International Communication
INFORMATION REVOLUTION AND
THE NEW WORLD ORDER
Subhash Dhuliya
"The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-l5. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.” -Thomas Friedman
"The images of falling WTC perfectly express the vulnerability of the US, at that moment the world’s only superpower. Its terrifying nuclear missile shield, its strategic bomber force, its air and army and naval bases throughout the world, its nuclear submarines, its dozen floating airports, its huge external and internal intelligence services the CIA and FBI – all had been powerless to protect its most vulnerable citizens as they began their innocent day (on 11th September 2001) ". -Sean O'Conaill
What did the Gulf War sell? We were inundated with images of technology: powerful and exotic airplanes taking to the sky night after night, tanks speeding across the desert, stopping only to shoot at (and always hit) a distant target. In case we missed the point, news anchor narrators assured us the bombs were "smart" and the strikes "surgical." The signification was clear: technology not only bestows power and superiority but enables us to be humane, even in the conduct of war. -William F. Fore
The information revolution has taken place at such a fast pace that it has become difficult to fully and comprehensively interpret its implications. Many thinkers, particularly since World War II, have expressed the view that technological progress is running ahead of man’s capacity to interprets its implications, and direct it into the most desirable channels.1 A critical examination of the information revolution shows that it has not brought about any fundamental changes in terms of power relationships among various classes in the international political, economic and social structure. On the contrary, it has facilitated consolidation of previous power structure and has tremendously enhanced its power to control. At the most the information revolution can be seen as a logical consequence of previous historical phases. From this perspective, Cees J. Hamelink calls information revolution a myth. This myth offers an explanation of the world of the late twentieth century and presents the normative implications of it historical interpretation. It suggests that the ‘information revolution’ is most historical development of our time: a revolutionary transition to a fundamentally different age.2
In the initial phase of information revolution, America was described as "network nation" and it was predicted that the new information age would have “decentralizing" effect characterized the "global village". However, with the process of blooming of information revolution, the parallel process of de-skilling of workers, centralization of decision-making, and other "centralizing" effects of the electronic technologies also began. Far from producing a new, democratized, post-industrial, "information age", the trend and the new trade in information commodity has merely resulted in a refinement of the methods of industrial society and the market economy.
Undoubtedly information revolution is one of the most significant transitions in the history of mankind, which has deeply affected every sphere of human life. But at the same time the fact cannot be ignored that it has only immensely strengthened the tools and instruments of control and governance rather than bringing about any fundamental change in power relationship between 'ruler' and 'ruled', between 'winner' and 'looser'. What has been termed, as information revolution may in its content seems to be equally “non-revolutionary” as its predecessor, the industrial revolution. What did not change were the power relationships between winners and losers, between rulers and ruled. These only acquired new names. With the advent of new information technologies, the established powers are strengthened, new dependencies are created, and new social discrepancies are brought about. The situation is worsening day by day. This is because the ethical questions have been subsumed under the banners of science, progress and development.3
Nevertheless, we are in the midst of a revolution: a revolution in information services, in the patterns of communication, in culture itself. A revolution driven by technological, political, and economic forces that will recast the structures and practices that constitutes our symbolic forms, our interpretive frames, and our modes of interaction. Certainly the development of new communication technologies has already begun to transform the basic patterns of communication. Whether revolutionary or not (the term should always be used with caution), the changes underway require critical reflection and informed intervention.4 In the process of historical changes, the sources of power did shift with the transformation of first, an agrarian society into an industrial one, which then gave way to the information society. The source of power changed form land ownership to capital ownership and from capital ownership to information ownership; but what fundamental difference does this make when, after every shift, there is a new elite (usually evolving from the old one)? The phenomenon is now unfolding as advance information and communication technologies are emerging and the old bipolar international system has collapsed. Once again, these technologies promise to play a significant role in shaping international actors and the new international system. Seven key technologies stand out paving way for unfolding of full fledged information revolution: fiber optics, which can carry over a billion bits of information per second and will eventually exceed a trillion bits per second; computer; improved human-computer interaction; digital transmission and digital compression; communication satellites; cellular technologies; and networking-largest network is the internet. Taken together these ‘seven technologies’ have the potential to revolutionize the field of information and communication. Collectively, they most likely will have major effects on the way international actors and international system that evolves.5 today, the latest theory of historical rupture is represented by the claims of the electronic crowd, who now comprise a strident chorus. In this group come the communication hardware and software people, who speak mostly with market expectations in mind. But there is also the academic contingent, centered in the high tech universities, and, above all, political figures in the highest reach of government. A prophet has emerged in Alvin Toffler, whose numerous books won mass circulation and nationwide attention. Toffler described the computer-using society as the “third wave” displacing the preceding industrial one, which in turn came after the agricultural era.6
In the information society, the basic resource is information and information technology is the life-blood of many other technologies, and in fact often the carrying mechanism through which other technological developments become operational. The main feature of this transition is increased relevance of resource called ‘information’. In information society, this resource is basic to all processes.7 The society that has been created by the information revolution makes application of different techniques but access to their management was not radically altered. Changes were expected and have taken place and have been quite radical in adding ferocity to the forces of colonialism in all spheres of human life and providing it new and attractive tools of packaging and marketing. Communication has always played vital role in shaping the power structure. The most dominant policy of most societies for most of human history has simply been the control of communication. Throughout history communication and power have been intertwined.8
Massive advancement in the field of science and technology in last century pave the way for information revolution. Studies of development of science show that the last 65 years have produced 90 percent of the scientific knowledge accumulated by mankind throughout it history, and 90 percent of the people involved in the science during its development are our contemporaries.9 Major chunk of this accumulated scientific knowledge goes to information and communication sector which in turn largely remained within domain of multinational power structure.
The implosion of convergence of technology
The marriage of telecommunication, satellite and computer has played vital role in bringing about the information revolution. As the mot of the research and development efforts were made in the developed societies and the political and economic forces in control of them, the logical outcome was that the multinationlal corporations are now in control new information and telecommunication technologies and thus can also continue to control the traditional means of communication such as film, press, television, and construction of telephone equipment and lines. J.H. Lorenzi and A. Lefebure, from the university of Paris, have classified these far-reaching changes as “conquest strategy of the new from of imperialism” (Le Monde, 1981). The gravity of the situation stems from the degree to which these powerful conglomerates, with their vast commercial and economic holdings, have begun to act as “culture industries” as they take over businesses directly or indirectly related to entertainment, publishing, mass media, recording, video, toys, and advertising."10
The boom in communication satellites has facilitated the media consumer to access large number of television channels and multimedia hub -the Internet. Television is deeply and widely influencing wider sections of world population while Internet has taken central stage in the life of the elite. The Internet is proving the two-ton gorilla of global media and communication. The Internet is increasingly becoming a part of our media and telecommunication systems, and a great technological convergence is taking place. 11 The other crucial development that stimulated the rise of the political economy of communication was the emergence of new electronic media technologies such as motion pictures, recorded music, radio, and television. These industries were part and parcel of the incorporation of entertainment into the commercial corporate sector. In addition, the emergence of telegraphy, telephony, and telecommunication became an important subset of the political economy of communication. In combination, these developments suggested that, media and communication systems were playing a much larger role in people's lives.12
As already mentioned the information revolution by its very nature was an implosion rather than an explosion. The scientific knowledge acquired by and large remained within the domain of “haves”. The rush to computerization, on the part of “have-nots”, has led the enormous complexities that surround advanced communication and other technologies at this stage of unequal global power and influence.13 In the absence of for oppositional movements to claim access to mass communications technology and use it for their own purposes, the digital divide got further expanded. This facilitated usage of new technologies for the purposes of domination and control. In the 1980s, as computerization of the economy and communications accelerated.14 the dominant global system was maximum beneficiary of the process of acceleration. The dominant global system became increasingly reliant on the communication technology and information flows to maintain and defend its position. Translational corporations, the chief organizers of the world business system, have become vitally dependent on information flows to carry on their operations and set to sell their goods and services in the international market.15
This led to emergence of new global system, which was making optimum use of powerful global communication network that had emerged, which is key instrument of new global order. The developing countries have virtually become computer-controlled by transnational power structure, which become more powerful with the emergence of new global communication network. It was in this context that during 1980s, it was advocated a "go-slow" computerization policy.16 Although the new media environment is only a few decades old, some of its characteristics are becoming clear. The society has become increasingly dependent on mediated communication: more time spent with electronics and less spent with people. The exploding number of communication delivery systems and the diversification of programming allow individuals to pick and choose only those messages that reinforce already held attitudes and beliefs, thus fragmenting the culture because people literally cannot hear or see others. The mediated communication has become very dominant and the process of filtration of information very refined. Thus people are increasingly getting exposed to highly selective information that lack context surrounding emergent issues and problems. The isolation of stories from each other and from their larger contexts so that information in the news becomes fragmented and hard to assemble into a big picture. The fragmentation of information begins by emphasizing individual actors over the political contexts in which they operate. This every event is an isolated happening.17
There is little doubt that the world is in the midst of fundamental change that would further perpetuate the status quo within the nation-state and among them. The ‘global network’ is in placed no matter how highly uneven it is distributed among the nations and peoples. It is disseminating such a volume of information that is unknown in the history of mankind. "This world of ours is a new world," wrote Robert Oppenheimer in 1963, "in which the unity of knowledge, the nature of human communities, the order of society, the order of ideas, the very notions of society and culture have changed and will not return to what they have been in the past. "Thus, it is not enough to call what we are experiencing "rapid social change" or even "revolution," since these phrases connote only social or political upheaval. The change is more basic in that it modifies everything we have known. As a result, the world is facing not just a communication revolution but also a new Technological Era that brings with it its own worldview one that challenges the worldviews of all historical religions.18
We have moved into the technological era, Van Leewen says, and this is the great new fact of our time. The communication revolution, the Age of Information and the Information Society are surface manifestations of the more profound change that is under way in every aspect of life.19 The arrival of new communication and information technologies has offered the promise of more egalitarian, participatory, and progressive structures. Yet in practice, the reality has been of their rapid incorporation into familiar structures inequality and commercial exploitation.20
The information age
It was interpreted that the information revolution has paved the way for emergence of information society, which is turn, has also been termed as “post-industrial society” and “post-ideological society”. America and Japan were considered as "information societies" as information sector had emerged as most dominant in all spheres of life- particularly in the arena of economy. The first came from Daniel Bell, who set the stage for what was to follow with his study of what he called post-industrial society.21 The end of Cold War was interpreted as victory of Western liberal ideology and Francis Fukuyama interpreted it as "a remarkable consensus concerning the legitimacy of liberal democracy as a system of government had emerged throughout the world over the past few years, as it conquered rival ideologies like hereditary monarchy, fascism, and most recently communism. The liberal democracy may constitute the "end point of mankind's ideological evolution" and the "final form of human government," and as such constituted the "end of history." 22In his book, Theories of the Information Society, Frank Webster makes a crucial distinction between those writers who see today's world as a rupture with the past and those who find historical antecedents and continuities.22+
This present time is also characterized by numerous efforts to persuade the public that a new era has dawned, one which has no connection to times gone by. Many existing structural or institutional relations, like the contradictory relation of labour to capital, are now dismissed as obsolete. The game is a new one, they say, with no roots in the past. History, by this criterion, is not only useless for understanding the present. It is totally irrelevant. This is an especially destructive theory since it undermines any understanding of the social process and how to change it.23
The other deep change was the extraordinary advances in technology that are sometimes summarized as the “information revolution.” They may be best illustrated by the fact that computing power declined in cost 1,000-fold from 1970 to 2000. Any time you have an extraordinary reduction in price, the barriers to entry go down, and that means opportunities for many more players in the game. When the costs of communication decline that quickly and that dramatically, it lowers the barriers to entry into world politics. All sorts of actors who previously were, let's say, priced out of the market now can enter the market. The nongovernmental players, who became involved, like the various NGOs, had a benign effect, but some of the new nongovernmental actors, such as transnational terrorist groups, were quite malign.24
Unfortunately, thus far the new technological era has created a world of means in which the meaning of human existence is lost. Jacques Ellul calls the force at work The Technique -- a pervasive method of problem-solving that asks, "How can we best solve this problem now?" rather than, "What is the ultimate objective, and how can we reach it?’ The means is identified with the end, and whatever gets something "done" is good.25 Fifteen years ago, few predicted the profound impact of the revolution in information technology. Looking ahead another fifteen years, the world will encounter more quantum leaps in information technology and in other areas of science and technology.
The continuing diffusion of information technology and new applications of biotechnology will be at the crest of the wave. Information technology will be the major building block for international commerce and for empowering non-state actors. Most experts agree that the information revolution represents the most significant global transformation since the Industrial Revolution beginning in the mid-eighteenth century. 26
Technological changes associated with the emerging Information Age are rapidly redefining the way in which international affairs are perceived and conducted; and they are shifting the way societies, governments and leaders communicate and do business with one another. Instantaneous communications, near-ubiquitous information and ever more pervasive and integrated systems are blurring traditional boundaries, creating new types of diplomatic issues and giving rise to a host of new non-state actors.
The information technology, market forces, and globalization have created a dynamic for new ideas and wealth creation, for the rise of new actors, and for the vulnerability of markets and institutions that rely on this new information infrastructure. The consequences of the ongoing globalization of the media are difficult to disentangle from the effects of the parallel and closely related economic and technological changes in national and global economies. These are intertwined and reinforcing.27
Nowhere can these changing dynamics and the effects of such new, information technology systemic interactions be seen more vividly than in the realm of foreign affairs. Thanks to the Information Age and its developments, diplomacy is no longer exclusively limited to foreign ministries and diplomats. Publics, nongovernmental organizations, big companies, even individuals and above all the multinational power structure, which was termed Industrial-Military Complex by Eisenhower, now have the ability to profoundly affect every sphere of human life. After the acceleration of process of present phase of globalization, it has been widely felt that the corporate power has acquired news dimensions to the extent of becoming "controlling mechanism". Corporate control of media is rapidly expanding. The new telecommunications regulations allow media giants to own even more radio, TV, cable and phone services than before. Herbert Schiller contends that the capability of private resource rich conglomerates constitutes the true levers of contemporary power. Their influence and impact on shaping public opinion is enormous.28
Schiller maintains that corporate-managed festivals rob communities of authentic historic experiences. "In their place are the frictionless social events, synthetic, up-beat concoctions that life insurance companies, banks and department stores feel comfortable with. One can look in vain for the social struggles that mark life and history in the sanitized commercial pageants that now regularly fill TV screens and national landscapes. Since shopping malls have virtually replaced the streets as the nation's main public thoroughfare, the corporate cooption is nearly complete in this regard. Malls are privately held property and are designed solely for consumerism. They are inhospitable places for social nonconformists to freely circulate ideas or engage in social action.
