist colonization of cyberspace.

With the rise of global media systems and a global media and communication market, one might logically expect that communication policymaking would enter global policymaking deliberations. In fact, the trend has been in the opposite direction. In the 1970s Third World nations used UNESCO as a forum to champion a drive for a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO), that would attempt to address the global commercialization of communication as well as the extraordinary and growing imbalance in communication resources between the rich and poor nations. The United States, urged on by powerful media interests, attacked UNESCO for even broaching the NWICO and withdrew from the organization. Since then UNESCO has formally backed down and made clear its desire not to tamper with the global media market in any substantive manner. Most poor countries have been pressured by the IMF and global capital markets to reject state or public involvement with media and communication, and to privatize their media and telecommunication systems. This is seen as indispensable to the integration of nations into the global market political economy. The public broadcasting systems in the rich countries have been advised to alter their mandates to conform to the global market and to become commercially viable. With the increasing significance of the global communication market for capital accumulation, the main global arena for the consideration of communication issues is now the World Trade Organization. The WTO battles to protect corporate intellectual property copyright in emerging economies and it has established the complete privatization and liberalization of global telecommunication as among its foremost goals for the 1990s.

In sum, the debate over communications policy is restricted to elites and those with serious financial stakes in the outcome. It does not reflect well on the caliber of U.S. participatory democracy, but it is capitalist democracy at its best. The politicians of both parties promised the public that the Telecommunications Act would provide a spurt in big-paying jobs and intense market competition in communications, a "digital free-for-all" as one liberal Democrat put it. An even cursory reading of the business press at the same time would reveal that those who benefited from the law knew these claims to be half-truths or outright lies. These are oligopolistic industries that strongly discourage all but the most judiciously planned competition. It is more likely that deregulation will lead to merger activity, increased concentration, and continued "downsizing."

Under careful examination, the market is a highly flawed regulatory mechanism. In markets, one's income and wealth determine one's power. Viewed in this manner, the market is more a plutocratic mechanism than a democratic one. In communication this means that the emerging system is tailored to the needs of business and the affluent. Nor do markets "give the people what they want" as much as they "give the people what they want within the range of what is most profitable to produce and/or in the political interests of the producers."

Much of the ideological strength of markets as a regulatory mechanism for media comes from the metaphor of the "marketplace of ideas." The image conjured by this term is one where as long as there is no government interference, all varieties of ideas will blossom under democracy's sun with the truth growing tallest. The market is assumed to be a neutral and value-free regulatory mechanism. In fact, for the reasons mentioned above, a commercial "marketplace" of ideas has a strong bias toward rewarding ideas supportive of the status quo and marginalizing socially dissident views. Markets tend to reproduce social inequality economically, politically and ideologically. The metaphor serves to mystify the actual corporate domination of our communication system and therefore provides the commercial interests with a valuable shield from rightful public criticism and participation in the policymaking process.