The TV programmes, films, music, data processing, publishing and advertising by multinationals with huge resources and far-reaching interests reduce diversity by blocking out independent speakers and sources of information. In the last decade, deregulation was also a significant force in the corporate takeover of public expression. Cultural industries have both followed and fuelled other corporate drives to dominate world markets. Information industries circulate data and capital around the world, allowing them to change the international division of labor and to shift production sites worldwide. The cultural industries have also expanded internationally for their own direct material gain.29
The corporate takeover
At stake was more than a heavy import of Anglo-American media material by the rest of the world. Fundamental economic data are also transferred internationally, ranging from travel reservation information to banking and insurance transactions to engineering and architectural design. These sorts of data transfers, combined with cultural flows, have created a system dominated by multinational companies. The essential point is that an entire broadcast, informational, and cultural system, privately owned and managed, often helped by government policy but mainly dependent on transnational advertising on behalf of corporate sponsors (or corporate users in the case of electronic data flows), is being set in place. When such a system is consolidated, the utility of analyzing the effects of the programme or medium is futile. The entire social mechanism has been transformed into a corporate exhibit or channel.30
In Culture, Inc., Herbert Schiller continues his urgent, almost breathless, analysis of the way in which ``the transnational corporate system'' dominates the ``cultural-informational sphere''. For Schiller, the rise of the information society constitutes a bold extension of corporate control over culture and communication. We are witnessing the ``corporate enclosure of public expression and cultural activity''. 31
Prophets of a new cyber world, like modernists before them, often overlook how much the New World overlaps and rests on the traditional world in which power depends on geographically based institutions. In 1998, 100 million people used the Internet. Even if this number reaches billions in 2005, as some experts predict, a large portion of the world’s people will not participate. Moreover, globalization is far from universal. Three quarters of the world’s population does not own a telephone, much less a modern and computer.32 According to Internet World Stats (cpaws.org) there are some 88 Crores Internet users in the world as on March 31, 2005 and population penetration is hardly 13.9 percent. The population penetration of Internet is highly uneven and is as high as 67.4 percent in America and over 60 percent in most of the developed countries while in Africa it is 1.5, Asia 8.4 and in Latin America 10.3 percent only.33 The uneven growth of information revolution and the widening divide between information-rich and information-poor is indicative of nature of the revolution and in essence it has been an implosion rather than an explosion of information.
The information highway are getting grafted onto a global capitalist system already characterized by vast and growing inequality, economic stagnation, market saturation, graded access to information, ecological degradation etc. The combination of marketing and the new information technology will enable certain firms to obtain higher profit margins and larger market shares, and will thereby promote greater concentration and centralization of capital.34 The information highway is at the centre of the vast technological restructuring that is taking place. It is infrastructure of interconnecting networks and has acquired power of the axis of new economy- the site where business deals are forged, where work is dispatched, and where “flexible accumulation” is calculated and managed.35
The implosive nature of information revolution had left its marks on the new order and the new technologies have played key role in shaping post-cold war world order. No technologies have been more powerful in reshaping the post-Cold War international system than those of the information revolution. Over the past two decades, nation-states and subnational groups, international businesses, and multinational organizations have struggled to incorporate the dramatic possibilities for their work of satellite communications, the Internet, inexpensive telephone and cell phone services, fax machines, and global computer networks. The innovations have occurred largely without central direction or a clear game plan, and the effects of the ongoing revolution in the way we communicate on international affairs will continue. We are only beginning to see purposeful efforts to channel all the power in these technologies in support of good governance or effective and expedient management of international conflicts and crises.36
Apparently, information is the thing to own, sell, and trade in the 1990's. What is this shift from the tangible to the intangible? Information, of course, has always been important to the workings of society, but it appears as though it is now crucial for our livelihood, for our full and active participation in society, and for our development as healthy, aware individuals. In essence, the reach of information technology will see MacLuhan's global village realized. A village, which has nothing in common with the "village" in traditional sense. Rather, it is negation of values and traditions of communality and collectivity of the village. The corporate owned media are doing their best to dazzle people with all the new consumer opportunities. There is an interactive 500 channel future which will enable people to shop from bedrooms- interacting very little. Instead of a "global village" we foresee a global mall owned and controlled by corporations who are largely unaccountable to the nation-states even in which they operate.
A top-down endeavour
It is admitted that information is more important in the sense that it is now perceived as a commodity whose trade is facilitated by technology, but capitalism, indeed society, has always relied on information. The increased reliance on information not different just accelerated. Indeed, the Information Revolution would appear to be a top-down endeavour. Moreover, the selling, trading, and consuming of information made easier with information technology serves to funnel even more power to those who already have it. Even more power is wrested from the individual, and there is nothing revolutionary about that.
In the aftermath of the information revolution the decision making process has become more centralized and common people exercise little influence over decision making contrary to claims that it will facilitate greater participation of people in governance. Even if the general public exercises any influence, it is difficult to assess the efficacy of such intervention. The pattern in information-saturated societies is less and less participation of people in most of the democratic exercises. If anything, the communication revolution is turning out to be an exercise in consolidating the military, economic and political powers of the elite. In particular it is of the greatest importance to a hundred or so transnational corporations. Rapid collection and transmission data made the global expansion of the transnational conglomerates possible in the first place. In that sense it has changed the global economy, global politics and the global military strategy. All news, information and entertainment are being trivialized for the vast majority of people. Emphasis is given to information rather than meaning, surface events rather than depth and reflection.37
We are moving from seeing communication as a service function for the whole society to treating it as a commodity to be purchased and sold. As laws of economics increasingly control media structures, they inevitably become larger and owned by fewer people. Moreover, society is also being divided into a new class structure, as more sophisticated communication facilities are available only to small elite for their personal growth, education and enrichment. Though advertised as progress for all, computer programmes, data bases, specialized videocassettes and a wide assortment of information services are, in fact, separating society into the information-rich and the information-poor.38
The volume and content
Never before in the history has so much been communicated so rapidly to so many people. The new revolution has created channels and forms through which too much quantity of information is being communicated but at the same times the content of getting rapidly shrunk. A massive bombardment of images is not facilitating higher public understanding of contemporary issues. Rather it is other way round. People are finding themselves lost in jungle of information most of the time. The public understanding of first Gulf War is a glaring example role of media that has emerged from the thunders of information revolution. The controversy over the occupation of Kuwait received extensive media coverage for over six months during 1090-91. Throughout most of the period in the build up to the war (from August 1990 to January 1991) news coverage was both lengthy and intense. During the war itself, this escalated into long periods of saturation coverage. The news media have failed in their role as information providers. Despite months of coverage, most people do not know basic facts about the political situation in the Middle East, or about the recent history of US policy towards Iraq. Television, as the "information" source most people depend upon, is particularly responsible. While support for the war was extraordinarily strong, it was at least partly built upon a body of knowledge that is either incorrect or incomplete. These data do not "prove" that the media "caused" lower levels of knowledge, or that ignorance of many basic facts "caused" people to so strongly support the Gulf War. There are many plausible (and non-mutually exclusive) explanations and interpretations of the results. It may be that people who opposed the war went to greater lengths to find out "correct" information (which was, indeed, available) in order to bolster their position; that is, their views could have produced their greater knowledge, rather than vice-versa. And, it may be that people who supported the war simply tended to watch more television, because what they saw there tended to confirm and sustain their views. To us, however, the data suggest an ongoing process in which support for the war, lower levels of knowledge, and greater media exposure all interact and reproduce each other in dynamic and systematic ways. In sum, people who generally watch a lot of television were substantially more likely to "strongly" support the use of force against Iraq; those who were watching more TV News during the war were slightly more likely to be supportive. There are many examples of this correlation. Strong supporters of the war, for example, were more than twice as likely to wrongly assert that Kuwait was a democracy than non-supporters (28% to 12%). This suggests that over a quarter of those supporting the war have been misled into supposing that this is a "fight for democracy". Similarly, only 10% of strong supporters were aware that the US had failed to warn Hussein of their response to an invasion, compared to 27% of non-supporters. Additionally, 71% of strong supporters as opposed to 46% of opponents erroneously thought that the U.S. said it would support Kuwait with the use of force. One of the few facts that supporters were more aware of was the name of the Patriot missile. Support for the war looks even more fragile when correlated with what people know; since the more people know the less likely they are to support the war.39
The age of information is drifting away from the age of knowledge and understanding of the current and contemporary issues. The ideal of information and knowledge “at the push of a button” has proved to be a misnomer. The information age might, at least, have had the effect of keeping citizens better informed but what actually is happening is contrary- rapid growth of misinformation and disinformation- witness Donna Demac’s book, Keeping America uninformed, or Henry Porter’s exposure of Fleet Street newspapers, Lies, Damned Lies.40
The information revolution has either not yet arrived or it has taken a kind of form of “misinformation revolution”. This is an age in which people are excessively informed on some not so relevant subject but are kept in dark on some of the most relevant subjects that have bearing on their immediate political, economic, social and cultural environment. And, in the process creating impression of an “age of ignorance and misinformation”. This is a time in which we are told that students are simply ignorant of the world around them and are incapable of fulfilling their duties as “citizens and workers”. 41
New World Information and
Communication Order (NWICO)
With the end of cold war conflict of ideologies and Third World position of collective bargaining sharply eroded, the post cold war information and communication order by and large is negation of what was pleaded in the numerous formulations of previous concept of the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO). The flow of information news and information form developed to developing countries has intensified and world is witnessing a new scenario in which small and weaker cultures are finding if difficulty of ward off the information and cultural onslaught that has been unleashed through new channels of communications. With advances in communication technologies and advent of information revolution, the one-way flow of information has tremendously intensified.
In the wake of MacBride Commission Report (1980), strong differences arose on “balance versus free flow” of international news and information. The free flow doctrine was essentially a part of the liberal, free market discourse that championed the rights of media proprietors to sell wherever and whatever they wished. As most of the world’s media resource and media-related capital, then as now, were concentrated in the West, it was the media proprietors in the Western countries, their governments and national business communities that had most to gain.42
There were differences between notions of "press freedom" or "free flow". Western countries were not sensitive towards imbalance in the flow of information and news and the kind of distorted images it was generating.
The NWICO ideals were collective right to communicate, the rights of sovereign entities to protect their cultures, and the concept of a plurality of information sources. The essential criterion of information freedom resides in the plurality of sources and in the free access to these sources and to all kinds of opinion. The conflict between North and South over the dissemination of news is more intractable than any other contemporary debate over the unfair distribution of earth resources. The flow of news is vital because it is dominant channel that help people to form perceptions and images of world. The news intrudes into the very culture societies. The Western concepts that governed selection and dissemination of news had resulted into creation of negative images of developing countries. Images of Western audiences have become conditioned to a view of the Third World which is founded upon selective, wrong or ill-judged information and which can be characterized as "exploitive, patronizing, and distorted." Moreover, because of the vast market for news and increasing commercialization of news media, it remained difficult to provide a balanced view of the Third World. Almost all major global news organizations are controlled by a few Western nations; the third world perspectives and alternative visions are almost missing.43
Information users in the developed countries interpret, process, and act upon this information, redistributing it in turn to the client states, along with more information about their own activities, cultures, and politics. Thus, the Third World nations come to be viewed through the eyes of the information interpreters of the developed nations, whose organizations control both the finances and infrastructures of the distribution system, while the developing nations never quite receive the latest information, nor the latitude of interpreting it to their own advantage. As well, in terms of pure volume of information produced and consumed, the developing nations lag far behind.44
Struggles over communication policy have emerged as central in the post war system of international power and the communications industries as among the largest stakeholders in the public choice model. However, the problem is that these international information processes are in integral part of the dependency relations that determine the economic, political, and cultural organization of the current international order. In conjunction with the economic expansion of Western capitalism, Western techniques, symbols and social patterns were exported to the colonized territories.45
Thus, as Hamid Mowlana states, ``communication study is largely the outcome of global and national forces that have propelled the communication process to the centre of domestic and international attention and concern.''46
At the beginning of the 1980s as the information revolution began to unfold, many Third World nations realized the need to design and implement national information policies. MacBride Commission also stressed the need to develop comprehensive national communication policies linked to overall social, cultural and economic development. It was also the period when neoliberalism started to dominate US and UK policies- domestic and foreign as well. The new era set in and the predominance of neoliberalism negated the gains of Third World what ever they were. This resulted into the process, by which the existing policy and institutional framework for international communication has developed, only facilitated the corporate dominance in the creation of global civil society, and the surplus of communicative rights enjoyed by corporate speakers. The corporate mass media play a vital role in creating and channeling consumer demand to fulfill corporate marketing needs and objectives.''47
In the 1970s movement of Third World nations to establish a New World Information and communication Order (NWICO) in conjunction with a New World Economic Order, got wide support. It was widely accepted that there is need to rectify the imbalances built into the global political economy after four centuries of imperialism. The movement was squashed for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was adamant opposition from corporate media and the U.S. and British governments. Indeed, the United States and Britain both withdrew from UNESCO in the mid-1980s in large part to express their dissatisfaction with that group's alleged desire to interfere with the operations of the global commercial media corporations. The aftermath of the NWICO defeat has seen the thoroughgoing demolition of anti-imperialist sentiments in the third world. In their place is the doctrine of neoliberalism, which calls for the fullest possible integration of national economies into global market system.48
The scholarly study of the political economy of communication entails two main dimensions. First, it addresses the nature of the relationship of media and communication systems to the broader structure of society. In other words, it examines how media (and communication) systems and content reinforce, challenge, or influence existing class and social relations. Second, the political economy of communication looks specifically at how ownership, support mechanisms (e.g. advertising), and government policies influence media behavior and content. This line of inquiry emphasizes structural factors and the labor process in the production, distribution, and consumption of communication.49
"The Third World has accused the West of cultural domination through its control of the major news- collecting resources of the world, through the unstinted flow of its cultural products across the world, and through the financial power of its advertising agencies, its international newspaper chains, its newsprint companies, and its hold over the electro-magnetic spectrum on which broadcasting, navigation, meteorology and much else depend. The seeping effect of this vast machinery has transferred the social fabric of Third World countries as it has repressed its traditional cultures"50
The news imperialism
Anthony Smith (1980) argued that "news imperialism" obtained from bias in content as well as economic factors. Due to marketing practices, the methods of news collection, and the structure of news itself, audiences in both the producing and consuming states received a biased picture of world. Our mental media picture of the world is compounded of our Western interests within it and is supportive therefore of those interests. The struggle to escape from our bad image of the Third World is an essential stage in its struggle for independence."51
NWICO assumption that information plenty is concomitant to and predetermined of economic prosperity remains at least arguable. Smith's Geopolitics, focused almost exclusively upon the imbalance evidenced in the news media. The choice of focus is far from arbitrary, since Smith viewed this area as the most contentious. "The conflict between North and South over the dissemination of news is more intractable than any other contemporary debate over the unfair distribution of earth resources, for it intrudes into the very culture of Western societies."52
The neoliberal era had resolved the conflict by incorporating the “elites” of Third World into new global multinational corporate culture. The new corporate interests of information age have incorporated the ever expanding additional purchasing power segment of the developing societies-the thriving middle class-that is becoming increasingly dependent on the somewhat 'magical power' of the new and ever changing information technologies. The new information instruments that have emerged have been adopted by affluent societies and again partially shared with the affluent sections of the developing societies and thus a “partnership of interests” has been created. The information and communication technologies, the neoliberal globalization and the controlled information revolution has played vital role in creating this “community of interests” in the “corporate global village” that is governing class today in the new world order. As a logical result, it accelerated the lop-sided social development, which has the potential of generating a news kind of social unrest. The world order that emerged as aftermath of information revolution helped the process of increasing power to the indigenous elites in the third world countries that was ready to collaborate with the multinational. The elites are Western oriented and now major challenge before dominant world order to perpetuate the power of Westernized indigenous elites. Citing the case of the Philippine press, Smith contended that western liberal schemes, such as, bilateral grants, training, or skill-transfer programmes resulted in "transplanted journalism", and the formation of elites who were in effect "internal émigrés", divorced from their own cultures. The existing information order is "a product of and has itself extended the historical relationships between the 'active' and the 'passive' nations.53
The images of nations are primarily created by means of the news. That is how the North comes to know the South and the interests that control news are also in control of the images. Smith contended, the exporting nations reinforce their own cultural images in the client nations through many other "physical and cultural" exports. Films, tourism, and consumer products such as automobiles are possible examples. As well, journalists from those nations and abroad report frequently on activities in the developed nations. With the emergence of global media, the flow of news is controlled by few big news organization and they are in control of news flows in all directions. However, because of the way in which news is constructed and marketed, emphasizing the most violent or dramatic images, the media present a selective or distorted image of the less developed nations.54
Disaster-oriented journalism
In interpreting Third World events for domestic audiences, Western journalists apply their own standards of propriety. The very concept of event to qualify to be newsworthy has to be “interesting” and “eye-catching” has resulted into what is termed as ‘disaster-oriented journalism’. The process of information gathering and dissemination that is involved in practice results into selection of only or mostly negative events and thus create only negative images. And, here lies the crux of media bias: "It is what the agencies and Western journalism does inadvertently which is the trouble. We think of the price of motor cars as necessarily rising through no one's fault; we think of the price of petrol rising as a direct result of the 'greed' of a few Arabs."55
It is widely known that almost over 90 percent of global flow of news (the "hard news"-the events of the day and the first report generally became trend setter in rest of coverage of the event) is controlled by Western news agencies. These agencies control even domestic distribution of news in developing countries through exchange arrangements with domestic news agencies. The Reuters of Britain, United Press International (UPI), Reuters, Associated Press (AP) of USA, and Agence France-Presse (AFP) of France and DPA of Germany are major players in global news market that now control domestic markets in context of international news. These news agencies are the primary producers and controllers of news.56
The issues of cultural domination and the concept of national sovereignty got new meaning in the wake of collapse of Soviet model and world becoming unipolar and with the intensification of neoliberal globalization. In addition to being material "have-nots", inhabitants of the ‘periphery’ nations have become "know-nots" when it comes to possession of important decision-making knowledge, since raw data is increasingly processed into knowledge in the ‘centre’.57 With the end of Cold War, the Third World of the 1990s finds itself with only one ideological pole toward which to turn, and with the United States as the major viable source of economic assistance. It would seem that the basic NWICO assumption that information plenty is concomitant to and predetermined of economic prosperity remains at least arguable, if not dead.58
The Western/American domination over information and images has on the one hand let the western cultural domination of the world and at the same time it generated strong reaction and the burns of backlash are also being felt as domination does not allow “dissent’ and alternative visions or the gap between the dissent and alternative visions is not compatible any longer and the democratic institutions are failing to work as outlet of people anger and frustrations. The ‘rejection’ in the absence of ‘democratic outlet’ is heading in different directions. The resistance of negative dimensions of the new order is increasingly getting manifested in negative forms in the absence of any genuine ideological alternative. The most dominant form of negative rejection is religious fundamentalism that has become focal point in the wake of 9/11.The religious fundamentalism may not be creation of new order but is drawing a lot of strength from the new situation.
Threat to cultural identities
The threat to cultural identities is finding manifestations in various forms and in Islamic world dominantly in religious fundamentalist form and hardened attitudes in certain circles in the West. “That tells me that they see our culture as alluring but poisonous — the Ayatollah Khomeini used the word in Farsi that I am told — I do not speak Farsi — that translates as "West toxification," literally like they are being poisoned by the West. Apparently there is a big "Baywatch" cult in Iran, and can't you just see the Mullah saying, "We want to watch it too?" The only way to stop this temptation is to destroy the source, the West. I don't think you can have a dialogue with people like that.”59
Ideally speaking, new efforts might consist of developing better ways of exporting information from the rich nations of the North and West, to the poor ones of the South and East, and of importing knowledge of developing countries through development education activities.60 But it is not so. In the wake of emergence of new order as key product of information revolution, the intense public relations campaign of North American researchers, economists, and sociologists - supporters of free informatics, the free flow of information, private corporate enterprise, and the status quo - demonstrates the attempt to legitimize as a universally valid doctrine what is obviously an economic and ideological offensive. What makes the reordering of information flows all the more urgent today is that they have become, in just a few years, the common denominator of economic, political, cultural, and social activity at global level? The indispensable need for fundamental change is not solely due to the value assigned to information as a factor in development. The control exercised by a few elites over communications channels, and the storage, processing, and distribution of date and messages make these mechanisms one of the principal components of the dominant system.61
Due to marketing practices, the methods of news collection, and the structure of news itself, audiences in both the producing and consuming states received a biased picture of world. Our mental media picture of the world is compounded of our Western interests within it and is supportive therefore of those interests. The struggle to escape from our bad image of the Third World is an essential stage in its struggle for independence."62
On the one hand West insistence on free flow doctrine has been created massive imbalance in the flow of news and information but on the other hand governmental dominance of news and information in most to the developing countries; too often has been the handmaiden of dictatorships, oligopolies and generally repressive regimes. Very few developing countries had free press to name. This provided substance to the argument of “free flow of news and information.” Many Third World leaders have a strong bias against free enterprise as the basis for maintaining the communication process that under girds their national destiny.63 The developing countries perturbed of what commercial media have done to the flow of news and information both within the United States and, to some degree, in their own nations. In the U.S. the broadcast and print media have increasingly turned viewers and readers into a product to be delivered to the real audience -- the sponsors. As a result, the mass media’s primary objective has changed: its goal no longer is to inform or enlighten or even to entertain, but rather to reach and hold the largest possible audience, regardless of the damage done to other journalistic objectives.64
During the past three decades, it has been suggested that an imbalance in information production and distribution might underlie uneven world economic development. Fraught with ideology, the debate about a New World Information and Communications Order (NWICO), tended to focus upon media ownership and upon the contending concepts of information as commodity and information as social good, upon the freedom of information as an individual versus a collective right.65
This discussion paper summarizes the debate, and suggests that the collapse of the Soviet Union might provide an opportunity to overcome past political differences and to get down to the real business of assisting developing nations. The NWICO debate flourished, or perhaps one might more aptly say, raged, throughout much of the 1970s and 1980s in the halls of the United Nations, and particularly within UNESCO. NWICO proponents and opponents alike accepted the premise of a link between economic progress and the availability of information.66
Liberal theorists maintained that national cultures and sovereignty were not threatened by information concentration, while structuralists and socialist analysts argued that they were. In particular, the NWICO proponents, mostly drawn from the ranks of non-aligned nations, claimed that Western ownership and control of both the news media and their distribution channels constituted a form of cultural dominance whose covert goal was capitalist economic expansion.67 The NWICO movement began as a protest over the concentration of print and broadcast media ownership among de facto cartels, and developed into an argument about the cultural dominance of poor nations by wealthy ones. However, even before the Soviet collapse, some NWICO proponents were beginning to suggest that the issue of news imbalance was a red herring, and that supplying developing nations with current banking and business information was more crucial.68 The Third World has accused the West of cultural domination through its control of the major news- collecting resources of the world, through the unstinted flow of its cultural products across the world, and through the financial power of its advertising agencies, its international newspaper chains, its newsprint companies, and its hold over the electro-magnetic spectrum on which broadcasting, navigation, meteorology and much else depend.69
What this depressing experience appears to have taught the leaders of the Third World is that independence, political, economic and cultural, is the crucial prerequisite for all forms of satisfactory growth and change. Without independence in information and culture the gains of political and economic independence are rapidly eroded. But as new technologies of communication inevitably spread deeper and deeper into the new societies it becomes ever harder to maintain local cultural autonomy. The paradoxes of dependence multiply and a political backlash results, of kind, which we are witnessing, today in international debate over the flow of news.70
As a result of the colonial past, the industrialized world is not only trying to impose its particular value-system and way of life upon other civilizations, it is also dominating and channelizing the flow of information from the developing countries to the outside world which reduces their chances to present their own views in an authentic way. The sophisticated infrastructure of information in the industrialized world prevents the development of alternative infrastructures in the Third World, which was perceived to be contrary to the principle of freedom of information.71
It was in this backdrop, UNESCO appointed a commission in 1976 to study communication problems under the leadership of Sean MacBride. The commission completed its work in time for the General Conference in Belgrade, October 1980. The report titled "Many Voices, One World" (UNESCO, 1980), supported the principles of free reporting of news, but it also encouraged state regulation of the media and suggested that UNESCO give priority to “the elaboration of international norms” in its communication programme.
The Belgrade Assembly merely referred the MacBride Commission report to its member governments, without endorsing any of its conclusions. However, the assembly went on to produce its own shocks to the West. The Group of 77, a bloc of more than 100 developing countries, had come with a detailed description of a “New World Information Order.” After strenuous negotiations, the sections that were most offensive to the West were removed. These included “the right of peoples to comprehensive and true information,” “the right of each nation” to inform the world about its affairs, and “the right of each nation to protect its cultural and social identity against the false or distorted information which may cause harm.”72
Free versus balanced flow
The MacBride Report had been welcomed by the U.S. press with rage, panic and considerable bias. Joseph A. Mehan of UNESCO charges that “with amazing uniformity, U S. newspapers have accused UNESCO of encouraging censorship, state control of the press, licensing of journalists by the state, and, in general, of being the archenemy of freedom of the press.” The New York Times featured an editorial titled “UNESCO as Censor.” Time magazine issued a full-page editorial statement on “The Global First Amendment War.” Hundreds of newspapers carried stories similar to Editor and Publisher’s “Press Groups Denounce UNESCO Plan on Media.” On the other hand many Third World leaders see a chance for simple justice. 75 The New York Times featured an editorial titled “UNESCO as Censor.” Time magazine issued a full-page editorial statement on “The Global First Amendment War.” Hundreds of newspapers carried stories similar to Editor and Publisher’s “Press Groups Denounce UNESCO Plan on Media.” During the past year and a half there has flowed a small but steady stream of reports full of anger, fear and righteous indignation. For, in these actions the press sees mortal threats to its freedom -- while many Third World leaders see a chance for simple justice.73
This argument, played out in fora such as the Non-Aligned Movement and UNESCO conferences drew support from the Soviet Union, and hostility from Western administrations. It was partly due to fears of the growing "politicization" of UNESCO that the United States and Great Britain withdrew from that organization in the mid 1980s. Because many of these writers argued in particular against de facto media cartels, because of political problems within UNESCO itself, and because of the East-West rivalries of the times, the NWICO debate came to be treated as a confrontation between capitalist West and the Third World backed by Soviet communism. Opponents charged that the NWICO proposals were part of a larger communist agenda. The debate of "balanced flow of information" versus "free flow of information" was focus of the confrontation.74
And the heat was still on when the Western camp put forward its own agenda. In May 1981, some 100 representatives of print and broadcast organizations from the U.S. and 20 other nations met in the French Alps, where they adopted the “Declaration of Talloires,” calling on UNESCO to “abandon attempts to regulate news content and formulate rules for the press.” In June, Elliott Abrams, assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs, charged that UNESCO had “lent itself to a massive assault on the free flow of information” and challenged General Secretary M’Bow that if he did not remain “neutral” and avoid confrontation on the issue, he faced a battle with the U.S. “This is a war UNESCO cannot win,” Abrams declared.75
The insistence on absolute freedom or a “free flow” of information was seen by the developing nations as the freedom of the fox in the chicken coop. By a free press, in the West, you mean a press owned by a few people who have a commercial monopoly, really a monopoly of the conscience of mankind. They are “the good people” and they “know what is right.” A free press means, for you, that the owner of the press is free to prevent whom he wants from being heard. You don’t have a free press at all. You have a press imprisoned by commercial interests. A. J. Liebling also said it: “Freedom of the press is reserved for those who own one.” 76
After the fall of Berlin Wall the UNESCO stance changed and so the attitudes of dominant Western powers. In new situation neither UNESCO nor the Third World was in position to offer any resistance to the New (extension of the old) World Order. The then US State Secretary James Baker announced that the United States would continue to observe the UNESCO. The main complaint for withdrawn was "politicization" of UNESCO but in new era the organization suffered political bias but that of the West. UNESCO remained excessively politicized. It seems clear, therefore, that the "politicization" of UNESCO was merely part of a broader phenomenon.
It has become a truism that present information flows are marked by serious inadequacy and imbalance and that most countries are passive recipients of the information disseminated by translational corporations controlled by the developed world and most of them in the United States. The new communication technologies have only serve to widen the gap between those who have access to information and the means of using it and influencing others, and those who do not have these capabilities. In a situation where access to information id dependent solely on wealth and income, no change in this current flow of information seems likely in the future.77
During the past three decades, it has been suggested that an imbalance in information production and distribution might underlie uneven world economic development. Fraught with ideology, the debate about a New World Information and Communications Order (NWICO), tended to focus upon media ownership and upon the contending concepts of information as commodity and information as social good, upon the freedom of information as an individual versus a collective right.78 The collapse of the Soviet Union might provide an opportunity to overcome past political differences and to get down to the real business of assisting developing nations. The NWICO debate flourished, or perhaps one might more aptly say, raged, throughout much of the 1970s and 1980s in the halls of the United Nations, and particularly within UNESCO. NWICO proponents and opponents alike accepted the premise of a link between economic progress and the availability of information. However, liberal theorists maintained that national cultures and sovereignty were not threatened by information concentration, while structuralists and socialist analysts argued that they were. In particular, the NWICO proponents, mostly drawn from the ranks of non-aligned nations, claimed that Western ownership and control of both the news media and their distribution channels constituted a form of cultural dominance whose covert goal was capitalist economic expansion.79
Death of an idea
With the death of the concept of NWICO the power of technology and those who control it became more severe from third world perspective. In the New Order the technology became the power and new technology acquired the status of untrained power. The new information technologies are unbalancing relationships in societies- globally strengthening some societies and rendering others weaker.80
The intensification of one-way flow of news and information (images of world) tends to support a global process of cultural synchronization rather than autonomous diversity. Information techniques facilitate the emergence of an oligopolized leisure market that defines and produces cultural services. This leads to a rapid loss of self-defined mechanism through which people cope with their environment: the core of cultural development.81
Joseph Nye argues that at this stage in history, it looks like as if globalization is Americanization, because the Americans are the dominant economy and so forth. But it helps to take history back a little bit and realize that cultures are not static. They are continually changing and the idea that it is all homogenizing is simply mistaken. So I don't see a world in which India is going to be like New York. In fact, New York is actually becoming more like India, which is good for New York. But I do think that it is a great mistake to take such a narrow slice of historical time as to think that globalization is Americanization. It is not.82
Samir Amin put is differently: socialization in the modern world is founded upon the expansion of capitalist market relations, which gradually master all aspects of social life and suppress, or at least largely dominate, all other forms of solidarity (national, familial, communal). This form of socialization “by the market,” even if has enabled a stupendous acceleration in the development of productive forces, has equally aggravated their destructive characteristics. It tends to reduce human being s to the status of “people” without identity other than that of being passive “consumers” in economic life and equally passive “spectators” (no longer citizens) in political life. 83
Undoubtedly intercultural interaction has been there for a long time but this age is witnessing an intense one-way information bombardment, which is creating a unique situation with all kind of complexities. Mahatma Gandhi said, “I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the culture of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any.” The intense one-way flow is virtually seems to be acquiring “blowing dimensions”. The media messages have become so complex by sheer quantity and quality that to comprehend their meaning has become beyond intellectual skills of man in street. The other challenge comes from globalization, which means the development of worldwide networks of interdependence, or sometimes, in shorthand, it has been called the "shrinkage of distance” which is largely facilitating massive and intense one-way information flow. The degree of interpretability of texts and the finite limits to consumer autonomy are still highly significant. Resistance by audience autonomy is frequently romanticized excess, and is, at most, some form of indirect autonomy over consumption, but never production.84
The free-flow doctrine simply "legitimates and reinforces the capability of a few dominant economies to impose their cultural definitions and perspectives on the rest of the world"85
The context of news and information is at least as important as content, since it allows the media to dilute and discredit information while still appearing to present it a fair manner. This is particularly problematic in media coverage of insurgency, war, and revolution since it means the public can be swayed to the needs of ‘national interests’ and policy. The justification for the Gulf War began with 'balance of power' in the region, then moved on to protecting national interests and the access to oil, and finally settled on protecting “democracy, our friends, and stopping a new Hitler and liberation of Iraq people from a ruthless despot”. And, the American and global media played merrily along. This is particularly problematic when coverage concerns insurgencies and the like, since the nuances of the language tend to lend legitimacy to which ever side is more beneficial to the West and demonizing the other side.
Emergence of global media and its impact on
global power relations
The present process of globalization is a total package a kind of synchronization of international political, economic, social and cultural life. Dominant western powers in control of global media are setting the models and standards which in turn amounts new kind of cultural colonialism. Ideally speaking the globalization can be described as the worldwide interconnection between societies, cultures, institutions, and individuals; the compression of time and space.
In the 1990s, witnessed three trends globally in media: a growth in the concentration of media ownership around the globe; the emergence of an "information economy" with information now seen as a product and its transfer as industry (the Internet); and an increase in deregulation, privatization and/or liberalization of the media. The early 1980s had witnessed a dramatic restructuring of national media industries, along with the emergence of a genuinely global commercial media market. The emergence of truly global media system is a very recent development, reflecting to not small degree the globalization of the market economy. Although global media are only one part of the overall expansion, and spread of an increasingly integrated global corporate system, they complement and support the needs of nonmedia enterprises. Global media provide the main vehicle of advertising corporate wares for sale, thereby facilitating corporate expansion into new nations, regions and markets.86
The neoliberal era
The global triumph of neo-liberalism in 1989 further accelerated the process of globalization in all spheres and coincided with new quests for markets. With perceived failure of controlled model of economies, the developed capitalist countries and international financial institutions were able to force the developing countries to open up their weak economies to the global economic system dominated by the multinationals. The multinationals are taking advantage by using more flexible and less visible forms of accumulation to exploit human and material resources of the developing countries. To obtain these resources and commodities, the spheres of commerce and finance are increasingly used by transnational capital. In this context, an efficient network of communication came into existence to transform the emerging middle class groups and organizations into the market, in the process the diverse societies have been exposed to the ideology of neo-liberalism.87
The scientific and technological revolution is producing in the networked economy which has been key to the emergence of a global communication network and global media. Globalization primarily is the imposition of the logic of capital on the world economy, polity, and culture, often engaging in economic determinism, rather than seeing the complex new configurations of economy, technology, polity, and culture, and attendant forces of domination and resistance. Globalization is largely perceived as the triumph of a globalized hegemony of market capitalism, where capital creates a homogeneous world culture of commercialization, commodification, administration, surveillance, and domination.88
The deregulation and liberalization of the international communication sector in the 1990s were paralleled in the media industries and, in conjunction with the new communication technologies of satellite and cable, have created a global marketplace for media products. Before globalization, most of media corporations had distinct areas of business. With the privatization of broadcasting across the globe, coupled with new methods of delivering media and communication content –namely , satellite, cable and the internet- the distinctions between these industries are being dissolved . With the deregulation, and the relaxation of cross-media ownership restrictions, especially in the USA and Britain, media companies started to look to broaden and deepen their existing interests and since the mid-1980s there has been a gathering of mergers and acquisitions.89
As the global media come under the ownership of handful of giant corporations, the tendency is for the same centrally gathered raw news material to be delivered to more and more outlets. The result seems contradiction between multiplying channels and shrinking content. The number of information outlets may be growing at an electrifying speed, but the diversity, depth and quality of information they contain are not keeping pace. 90 The globalization of markets would lead to only to few media enterprises staying competitive worldwide, leaving them controlling the global development to of the communication media. In communication sector globalization at the present time means that an oligopoly of offerers is dominating the scene.91
In the present epoch we often discover that diverse interests are at work, and what may appear at one level to be ‘globalization’ in the sense of ‘homogenization’, may appear at another level fragmentation and competition. The development of the concept of ‘news’ as a process that lies at the hart of modern capitalism and which also illuminates processes of globalization which, modern capitalism has helped to generate . News contributed to processes of the construction of national identities; to imperialism and the control of colonies; it was san essential lubricant in day-to-day financial affairs, both within and between domestic markets. The collection and dissemination of this commodity was organized and rationalized on behalf of media and non-media clients by small group of powerful agencies, acting globally and as a cartel. Hence the links between modernity, capitalism, news, new agencies and globalization are an outstanding but neglected for the past 150 years.92
Mark D. Alleyne analyses the process of present process of globalization in different perspective. He says that the globalization in actually a misnomer, the label is applied to intensified transnational exchange not across entire world necessarily, but in few fractions of it. Some have yielded to this fact by calling the reality “uneven globalization.93
Information superhighways
The idea of national and global “information superhighways” is where the notions of post-industrialism and globalization intersect. Both concepts are based on the idea that creation and use of communication technologies produce profound consequences for the way societies organize work, business management, government, and other social activities, such as education. In some way globalization can be described as post-industrialism on global scale. A similar straightforward definition of the concept is one that puts emphasis on the very transparent affects on new communicant capabilities and call globalization in term that merely “implies increasing volume and expanding scope of interactions among a broad range of actors in the international system, as well as greater a greater degree of interdependence resulting from this interconnectivity. But a more thoughtful and better researched definition of globalization is that it is a “social process in which the constraints of geography on social and cultural arrangements recede and in which people become increasingly aware that they are receding”.94
In conventional parlance, the current era in history is generally characterized as one of globalization, technological revolution, and democratization. In all three of these areas media and communication play a central, perhaps even a defining, role. Economic and cultural globalization arguably would be impossible without a global commercial media system to promote global markets and to encourage consumer values. The very essence of the technological revolution is the radical development in digital communication and computing. The notion of globalization as it is commonly used to describe some natural and inexorable force; the telos of capitalism as it were, is misleading and ideologically loaded. A superior term would be neoliberalism; this refers to the set of national and international policies that call for business domination of all social affairs with minimal countervailing force. Governments are to remain large so as to better serve the corporate interests, while minimizing any activities that might undermine the rule of business and the wealthy. Neoliberalism is almost always intertwined with a deep belief in the ability of markets to use new technologies to solve social problems far better than any alternative course. The centerpiece of neoliberal policies is invariably a call for commercial media and communication markets to be deregulated. What this means in practice is that they are “re-regulated” to serve corporate interests.95
Globalization involves both capitalist markets and sets of social relations and flows of commodities, capital, technology, ideas, forms of culture, and people across national boundaries via a globally networked society. In a globalized network society, the transmutations of technology and capital work together to create an increasingly globalized and interconnected world. A technological revolution involving the creation of a computerized network of communication, transportation, and exchange is the presupposition of a globalized economy, along with the extension of a world capitalist market system that is absorbing ever more areas of the world and spheres of production, exchange, and consumption into its orbit.96
Ideological context of political discourse
The configuration of the international economy explains the broad outline of the global media system. The relationship between the world political economy and the new media has profound implications for the ideological context of political discourse.97 Globalization is a phenomenon not possible without a particular kind of media environment and international news and information flow. In fact so pervasive have global media become that media that we are witnessing the onset of a "new form of global culture" in which globally produced images, sounds and spectacles help produce the fabric of everyday life providing the materials out of which people forge their very identities. Information flow in all kinds of forms and especially media are the source of knowing the world that is beyond the domain of their direct experience and thus, in major part of our knowing and knowledge is world of images.
The spread of a global culture and enhanced power of media are shaping identities and our images and views of the world. According to a number of media and cultural critics, this "global culture"--with the hallmarks of homogenization and convergence--is obliterating local cultures, creating in its wake mirrors of American consumer society. Thus media theorist Cees Hamelink believes that "the impressive variety of the world's cultural systems is waning due to a process of 'cultural synchronization' that is without historic precedent." This particularly pessimistic view of the obliteration of local cultures, a result of the impact of the globalization of (largely) American electronic media, has come to be known in media studies as the "media/cultural imperialism thesis."98
The present process of cultural globalization has been set into the accelerated pace by global media that has emerged in the wake of information revolution. The global media controlled by multinational power structure is not facilitating a healthy cultural interaction- rather it is other way round. The global media is key to selling news ideas and dreams to vast population of the world. For capitalism’s cheerleaders, like Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, all this suggests that the human race is entering a new Golden Age. All people need to do is sit back, shut up and shop, and let markets and technologies work their magical wonders. For “socialists and those committed to radical social change these claims should be regarded with the utmost skepticism”.99
Despite advances in communication technologies and massive outpouring of information in various forms it failed to facilitate bringing about a wider distribution of information, distribution is paradoxically restricted to those who already have more than their fair share of information. Now even questions are being raised that to what extent even the information-rich are informed or are they more misinformed? Are they intellectually skilled enough, to reveal the hidden meanings of the volume of images that are being communicated through intense bombardment of various types of information? Information is becoming highly specialized and complex. It implies that despite volume of information available to people, it is not facilitating better understanding of contemporary issues. The resource information is far more difficult to exploit than land and capital. It requires highly developed intellectual and managerial skills that are unevenly distributed in the society.24/7 journalism (24-hourn news, 7 days a week) so quickly and rapidly shifting from one theme to other that it become difficult for viewer to make any meaningful sense of any event. A glaring example of the problem this method creates is the present state of TV news: most people prefer its simplistic presentation to a more complex and demanding one.100
This is creating an entirely new situation in terms of media role to inform and educate people and new questions are arising in terms of media role in enhancing public knowledge. In the United State one study has reveled that more television people watch less they now.101 Heavy exposure to media coverage of a dominant issue leads to a stronger and/or more frequent activation of the though elements related to the issue. Media messages often directly influence individual-level attitudes but that such effects depend on the information environment and the individual’s exposure and resistance to persuasive messages.
If news is trivialized and structural erosion of the public sphere in is sharpened, where the viewer, bombarded with visuals, may not be able to differentiate between public information and propaganda from powerful global media channels. With entertainment becoming dominant in the information market, there is emergence of a kind of conflict-media, which is always interested in conflict kind of news, which considered having more entertainment value. In the media saturated world, with constant flow of words sounds and images, 24/7 concept of journalism has emerged as a television genre in its own right. Given the fiercely competitive commercial environment within which news networks have to function. The proliferation of 24/7 news channels is growing competition for audiences and crucially, advertising revenue, at a time when interest in news if generally declining. The commercialization and ‘entertanization’ of news is primarily responsible for decline in public interest in news. There are over hundred odd channels for entertainment and people do expect “news” from news channels and pure entertainment and naked commerce. In a scenario where large blocks of information are owned by corporate interests driven by greed for profit, entire classes of people are bound to be excluded.
The traditional news culture has been replaced by marketing managerial culture- the ‘editor’ got replaced by the ‘brand manager’. The formerly revered practice of news reporting for the public interest has been usurped by the MBA/corporate-driven view that the news is a "product" and the reader or viewer a "consumer” and news production has become highly commercialized. The corporate entities deploy resources, such as reporters or photographers, to maximize return to stockholders, leads to an exploration of the ways such practices affect journalistic quality. There is increasing trend of application of market logic to news and, because of its growing importance, particularly to television news. In the past, local television news was viewed by journalists in other media as fluff, an inconsequential market-driven medium; but since the mid-1980s, as newspapers and network TV have faced increasing competition and a shrinking advertising market, their programming style has also become increasingly driven by market forces rather than by traditional journalistic practices. Obsessed, as 24/7 news appears to be with ratings and the resultant emphasis on infotainment, it seems to have failed to provide the economic or political context to help explain why there are conflicts in the world.102
Appearance of truth to the illusion
Public perception at the end of the twentieth century depends increasingly on images and brief sound bites distilled, abstracted and presented by the organs of the modern media. Issues, personalities, and events appear before the public, only to vanish behind a bewildering glitter of new sensations, disasters, and miseries. The information flows in a never-ending, indigestible stream, lending an appearance of truth to the illusion of an informed public at the beginning of an open, democratic, information age. For the masses are also made of this useless hyper information which claims to enlighten them, when all it does is clutter up the space of the representable and annul itself in a silent equivalent.103
As the messages do not originate in a vacuum but from a well defined political, economic and cultural position and the process of communication and its content acquire normative dimensions. The value-loaded messages tell how the world ought to be, and provides us with moral categories that indicate what kind of behavior are desirable and what kinds of acts are objectionable. Today the information revolution is selling dreams as if the new information technologies have some magic power, which can solve all the problems the mankind is facing today. There can not he any objection and it cannot be sustain in this age of globalization either, to a genuine expansion of communication channels in a country or globally, if there is slightest reason to believe that those channels would be used in a social direction and address the staggering amount of unmet needs that people. There are untold educational needs, health needs, and general cultural needs of a wide variety. There are untold recreational needs of a very different character.
The amounts of information available are increasingly refined and sophisticated. For example, a person can search out how judges voted on a given court case, and how many cases represent a particular point of view. All of this information is available "on line," but it's available commercially, and the costs can be substantial. The complete commercialization of space and information is proceeding rapidly. A fundamental quality of life is being changed under our noses. Ironically, each one of these changes is being hailed as a marvelous benefit to the population. It's an unbelievable trick. Things that are fundamentally changing for the worse, the limiting of access to information and the commercialization of public space, are being presented as wonderful benefits in the offing. The broader social and ideological context within which mass communication research is conducted and exchanged has altered significantly in the past decade or so. The rising appreciation of the importance of media literacy and the pace of corporate concentration in the communications sector had seemed, only recently, to herald an emergent popular understanding of the critical public function of communication resources and practices. Now this concern has been displaced by vigorous deployment of the language of private commerce in public affairs. Neo-liberal claims about the efficiency and accountability of the private sector, the fiscal necessity of privatizing public institutions and deregulating trade and industry, and the imperatives of technology, globalization, and ``national competitiveness'' have rapidly become the privileged categories for mass media discussion of the public interest in all sectors.104
With regard to their own sector, the globally integrated private communication industries present themselves, unsurprisingly, as exemplars of the rightness of these claims, even as the concentration of ownership in the media marketplace continues to accelerate. In disregard of these developments, the media portray popular or scholarly criticism of private-sector control of public information processes and espousal of expanded public or community control of the media as incomprehensible absurdities, when they are addressed at all.105
The mass media's embrace of the commercial tropes of globalization has also obscured their own obstructive role in the development of international public institutions and an international public sphere. ``Trade in services,'' ``free flow of information,'' and the ``Information Superhighway'' are now the defining media categories of international communications policy and governance in the global information society. Hidden beneath this rhetorical shift, the emerging institutional and electronic structure of global civil society is, apparently, being pruned and shaped so as to attenuate public communicative entitlements in new, mediated international political spaces and to swell the private usufruct of the global oligopolies, led by the media and information industries.106
Commodification of information
The process of commodification of information had been set in the motion with the advent of information revolution. What was “free” is now owned, proprietary information. What has to be looked at is to what extend the net itself becomes a privatized operation. Another area will be how they are going to put television and broadcasting onto the Internet. That also is going to bring commercial advertisement. It will no longer be open, available and free.107
The process of synchronization at political, economic, social and cultural levels has facilitated the emergence of a powerful media market that defines and produces cultural products and services. The images of the world that is being projected and created by the international media are not in conformity with the ground realities. The emphasis on personal and dramatic qualities of events feeds into a third information characteristic of the new: the isolation of stories from each other and from their larger contexts to that information in the news becomes fragmented and hard to assemble into a big picture. The fragmentation of information begins by emphasizing individual actors over political contexts in which they operate. Fragmentation is then heightened by the use of dramatic formats that turn events into self –contained, isolated happening.108 The most obvious effect of dramatization is to trivialize news contend. In place of unswerving attention to major events and problems, there is increasing tendency to substitute manufactured drama.109
In the 1980s and early 1990s, it was believed in corporate circles that the global was supplanting the local and it was only a mater of time before cultural differences among nations gave way to a global culture. Television executive progressively discovered that audiences preferred to watch, when available, home-made television programmes, and underestimated local companies’ ability to copy international television channel formats. This prompted them to adapt their international feeds to local tastes, leading to the emergence of practices of localization.110
It is argued that globalization has led to localization but the blending has not been culturally healthy. The local became global and global camouflaged it into local and in its content it paves the way for spread of dominant Western ‘global’ culture. In the process of copying the ‘international’ format the ‘local’ became tools of spreading western cultural values and this became a tool of cultural synchronization process.
Like contemporary discussions of globalization in the context of neoliberal ‘free market’ policies, the classical Marxist accounts of the nineteenth century era of free trade and its suppression by the era of inter-imperial rivalry also confusingly counter posed ‘states’ and ‘markets’. In both cases there is a failure to appreciate the crucial role of the state in making ‘free markets’ possible and then to make them work. Just as the emergence of so-called ‘laissez faire’ under mid-nineteenth century industrial capitalism entailed a highly active state to effect the formal separation of the polity and economy, and to define and police the domestic social relations of a fully capitalist order, so did the external policy of free trade entail an extension of the imperial role along all of these dimensions on the part of the first state that ‘created a form of imperialism driven by the logic of capitalism’.111 A wide and diverse range of social theorists have argued that today's world is organized by accelerating globalization, which is strengthening the dominance of a world capitalist economic system, supplanting the primacy of the nation-state by transnational corporations and organizations, and eroding local cultures and traditions through a global culture. Contemporary theorists from a wide range of political and theoretical positions are converging on the position that globalization is a distinguishing trend of the present moment, but there are hot debates concerning its nature, effects, and future.112
Synthesis of capital and technology
The term "techno capitalism" is useful to describe the synthesis of capital and technology in the present organization of society. In an era of unrestrained capitalism, it would be difficult to deny that contemporary societies are still organized around production and capital accumulation, and that capitalist imperatives continue to dominate production, distribution, and consumption, as well as other cultural, social and political domains. Workers remain exploited by capitalists and capital persists as the hegemonic force -- more so than ever after the collapse of communism.113
The concentration of the media in fewer hands has narrowed the opportunity for citizens to express alternative points of view. In point of fact, media conglomerates have emerged as the most powerful voice in society - and we have become a mediacracy.114 In the wake of process of globalization, increasing trends of commercialization and concentration became prominent. The emergence of mediacracy has been seen as dangerous to democracy when the range of ideas is dominated primarily by consideration of profit margins.115
To cite an example, it is estimated that the newspapers that Rupert Murdoch News Corporation owns or controls in the United Kingdom have a circulation reaching 40%, and this says nothing of his control of television and satellite transmission. His influence on the media in the United States is growing. It is no secret that as an owner he is all too willing to inflict his own biased views on the editorial content of his properties. Recently Bertelsmann AG bought Random House, making the German conglomerate the most influential player in American publishing.116
What guarantee do we have that the powerful corporations that now control the American media will allow their news departments independence and that they will not intervene in the editorial content of their publishing companies? Has not the current powerful mediacracy, in emphasizing entertainment, already undermined the public's right to know? This trend is especially disturbing for the future of democracy when it reshapes the entire broadcast and publishing industries. It is surprising that there is so little opposition to the formation of these oligopolies.117
The commercialization and concentration of media has led to a situation in which particular kind information rarely appears in the Western media, and to understand the nature of western censorship, we need a better understanding of the nature of the industrialized world's media and the types of filters that control access to it." The public is exposed to powerful persuasive messages from above and is unable to communicate meaningfully through the media in response to these messages... Leaders have usurped enormous amounts of political control and reduced popular control over the political system by using the media to generate support, compliance and just plain confusion among the public". 118
At the same it is important to realize that the media has 'relative autonomy' and serves the system as a whole, and not individual components within it. It is free to operate within the broad constraints of a liberal capitalist system. It can, and does, criticize elements of society, so long as it does not attack the system itself. The censorship filters operate to defend the status quo of the system as a whole. Instead of direct censorship in the western media a system of elaborate check and balances has evolved to control the power of the media, and insure that in the long run it builds consent within Western society. Constraints based on ownership, institutional organization, the political economy of the media, and political power all subtly create a system of self-censorship that effectively insures that any challenges to the fundamental nature of the state or economy, internal or external, are excluded from the mainstream media.
The system maintains its credibility because its reliability is rarely questioned by society at large, or from within its ranks, and because the media itself defines what is fair and correct. In other words, because the censorship is subtle, and because 'open' and 'free' are defined within these constraints, the system seems to be open and free. This credo hardly squares with the last half-century's record of initiatives and policies by successive governments to ensure the US's world mastery over the now powerful sector engaged in cultural production, transmission and dissemination. We are up against a deliberate policy followed by every Administration from the Second World War up to and including the Clinton White House.119
Crisis of credibility
The technological advances and resulting growth of media has created an entirely new situation that has been summarized by Eduardo Galeano as, “never have so many been held incommunicado by so few.” So today on the one hand there is information glut, difficulty in verification. The information glut without maintaining a minimum level of quality and truthfulness of content in turn has created a crisis of credibility. Internet has become a powerful medium for elite sections of population but its information percolating to masses through multi-step communication process is yet to be seen. Again the passive nature of the internet, and the lack of trust in this new information source, it is not yet a challenge to the mainstream media. The changes occurring in the structure and economy of the internet are commercializing it, so integration is only a matter of time. Media coverage of insurgency and conflict has always been political and a change in technology is unlikely to provide any sort of magical cure to the broad direction of the coverage. On the contrary, the crisis of credibility is creating much more complex situation and it is becoming difficult to analyze the media effects and likely its implications. Internationally speaking, the computer inequality between countries is going to change the balance among nations. Relations can be profoundly affected, in that those countries that do not possess modem information media will be increasingly dependent on those that monopolize such equipment. The widespread use of computers, considering their interconnections, will lead to what Americans call total computation, which is nothing more than a considerable strengthening of social control. Informatics raises political and legal problems which constitute an exercise of power and, above all, raises problems concerning the control over exercise of this power. Traditional formulas can no longer offer a solution. 120
The notion that the Internet would “set us free,” and permit anyone to communicate effectively, hence undermining the monopoly power of the corporate media giants, has not transpired. Although the Internet offers extraordinary promise in many regards, it alone cannot slay the power of the media giants. Indeed, no commercially viable media content site has been launched on the Internet, and it would be difficult to find an investor willing to bankroll any additional attempts. To the extent the Internet becomes part of the commercially viable media system, it looks to be under the thumb of the usual corporate suspects.121 It was anticipated in certain circles that the rise of the internet would eliminate the monopoly power of the global media giants but now it is being realized that the largest media, telecommunication and computer firms have done everything within their immense powers to colonize the internet, or at least neutralize its threat. The global media cartel may be evolving into a global communication cartel. But the entire global media and communication system is still influx. While we are probably not too far from crystallization, there will likely be considerable merger and joint venture activity in the coming years. Indeed, by the time you read this, there may already be some shifts in who owns what or whom.122
Chomsky observes that if we use the term the term globalization neutrally, globalization just means international integration, welcome or not depending on the human consequences. In Western doctrinal systems, which prevail everywhere as a result of Western power, the term has a somewhat different and narrower meaning. It refers to a specific form of international integration that has been pursued with particular intensity in the last quarter century. It’s designed primarily in the interest of private concentrations of power, and the interests of everyone else are incidental. With that terminology in place, the great mass of people around the world who object to these programmes can be labeled “anti-globalization” as they always are. The force of ideology and power is such that they even accept that ridiculous designation. They can then be derided as “primitivists’’ who want to return to the “Stone Age,’’ to harm the poor, and other terms of abuse with which we are familiar.123
There is considerable debate across the political spectrum about just how advanced this globalization process is, or is likely to become, as well as its political implication. Most critics of globalization argue that it favours big business and the wealthy and undermines the capacity of labor, environmentalists, poor people, and just about everyone else, to control their own destiny. Globalization is regarded as having a distinctly antidemocratic edge as it effectively force national governments to comply with the needs of globally mobile capital or face economic purgatory. In short, more and more of society’s basic decisions are made the province of the market and removed from popular consideration. Some argue the term globalization is misleading-the real issue is capitalism-and the case for its existence is overstated in historical terms. This line of reasoning tends to discount the aura of "inevitability" that surrounds much of the discussion of globalization, particularly with regard to the alleged inability of nation-states and organized labor to counteract the power of capital. Proponents of globalization do not necessarily disagree with any of these observations; they simply assert that there is no other route to economic growth, and that cautious "business friendly" state intervention combined with the magic of the market will soften the immediate dislocations in due time.124
Globalization and political regression
The dominant trend of our time is globalization, taking such forms as the elimination of trade barriers, downsized governments, greater reliance on the private sector, reduced regulation of business, and an increasingly global economy. Many people interpret this as economic progress, basically a good thing. But this form of globalization is actually political regression, threatening to destroy democratic institutions and turn the clock of human progress centuries backward to something resembling feudalism.125
The reason should be obvious: Globalization isn't about competition among nations, but rather about the increasing power of mega- corporations over nations and their peoples. In effect, the US government acts as a proxy for elite corporate interests, not as a representative of its people or even national interests in any traditional sense. Although sovereign national states, sometimes competing and sometimes cooperating, are the Familiar World Order, globalization is leading us inexorably toward a New World Order where mega- corporations (and the wealthy elite who control them) reign supreme, while nations are reduced to a vestigial, subservient, policing role -- as we see in much of the Third World.126
For the general population, the elites represented security or tyranny, depending on your perspective. But it was obvious to all that they ran things; no one pretended society was democratic. With the advent of "democratic republics," however, the older elites were removed from power, while the business wealthy, who ushered in capitalism, remained relatively undisturbed. Did this transformation bring about democracy in any genuine sense, or merely monopolization of power in the hands of the single remaining elite? The question remains open.127And yet, this increase of productivity and technological ability that lies behind that danger isn’t an avoidable byproduct of capitalism; it’s in the nature of what capitalism is constantly doing. We are creating new and ever more dangerous problems for ourselves simply by doing what it is that we like to do. And the idea that more capitalism necessarily creates more stability in the world is an illusion.128
In criticizing global domination, media/cultural imperialism theorists see media operating within a single world market organized by the global imperatives of the American and the West European-controlled multinational corporations. Central to the process of economic domination is the role-played by the communications-cultural corporations. The media products are largely determined by the same market imperatives that govern the overall system's production of goods and services. Their role is not only informational, but also ideological in that they promote and develop popular support for the values and artifacts of the capitalist system. As Herbert Schiller, one of the strongest proponents of this view, argues, "Media-cultural imperialism is a subset of the general system of imperialism. It is not free-standing; the media-cultural component in a developed, corporate economy supports the economic objectives of the decisive industrial-financial sectors." Furthermore, he argues that "it is the imagery and cultural perspectives of the ruling sector in the center that shape and structure consciousness throughout the system at large." 129
There is no doubt that at an economic level we are witnessing profound changes characterized by the consolidation of media providers into the hands of an increasingly smaller number of transnational conglomerates. For these large, capitalist enterprises, economic considerations are the primary determinants in what meanings get produced and circulated on a global scale. The increasing monopolization and commodification of culture by an increasingly smaller number of primarily Western media providers does raise questions and concerns as to the nature of the images and meanings being globally circulated. However, there has been the tendency by the media/cultural imperialism theorists to simply read of the cultural effects of global media from their contents. Underlining this assumption is a model of weak receivers of the global message who are unable to withstand the cultural-ideological onslaught of the center (primarily America).
Discourses of globalization initially were polarized into pro or con celebrations or attacks. For critics, it provides a cover concept for global capitalism and imperialism, and is accordingly condemned as another form of the imposition of the logic of capital and the market on ever more regions of the world and spheres of life. For defenders, it is the continuation of modernization and a force of progress, increased wealth, freedom, democracy, and happiness. Its champions present globalization as beneficial, generating fresh economic opportunities, political democratization, cultural diversity, and the opening to an exciting new world. Its detractors see globalization as harmful, bringing about increased domination and control by the wealthier overdeveloped nations over the poor underdeveloped countries, thus increasing the hegemony of the "haves" over the "have nots." In addition, supplementing the negative view, globalization critics assert that globalization produces an undermining of democracy, a cultural homogenization, and increased destruction of natural species and the environment. Some imagine the globalization project-whether viewed positively or negatively - as inevitable and beyond human control and intervention, whereas others view globalization as generating new conflicts and new spaces for struggle, distinguishing between globalization from above and globalization from below.130
New global media culture
In the wake of present process of corporate globalization a new global media culture has emerged which is dominantly governed by commercialization considerations. Until the 1980s, media systems were generally national in scope. While there have been imports of books, films, music and TV shows for decades, the basic broadcasting systems and newspaper industries were domestically owned and regulated. Beginning in the 1980s, pressure from the IMF, World Bank and U.S. government to deregulate and privatize media and communication systems coincided with new satellite and digital technologies, resulting in the rise of transnational media giants. The transitional media giants had already created a kind of global media market and increasingly media programming is losing national character and is tending to become bad carbon copy of the ‘global’. 131
The emergence of global media system was facilitated by merger of acquisitions. To cite an example, the two largest media firms in the world, Time Warner and Disney, generated around 15 percent of their income outside of the United States in 1990. By 1997, that figure was in the 30 percent-35 percent range. Both firms expect to do a majority of their business abroad at some point in the next decade.132
The overwhelming majority (in revenue terms) of the world's film production, TV show production, cable channel ownership, cable and satellite system ownership, book publishing, magazine publishing and music production is provided by these 50 or so firms, and the first nine firms thoroughly dominate many of these sectors. By any standard of democracy, such a concentration of media power is troubling, if not unacceptable.133 Ibid. But that hardly explains how concentrated and uncompetitive this global media power actually is. In addition, these firms are all actively engaged in equity joint ventures where they share ownership of concerns with their "competitors" so as to reduce competition and risk. Each of the nine first-tier media giants, for example, has joint ventures with, on average, two-thirds of the other eight first-tier media giants. And the second tier is every bit as aggressive about making joint ventures. 134
In some ways, the emerging global commercial media system is not an entirely negative proposition. It occasionally promotes anti-racist, anti-sexist or anti-authoritarian messages that can be welcome in some of the more repressive corners of the world. But on balance the system has minimal interest in journalism or public affairs except for that which serves the business and upper-middle classes, and it privileges just a few lucrative genres that it can do quite well--like sports, light entertainment and action movies--over other fare. Even at its best the entire system is saturated by a hyper- commercialism, a veritable commercial carpet-bombing of every aspect of human life. As the C.E.O. of Westinghouse put it (Advertising Age, 2/3/97), "We are here to serve advertisers. That is our raison d'etre."135
When audiences appear to prefer locally made fare, the global media corporations, rather than flee in despair, globalize their production. Sony has been at the forefront of this, producing films with local companies in China, France, India, and Mexico, to name but a few. India’s acclaimed domestic film industry—“Bollywood”—is also developing close ties to the global media giants. This process is even more visible in the music industry. Music has always been the least capital-intensive of the electronic media and therefore the most open to experimentation and new ideas.136
There are a few other points to make to put the global media system in proper perspective. The global media market is rounded out by a second tier of six or seven dozen firms that are national or regional powerhouses, or that control niche markets, like business or trade publishing. Between one-third and one-half of these second-tier firms come from North America; most of the rest are from Western Europe and Japan. Many national and regional conglomerates have been established on the backs of publishing or television empires. Each of these second-tier firms is a giant in its own right, often ranking among the thousand largest companies in the world and doing more than one billion dollars per year in business. The roster of second-tier media firms from North America includes Tribune Company, Dow Jones, Gannett, Knight-Ridder, Hearst, and Advance Publications, and among those from Europe are the Kirch Group, Mediaset, Prisa, Pearson, Reuters, and Reed Elsevier. The Japanese companies, aside from Sony, remain almost exclusively domestic producers.137
The global media system is only partially competitive in any meaningful economic sense of the term. Many of the largest media firms have some of the same major shareholders, own pieces of one another or have interlocking boards of directors. When Variety compiled its list of the fifty largest global media firms for 1997, it observed that “merger mania” and cross-ownership had “resulted in a complex web of interrelationships” that will “make you dizzy.”138
The media giants have become effective political lobbyists at the national, regional, and global levels. The global media system is not the result of “free markets” or natural law; it is the consequence of a number of important state policies that have been made that created the system. The media giants have had a heavy hand in drafting these laws and regulations, and the public tends to have little or no input.
Military-strategic dimensions
The political and military-strategic dimensions of global media are becoming prominent in the post cold war world order. Most important, not far below the surface is the role of the U.S. military as the global enforcer of capitalism, with U.S. based corporations and investors in the driver’s seat. Recall the approving words of Thomas Friedman: “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-l5. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.” In short, we need to develop an understanding of neoliberal globalization that is joined at the hip to U.S. militarism—and all the dreadful implications that that suggests—rather than one that is in opposition to it.139
A major chunk of American media is directly or indirectly controlled by armament industry which reflects the core relationship between the U.S. military and the global neoliberal project, one of the central political issues of our times, also is virtually unknown to the journalism of AOL-Time Warner’s CNN and the other corporate media giants, who increasingly are the providers of substantive news concerning international politics. The very notion of imperialism has been dismissed as a historical artifact or a rhetorical ploy of desperate opportunists and the feeble-minded. In view of the corporate media’s interdependence with the global neoliberal regime and armament industry, any other outcome would be remarkable.140 It is a disaster for anything but the most superficial notion of democracy--a democracy where, to paraphrase John Jay's maxim, those who own the world ought to govern it.
In the first half of 2000, the volume of merger deals in global media, Internet, and telecommunications totaled $300 billion, triple the figure for the first six months of 1999, and exponentially higher than the figure from ten years earlier. The logic guiding media firms in all of this is clear: get very big very quickly, or get swallowed up by someone else. This is similar to trends taking place in many other industries. “There will be less than a handful of end-game winners,” the CEO of Chase Manhattan announced in September 2000. “We want to be an end-game winner”. 141
The corporate takeover of public expression means that culture has become an industry: book publishing is now in the hands of a few giants, and the line between journalism and public relations is increasingly blurred. "What the record reveals is an almost total takeover of the domestic information system for the purpose of selling goods, services, people, and prefabricated opinion."142 Media corporations are owned and controlled by the same corporate class that owns the rest of the means of production, and therefore have vested interests in the economic status quo. They are not neutral observers. The media is not independent, nor can it be, since it must answer to owners, to shareholders, and to advertisers upon whom the media depends for its long-term survival. If no control comes with ownership of the media, why would anyone want bother owning the media? 143
But in few industries has the level of concentration been as stunning as in media. In short order, the global media market has come to be dominated by seven multinational corporations: Disney, AOL-Time Warner, Sony, News Corporation, Viacom, Vivendi, and Bertelsmann. None of these companies existed in their present form as media companies as recently as fifteen years ago; today nearly all of them will rank among the largest 300 non-financial firms in the world for 2001. 155 Chernin’s firm, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, may be the most aggressive global trailblazer, although cases could be made for Sony, Bertelsmann, or AOL-Time Warner. Murdoch has satellite TV services that run from Asia to Europe to Latin America.144
The last fifty years have seen acceleration in the decline of nonmarket-controlled creative work and symbolic output. The "pervasive ideological character" of the cultural industries, means that "the heavy public consumption of cultural products and services and the contexts in which most of them are provided represent a daily, if not hourly, diet of systemic values." Only the very wealthiest can afford to own information and cultural media; hence these media transmit "the thinking and the perspectives of the dominant, though tiniest, stratum of the propertied class, not only in news but also in entertainment and general cultural product"145
When McLuhan, predicted more than 30 years ago the advent of the global village, many people thought the new technologies in communication would make it possible for us to access all sorts of information freely on our own without having to depend on newspapers. What we did not contemplate is that—instead of liberating us from intermediaries – inexpensive computers and universal access to the Internet would so inundate us with massive amounts of unsorted information that we would become even more dependent on those who could tell us what was important and accurate and what was not. 146
The idea that media organizations manipulate the news and that global media organizations will manipulate the news globally, forcing readers to read news they do not want to read makes sense only as the plot of a James Bond movie; this nightmarish vision has no basis in real life.147
Ironically, the new technologies have actually made news coverage more not less parochial. Former colleagues of mine working for the major networks tell me that whereas the three networks used to carry news of national and international significance in the past when they had the human and capital resources to do so, these days, the broadened constituency for 24-hour news increased the size but decreased the sophistication of audiences and has resulted in less thorough coverage of international events.148
Except in the case of a major breaking international story, cable networks only broadcast short snippets about events overseas. And, since viewers can access the news quickly 24 hours a day seven days a week on CNN, the networks have had to turn their attention to stories cable is unlikely to cover. The older networks now specialize in medical information or social issues, which can be run any day of the week. And since they no longer have the advertising revenue needed to maintain bureaus around the world, they cover mostly domestic stories. “May I suggest for reasons I have outlined above that when we look at globalization of the media that we refrain from conjuring paranoid images of evil media moguls exerting total control over the world through corporate empires and contemplate instead the far more realistic dangers of: technology-induced information overflow, • declining reportorial standards, • shallow international coverage, and• parochial reader/viewer interest”.149
In India, for example, influenced by the global media giants, “the revamped news media…now focus more on fashion designers and beauty queens than on the dark realities of a poor and violent country.” This slant is often quite subtle. Indeed, the genius of the commercial-media system is the general lack of overt censorship. As George Orwell noted in his introduction to Animal Farm, censorship in free societies is infinitely more sophisticated and thorough than in dictatorships, because “unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without any need for an official ban.”150 Lacking any necessarily conspiratorial intent and acting in their own bottom line interest, media conglomerates gradually weed out public sphere substance in favor of light entertainment.151 The combination of neoliberalism and corporate media culture tends to promote a deep and profound depoliticization. One need only look at the United States to see the logical endpoint.
TV images of the War
Students of television have identified more than one way of viewing its role as a cultural force. Recognition of the meanings it transmits, the way its programming is driven by economic considerations and its role in gratifying audience needs all provide important tools for analyzing its role in shaping societal goals and values. This applies even more effectively when attitudes are being shaped for a major societal effort such as a war. When we apply these three analytical methods to TV images of the Gulf War, some important insights into television's biases and cultural power emerge.152
TV viewers have already learned a complex visual code in which a close-up means intimacy or emotion, a shot from below means authority, a fadeout means the end of an episode. We have been taught the "meaning" of certain characters and objects: doctors represent authority; jet planes mean wealth and power, popular actors and athletes are trustworthy. Commercials rely heavily on significant images that link soft drinks with youth and beauty, automobiles with power, control and escape. Signification is the key to all effective selling.153
What did the Gulf War sell? We were inundated with images of technology: powerful and exotic airplanes taking to the sky night after night, tanks speeding across the desert, stopping only to shoot at (and always hit) a distant target. In case we missed the point, news anchor narrators assured us the bombs were "smart" and the strikes "surgical." The signification was clear: technology not only bestows power and superiority but enables us to be humane, even in the conduct of war.154
We also saw a great deal of interpretation as opposed to documentation. If Vietnam was the first TV war, the Gulf was the first anti-TV war. With the exception of a few exciting moments when a Scud missile was expected in Israel or Dhahran, correspondents were restricted to talking to us by radio or telephone while the camera focused on a map of the Middle East. Otherwise, various experts, mostly former military men, explained a particular weapon or tactic from a studio thousands of miles from the battlefield. Never was so much stock footage used to convey so little.155
While newspeople described tank training, we saw familiar shots of tanks racing across the desert. If there was a report of new air sorties, we saw, for the dozens time, the same old pictures of planes leaving their airfields; and when the Patriot missiles were discussed, we were treated to endlessly repeated footage of Patriots being uncrated all cleared by the censors.156
In sharp contrast to Vietnam no cameras went with the soldiers into ground combat. We never saw for ourselves that this war was quite separate from our daily lives. For all the rhetoric, the war was not a truly serious event for most TV viewers-which may have been why some entrepreneurs tried so hard to sell the war to others, through yellow ribbons, bumper stickers and even outdoor advertising.157
We saw two other kinds of images, but they were far less visible and much less compelling. One was the image of warriors, the U.S. soldiers visited by TV in order to provide us with "human interest." GIs, somewhat ill at ease, told how they were eager to "get the job done" and go home, while officers assured us that their troops were fully prepared for attack. These images signified that there were real people over there-on our side, that is.158 Media images of victims were even less in evidence. We saw family hardship back home in America, especially among "newsworthy" families (a father taking off from work to care for baby while mother was at war or families encountering economic loss while the breadwinner was away). But the real victims-the more than 50,000 Iraqi soldiers who were fried and pulverized by hundreds of thousands of tons of bombs, or the four million civilians in Baghdad experiencing nightly bombing raids and days with no water, food, electricity or sanitation-were virtually invisible.159
Almost 25 years ago the German media critic Hans Magnus Enzenberger pointed out that all media are manipulated in some way: "There is no such thing as unmanipulated writing, filming or broadcasting. The question is, therefore, not whether the media are manipulated, but who manipulates them." Who controls TV? The web is complex, but three groups exercise most of the control: the owners who run it, the advertisers who pay for it, and the government which licenses it. When we analyze television from an economic perspective, we ask one simple question: Who benefits? Who benefits when the amount of documentaries on the networks decreases each year for 20 years? Who benefits when a single company can own television and radio stations, cable systems and local newspapers-and control much of the information in a community?160
The celebration of technology in the Gulf War took place on stations increasingly owned and operated by multinationals deeply involved in the production of armaments. General Electric, the tenth largest corporation in the U.S. and one of the largest weapons producers, owns the NBC network and its stations. Westinghouse, another major defense contractor, owns one of the largest broadcast groups.161 Control is not limited to owners. Sponsors also greatly influence the way news is presented. Dupont, IBM, AT&T and ITT are all major television sponsors, and all have major stakes in the public support for high-tech armaments. Who benefits from coverage that celebrates smart bombs and surgical strikes? 162
Coverage of the war met a number of deep-rooted psychological needs: to feel powerful and in control, to experience extreme emotions in a guilt-free, non-threatening environment, to share emotionally charged experiences with others, to gain a sense of identity, to gain information, to satisfy a belief in justice, to see others make mistakes, to participate in the drama of history (vicariously and without risk) and to affirm moral values.163
This aspect of television viewing is perhaps the hardest lesson to accept. It reminds us that television would have no power if it did not have viewers eager to consume its messages. While it is true that television seeks out our psychological needs and meets them in ways that serve particular people's desires for money, power and control, it is also true that every person who views uncritically is asking to be controlled.164 In the final analysis, it is not so much the consumers as the producers who decide what the market is 'requires'. Technical options have increased the manipulative capabilities of producers.
At this juncture, it is difficult to understand how ordinary people's reception of events is affected or to predict what effects the new media will have on the audiences who directly comprise the new social segments of the expanding middle class and through multi-step communication process, reach the marginalized in an extremely mediated manner. It would be irrational to assume that people who spend hours a day before television or internet set or that the corporations that control most aspects of our mediated lives and spend billions of dollars on programmes, advertising, voice and data transfer to assure consumer piety are not engaged in some form of communication. It would be equally irrational to argue that these focused one-way flows of corporate information and images are constituent elements of dialogue. Are there any more effective instruments in the existing communication order the developing countries?
Global disorder and instability are clearly major concerns of the business and governing classes. The post-cold war world order has played a central role in the creation of this increasingly unstable and disorderly world. The emergence of the so-called global economy clearly amounts to hegemony of the West. The information revolution is leading the concentration of wealth that is in turn leading to misery and marginalization for the ever-increasing numbers of the world's population.
Despite advances in communication technologies and massive outpouring of information in various forms it failed to facilitate a wider distribution of information. Distribution is paradoxically restricted to those who already have more than their fair share of information. Now even questions are being raised as to what extent even the information-rich are informed or are they more misinformed? Are they intellectually skilled enough, to decipher the hidden meanings that are being communicated through intense bombardments of various types of information? Information is becoming highly specialized and complex. It implies that despite the huge volume of information available to people more people know less. The resource information is far more difficult to exploit than land and capital. It requires highly developed intellectual and managerial skills that are unevenly distributed in the society.
Information becomes a source of power only if the necessary infrastructure for its production, processing, storing, retrieval and transportation is accessible. Assuming that people are informed about the exploitative nature of the governance, yet they did not act, and their information did not become a source of power, because they lacked material and strategic means to transform their dissent into a political and social stream powerful enough to change the course of the developments. The latest information revolution has the potential to change the direction of its development and despite its highly controlled nature it may well become 'uncontrollable' in a given specific objective situation.
In the cultural sphere, again, the direction of development of the information revolution suggests that it tends to support a global process of synchronization rather than autonomous diversity. As the messages do not originate in a vacuum but from a well-defined political, economic and cultural position, the process of communication and its content acquire normative dimensions. The value-loaded messages tell how the world "is" and how it "ought" to be "civilized". Today the information revolution is selling dreams as if the new information technologies offer a magic wand, which can solve all the problems, that mankind is facing. The information revolution has also set in a process of synchronization at political, economic, social and cultural levels.
The major media are promoting, advertising, and exciting people with talk of an "information superhighway" The corporate owned media are doing their best to dazzle people with all the new consumer opportunities we'll have in an interactive 500 channel future which will enable us to shop from our bedrooms. You, on the other hand, are among a small group of scholars who scathingly criticize this portrait of things. Instead of a "global village" you foresee a global mall owned and controlled by corporations who are largely unaccountable to the nation-states in which they operate. Will you elaborate on this for us?
The entire gamut of communication has strong cultural component which somewhat got neglected while drawing our political strategy even after the information revolution. The “rejection” has strong cultural dimension. Schiller has been very consistence to include the cultural component in all his works on communication and information revolution. All along comes cultural studies and attacks the political economy approach as being too narrow and too exclusive. At least in the United States, the main current of cultural studies is to deny the legitimacy of the political economy of mass communication. It may not be intention, but it has served the dominant ideology. The dominant ideology does not want to see the underlying reality of the images and messages they are looking at. 'The act of the audience' puts people in a curious situation. It is vital to understand and recognize where the cultural power is. It is also vital to understand what from the resistance is acquiring.165
There are no situations, which are insurmountable, and alternative choices always exist. Capitalist globalization such as is being offered at this time of crisis, as a means of managing it, is not in itself a way of resolving the crisis. Conversely, neither does ‘rejection’ of globalization constitute an adequate response. ‘Rejections’, apparent only by the ways in which they are expressed—the turning back to ethnicity, and religious fundamentalism – become integrated into this brutal globalization and are made use of by it. Delinking is not to be found in these illusory and negative rejections but on the contrary by an active insertion capable of modifying the conditions of globalization.166
U.S. and U.K. media organizations provide and distribute much of the worlds new. The largest news services, the Associated Press and Reuters, cover news around the world from primarily western news centers. CNN is a 24/7 global news network available in more than 150 million households and 212 countries and territories worldwide and its part of the world's largest media conglomerate.167
"The media are about politics and commerce and ideas. This is a strange enough combination even when the media stay at home. But as an item of international trade the combination is even more unusual. When a government allows news importation, it is in effect importing a piece of another country's politics -- which is true of no other import. The media also set out to entertain and intrigue -- to make people laugh or cry they have an emotional appeal unlike other products. And because the media also deal in ideas, their influence can be unpredictable in time and strength. "168
The global media thrive on ignorance. It informs people of various countries / regions on a very selective basis. The Third World is bombarded with the images of “great western life style” and at the same time the public in the home constituency is not adequately informed on the subjects that have direct bearing on policy of the state in which they vote.
The American state of ignorance of the rest of the world has been extended since the end of the Cold War and the emergence of the USA as a self-satisfied and unchallenged superpower. A study of television coverage of foreign events on nightly national news programmes the main source of information for the public strikingly demonstrates this.
Yet the national ignorance cannot be accounted for solely by the trivialization and withholding of news. It has much deeper roots. The structural foundation of the media system, its unrestrained market-determined operations, financed exclusively by those who can afford to buy time and messages, assures a continuing cultural impoverishment of the audience. As the giant goods- and services-producing corporations account for the bulk of all the media's financial support, it is their messages, 40 billion dollars' worth annually in television alone, that create the all-embracing commercial atmosphere. The most of the news we consume is produced by profit-seeking businesses. This in real term amounts the negation of the ideal that “the purpose of news is to empower the public by maximizing its understanding of those current issues and events that most shape its environment.”169
As such, inadequate and trivialized news is only part of the public's information problem. Its saturation with commercial messages is another. Few have attempted to measure the impact on individuals of the incessant flow of commercials. Though this may seem curious, it can be explained, by the low priority of such research for those with the funds to finance it -- the companies that are actually making the advertising expenditures. This does not mean that the companies ignore the impact of advertising. The studies that they do support are, first of all, proprietary. They are privately owned and withheld from the public. The demand of business logic is to craft the newsroom and journalism to serve the market and to create an image of the world upon which they can act upon. The business logic also demands that reader or viewer is now a “consumer”; the news is a “product” and media is “profit making business”. 170
The creative director of one New York advertising agency explained: "No one's really worrying about what it's teaching impressionable youth. Hey, I'm in the business of convincing people to buy things they don't need" (Bartlett 1997). 171
Barrage of commercial imagery
This perverse condition provides another aspect of what it means to be living in the center of the global corporate system. No other people in the world are subject to as heavy a barrage of commercial imagery and messages as are Americans. In recent years, as the corporate marketing system grows increasingly global, other nations are experiencing rising advertising expenditures per capita -- and these are almost certain to accelerate. All the same, the USA, as the strongest force in, and the greatest proponent of, the marketing system, remains in a class by itself, in the production and dissemination of advertising commercials -- in all media and into all possible spaces, public and private. 172What precisely this means is difficult to specify, but to assume there is no effect on the people caught in the center of this commercial onslaught is to be willfully blind. At the very least, it suggests distraction, as in the aptly titled film Weapons of Mass Distraction, confusion, absorption with consumption, fragmented attention, out-of-alignment social priorities. One or all of the above.
The commercial pummeling of the American mind begins at a very early age -- generally coincidental with a youngster's capability of focusing on a moving image. Here again, studies by non-commercial researchers of the impact of incessant advertising on preschool and pre-teen children are either limited or non-existent. Yet the situation is so gross that Business Week, a publication not known for its hostility to the market economy, was prompted to publish a cover story, "Hey Kid, Buy This", and to ask rhetorically, "Is Madison Avenue taking 'Get 'em while they're young' too far?"173
In the Iraqi wars, there was a tension between the pre-existing national and emergent global civil society roles of media. Many media outlets, especially newspapers but also to a large extent mainstream television, fell back primarily on national definitions of the conflicts - echoing older experiences of national wars. This was the case even though the involvement of the armed forces was not primarily in a national role. Thus British media, for example, interpreted the Gulf as a national war, even though the UK was a secondary member of multi-national coalition acting under the auspices of the UN and leadership of the US.174
The global commercial media are integral to this depoliticization process. Without any necessary forethought and by merely pursuing market dictates, the global commercial media are superior at serving up a depoliticized populace that privileges personal consumption over social understanding and activity, a mass more likely to take orders and less likely to make waves. Hence the global commercial media provide a serious journalism aimed at the elite and the upper middle classes and shaped to its need and prejudices, and tabloid news for the balance of the population. The clear focus of the media system is to provide its broadest audience with light escapist entertainment.175
Moreover, major economists like Joseph Stiglitz (2002), as well as anti-corporate globalization protestors and critics, argued that the developing countries were not developing under current corporate globalization policies and that division between the rich and poor nations was growing. Under these conditions, critics of globalization were calling for radically new policies that would help the developing countries, regulate the rich, and provide more power to working people and local groups.176
But not only the anti-corporate globalization movement emerged as a form of globalization from below, but also Al Qaeda and various global terror networks intensified their attacks and helped generate an era of Terror War . This made it difficult simply to affirm globalization from below while denigrating globalization from above, as clearly terrorism was an emergent and dangerous form of globalization from below that was attacking hegemonic global forces and institutions. Moreover, in the face of Bush administration unilateralism and militarism, multilateral approaches to the problems of terrorism called for global responses to the problem. The terror attacks of September 11, 2001 and subsequent Terror War as exemplifying the contradictions and ambiguities of globalization today and conclude with reflections on the proper global response to terrorism.177
The terrorist acts on the United States on September 11 and subsequent Terror War dramatically disclose the downsides of globalization, the ways that global flows of technology, goods, information, ideologies, and people can have destructive as well as productive effects. The disclosure of powerful anti-Western terrorist networks shows that globalization divides the world as it unifies, that it produces enemies as it incorporates participants. Globalization links people together and brings new commonalties into experience just as it differentiates them and produces new inequalities. Likewise, while it connects and brings into global networks parts of the world that were isolated and cut-off, it ignores and bypasses other regions. The events disclose explosive contradictions and conflicts at the heart of globalization and that the technologies of information, communication, and transportation that facilitate globalization can also be used to undermine and attack it, and generate instruments of destruction as well as production.178
Ambiguity of globalization
The experience of September 11 points to the objective ambiguity of globalization, that positive and negative sides are interconnected, that the institutions of the open society unlock the possibilities of destruction and violence, as well as democracy, free trade, and cultural and social exchange. Once again, the interconnection and interdependency of the networked world was dramatically demonstrated as terrorists from the Middle East brought local grievances from their region to attack key symbols of American power and the very infrastructure of New York. Some saw terrorism as an expression of "the dark side of globalization," while I would conceive it as part of the ambiguity and contradictions of globalization that simultaneously creates friends and enemies, wealth and poverty, and growing divisions between the "haves" and "have nots." Yet, the downturning of the global economy, intensification of local and global political conflicts, repression of human rights and civil liberties, and general increase in fear and anxiety have certainly undermined the naïve optimism of globophiles who perceived globalization as a purely positive instrument of progress and well-being.179
The use of powerful technologies as weapons of destruction also discloses current asymmetries of power and emergent forms of terrorism and war, as the new millennium exploded into dangerous conflicts and interventions. As technologies of mass destruction become more available and dispersed, perilous instabilities have emerged that have elicited policing measures to stem the flow of movements of people and goods across borders and internally.180
The processes of globalization are highly turbulent and have generated new conflicts throughout the world. Benjamin Barber (1998) describes the strife between McWorld and Jihad, contrasting the homogenizing, commercialized, americanized tendencies of the global economy and culture with traditional cultures, which are often resistant to globalization. Thomas Friedman (1999) makes a more benign distinction between what he calls the "Lexus" and the "Olive Tree." The former is a symbol of modernization, of affluence and luxury, and of Westernized consumption, contrasted with the Olive Tree that is a symbol of roots, tradition, place, and stable community. Barber (1997), however, is too negative toward McWorld and Jihad, failing to adequately describe the democratic and progressive forces within both. Although Barber recognizes dialectic of McWorld and Jihad, he opposes both to democracy, failing to perceive how both generate their own democratic forces and tendencies, as well as opposing and undermining democratization. Within the Western democracies, for instance, there is not just top-down homogenization and corporate domination, but also globalization-from-below and oppositional social movements that desire alternatives to capitalist globalization. Thus, it is not only traditionalist, non-Western forces of Jihad that oppose McWorld. Likewise, Jihad has its democratizing forces as well as the reactionary Islamic fundamentalists who are now the most demonized elements of the contemporary era. Jihad, like McWorld, has its contradictions and its potential for democratization, as well as elements of domination and destruction.181
Friedman, by contrast, is too uncritical of globalization, caught up in his own Lexus high-consumption life-style, failing to perceive the depth of the oppressive features of globalization and breadth and extent of resistance and opposition to it. In particular, he fails to articulate contradictions between capitalism and democracy and the ways that globalization and its economic logic undermines democracy as well as circulates it. Likewise, he does not grasp the virulence of the premodern and Jihadist tendencies that he blithely identifies with the Olive tree and the reasons why globalization and the West are so strongly resisted in many parts of the world.182
Grasping that globalization embodies these contradictory tendencies at once, that it can be both a force of homogenization and heterogeneity, is crucial to articulating the contradictions of globalization and avoiding one-sided and reductive conceptions.183
The Al Qaeda terror network used the Internet, as it used globalization, to move its communication, money, people, propaganda, and terror. Curiously, then, 9/11 dramatizes that all of the most positive aspects of globalization and new technology can be turned against the U.S., or, in general, positive aspects of globalization can turn into their opposite.184
The new communication technologies make possible the spreading of hate and terror, as well as knowledge and culture. The warring camps in the new global order are using the new opportunities offered by the new technologies and the consequences are hard to be predicted. Computers can be an integral part of a terror network just as they are part of businesses everywhere and many of our own everyday lives.185
The September 11 events exposed the dangers and weaknesses inherent in constructions of Fortress America, and the untenability of isolationism and unilateralist policies. They made evident that we are in a local/global world with local/global problems, which require local/global solutions.186 The global media that had emerged in the wake of neoliberal globalization and information revolution is dominated by the Western agencies, which are colonial in their nature; the image of the world, which they offer, is unbalanced by reason of their structure, history and professional intention, even though they are wedded in theory of doctrines of impartiality and accuracy. The media for their part argue that they provide reliable an comprehensive services to clients who are highly diverse in political, cultural and economic background; the assert that the accusations mad against them tend to be put not really to create a better balance but simply to diver attention from illiberal an obscurantist domestic press policies in the complaining countries.187
Information becomes a source of power only if the necessary infrastructure for its production, processing, storing, retrieval and transportation is accessible. Assuming that even people are informed even to limited extent about the exploitative nature of the governance, yet they did not act, and their information did not become a source of power, because they lacked material and strategic means to transform their dissent into a political and social stream powerful enough to change the course of the developments.
Footnotes
1. Sea’n MacBride, in the Forward of “The Myth of the Information Revolution”, Sage Publications, 1986, p. vii.
2. Cees J. Hamelink, Is there Life After Information revolution? Chapter-I of “The Myth of the Information Revolution”, Sage Publications, 1986, p.9.
3.Hamid Mowlana, International communications research in the 21st century: From functionalism to postmodernism and beyond, 1994, p. 360 &Cees J. Hamelink & Olga Linne (Eds.), Mass communication research: On problems and policies and The art of asking the right questions: In honor of James D. Halloran, Ablex Publishing Corporation Norwood, New Jersey pp. 351-369.
4.Ted Magder, New Technologies and Democratic Communications, Canadian Journal of Communication, Volume 17, Number 4, 1992.
5. Alan L. Porter and William H. read, The Information Revolution: Current and Future Consequences, Ablex Publishing Corporation, London, 1998, pp. 184,185.
6. Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave, William Morrow, New York, 1980.
7. Cees J. Hamelink, Is there Life After Information revolution? Chapter-I of “The Myth of the Information Revolution”, Sage Publications, 1986, p.9.
8. L.John Martin and Ray Eldon Hiebert, Current Issues in International Communication, Longman, 1990. pp.5, 6.
9.A.N. Vlosova, The Role of Information in Public Opinion Formation, Mass Media and Public Opinion, Report of fifth Soviet-Finnish seminar, University of Tampere, 1988, pp. 118,119.
10. Enrique Gonzalez-Manet, The Hidden War of Information, Ablex Publishing Corporation Norwood, New Jersey, pp. 111,112,113.
11. Robert W. McChesney, Global Media, Neoliberalism, and Imperialism, Monthly Review, March 2001.
12. Robert W. McChesney, The Political Economy of Global Communication, Capitalism and the Information Age: The Political Economy of the Global Communication revolution, Monthly Review Press, New York, 1998, p.7
13. Schiller, Herbert I. Who Knows: Information in the Age of the Fortune 500, Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing, 1981.pp. 149-151.
14. Mark Hudson, Understanding Information Media in the Age of Neoliberalism: The Contributions of Herbert Schiller, Monthly Review, Fall 1999
15.Herbert I. Schiller in the Foreword of Cees J. Hamelink, Cultural Autonomy in Global Communication, Longman, 1983,p. ix
16 Ibid, p. x
17. W. Lance Bennett, News: The Politics of Illusion, Addison Wesley Longman, New York, 2001, p.5, 37, 36
18. William F. Fore, The Church and Communication in the Technological Era, Christian Century, www.christiancentury.org. , September 24, 1986.
19. William F. Fore, The Church and Communication in the Technological Era, Christian Century, www.christiancentury.org. , September 24, 1986.
20. Peter Golding, Global Village or Cultural Pillage? The Unequal Inheritance of the Communication Revolution, Capitalism and Information Age, Monthly review Press, New York, 1998, p.81.
21. Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, Basic Books, New York, 1973.
22. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History? The National Interest, Summer 1989.
22. Frank Webster, Theories of the Information Society, Routledge, London/New York, 1995.
23. Herbert I. Schiller, Fighting for communication control, Le Monde diplomatique, September 1997
24. Joseph S. Nye, Edited transcript of the discussion held on Nye’s book “, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics” at Carnegie Council, April 13, 2004
25. William F. Fore, The Church and Communication in the Technological Era, Christian Century, www.christiancentury.org. , September 24, 1986.
26. Ibid
27. Edward S. Herman and Robert W. McChesney, The Global Media: The New Missionaries of Corporate Capitalism, Madhyam Books, Delhi, 1998, p.136.
28. Claire Riley, Review of Herbert I. Schiller's The Corporate Takeover of Public Expression, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, Book Review, and July-August 1990.
29. Claire Riley, Review of Herbert I. Schiller's The Corporate Takeover of Public Expression, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, Book Review, and July-August 1990.
30. Claire Riley, Review of Herbert I. Schiller's The Corporate Takeover of Public Expression, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, Book Review, and July-August 1990.
31. Ted Magder, New Technologies and Democratic Communications, Canadian Journal of Communication, Volume 17, Number 4, 1992
32. Robert O. Keobane and Joseph S. Nye Jr., “Power and Interdependence in the Information Age” published in the Foreign Affairs, September/October 1998.
33. Internet World Stats, Internet Usage Statistics, cpaws.org, March 31, 2005.
34. Michel Dawson and John Bellamy Foster, Virtual Capitalism: Monopoly Capital, Marketing and the Information Highway, Capitalism and Information Age, Monthly review Press, New York, 1998, p.66.
35. Heather Menzies, Challenging Capitalism in Cyberspace, Capitalism and Information Age, Monthly review Press, New York, 1998, p.90.
36. Richard Solomon and Sheryl J. Brown, Director, Virtual Diplomacy Initiative, United States Institute of Peace, Delivered to the Conference on Crisis Management and Information Technology, Helsinki, Finland, September 12, 2003
37. William F. Fore, The Church and Communication in the Technological Era, Christian Century, www.christiancentury.org. , September 24, 1986.
38. William F. Fore, The Church and Communication in the Technological Era, Christian Century, www.christiancentury.org. , September 24, 1986.
39.Justin Lewis, Sut Jhally and Michael Morgan, The Gulf War: Study of Media, Public Opinion and Public Knowledge, The Center for the Study of Communication, Department of Communication, University of Massachusetts/Amherst, February 1991
40. Donna A. Demac, Keeping America uninformed: Government Secrecy in the 1980s, Pilgrim Press, New York, 1984 and Henry Porter, Lies , Damned Lies, Fleet St. Exposed, Chatto, London, 1984 quoted by Michael Traber in the Myth of Information, Sage, London, 1986, pp. 1,2.
41. Michael W. Apple, Selling Our Children: Channel One and Politics of Education, Capitalism and Information Age, Monthly review Press, New York, 1998, p.137.
42. Daya Kishan Thussu, International Communication: Continuity and Change, Arnold, 2000, p.55, 43.
43. Anthony Smith, The Geopolitics of Information: how Western Culture Dominates the World, Faber & Faber, London and Boston, 1980, p. 15
44. Christopher Brown-Syed, The New World Order and the Geopolitics of Information Libres: Library and Information Science Research, January 19, 1993.
45. Cees J. Hamelink, Cultural Autonomy in Global Communications, Longman, 1983, p. 89.
46. Hamid Mowlana, International communications research in the 21st century: From functionalism to postmodernism and beyond, 1994, p. 354
James D. Halloran, The art of asking the right questions, Ablex Publishing Corporation Norwood, New Jersey, pp. 351-369.
47. Cees J. Hamelink, Cultural Autonomy in Global Communications, Longman, 1983, pp. 101, 102.
48.Robert W. McChesney, The Political Economy of Global Communication, Capitalism and the Information Age: The Political Economy of the Global Communication revolution, Monthly Review Press, New York, 1998, p.12.
49.Robert W. McChesney, The Political Economy of Global Communication, Capitalism and the Information Age: The Political Economy of the Global Communication revolution, Monthly Review Press, New York, 1998, p.3, 4.
50. Anthony Smith, The Geopolitics of Information: How Western Culture Dominates the World, Faber& Faber, London and Boston, 1980, p. 13.
51. Anthony Smith, The Geopolitics of Information: How Western Culture Dominates the World, Faber& Faber, London and Boston, 1980, p.110.
52. Anthony Smith, The Geopolitics of Information: How Western Culture Dominates the World, Faber& Faber, London and Boston, 1980, p. 15.
53. Anthony Smith, The Geopolitics of Information: How Western Culture Dominates the World, Faber& Faber, London and Boston, 1980, pp.155, 175, 161.
54. Anthony Smith, The Geopolitics of Information: How Western Culture Dominates the World, Faber& Faber, London and Boston, 1980, p. 110.
55. Anthony Smith, The Geopolitics of Information: How Western Culture Dominates the World, Faber& Faber, London and Boston, 1980, p. 110.
56. Anthony Smith, The Geopolitics of Information: How Western Culture Dominates the World, Faber& Faber, London and Boston, 1980, p. 110.
57. L. John Martin and Ray Eldon Hiebert, Current Issues in International Communication, Longman, 1990. p.5.
58. Ibid, p. 5.
59.Thomas M. Nichols, Conflict and Order in the New Age of Preventive War, Edited transcript of remarks, Carnegie Council Young Associates Program, February 3, 2005.
60. Christopher Brown-Syed, The New World Order and the Geopolitics of Information LIBRES: Library and Information Science Research, January 19, 1993.
61. Enrique Gonzalez-Manet, The Hidden War of Information, Ablex Publishing Corporation Norwood, New Jersey, p.67.
62. Anthony Smith, The Geopolitics of Information: how Western Culture Dominates the World, Faber & Faber, London and Boston, 1980, pp. 85, 86.
63. Christopher Brown-Syed, The New World Order and the Geopolitics of Information, LIBRES: Library and Information Science Research, January 19, 1993.
64. Christopher Brown-Syed, The New World Order and the Geopolitics of Information, LIBRES: Library and Information Science Research, January 19, 1993.
65. Christopher Brown-Syed, The New World Order and the Geopolitics of Information LIBRES: Library and Information Science Research, January 19, 1993.
66. Christopher Brown-Syed, The New World Order and the Geopolitics of Information LIBRES: Library and Information Science Research, January 19, 1993.
67. Christopher Brown-Syed, The New World Order and the Geopolitics of Information LIBRES: Library and Information Science Research, January 19, 1993.
68. Christopher Brown-Syed, The New World Order and the Geopolitics of Information LIBRES: Library and Information Science Research, January 19, 1993.
69. Anthony Smith, The Geopolitics of Information: how Western Culture Dominates the World, Faber & Faber, London and Boston, 1980, P. 1371.Anthony Smith, The Geopolitics of Information: how Western Culture Dominates the World, Faber & Faber, London and Boston, 1980, pp. 66, 67
70. Ibid
71. Michael Traber, The Myth of Information Revolution, Sage, London, 1986, pp. 3, 4.
72. Many Voices, One World, UNESCO, The MacBride Report 1980
73. Howard C. Anawalt, Is the McBride Commission’s Approach Compatible with the United States Constitution? Journal of Communication, Autumn 1981
74. Howard C. Anawalt, Is the McBride Commission’s Approach Compatible with the United States Constitution? Journal of Communication, Autumn 1981
75. William F. Fore, A New World Order in Communication, the Christian Century, www.christiancentury.org, April 14, 1982
76. ibid
77. L. John Martin and Ray Eldon Hiebert, Current Issues in International Communication, Longman, 1990. p.33.
78. Christopher Brown-Syed, The New World Order and the Geopolitics of Information LIBRES: Library and Information Science Research, January 19, 1993.
79. Christopher Brown-Syed, The New World Order and the Geopolitics of Information LIBRES: Library and Information Science Research, January 19, 1993.
80. Dorothy I. Riddle (ed.) Information Economy and Development, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Bonn, 1998, p.31.
81. Cees J. Hamelink, Is there life after the information revolution? The Myth of Information Revolution, Sage, London, 1986, p.13.
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108. W. Lance Bennett, News: The Politics of Illusion, Addison Wesley Longman, Mew York, 2001, p.38.
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118. W. Lance Bennett quoted by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media, Pantheon Books, New York, 1988, p.303.
119. Herbert I. Schiller, Fighting for communication control, Le Monde diplomatique, September 1997
120.Enrique Gonzalez-Manet, The Hidden War of Information, Ablex Publishing Corporation Norwood, New jersey, 1988, p.64, 65.
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122. Robert McChesney, The Global Media Giants, Monthly Review, November/December 1997.
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124.Robert W. McChesney, The Political Economy of Global Communication, Capitalism and the Information Age: The Political Economy of the Global Communication revolution, Monthly Review Press, New York, 1998, p.1,2
125. Richard K. Moore, Absolute Power -- The Making of the New World Order, Toward Freedom, May 1998
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129. Robert W. McChesney, Global Media, Neoliberalism, and Imperialism, Monthly Review, March 2001.
130. Douglas Kellner, Globalization, Terrorism, and Democracy: 9/11 and its Aftermath, http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/papers/,2003.
131. Robert McChesney, The Global Media Giants, Monthly Review, November/December 1997
132. Robert McChesney, The Global Media Giants, Monthly Review, November/December 1997.
134. ibid
135. Ibid
136. Robert W. McChesney, Global Media, Neoliberalism, and Imperialism, Monthly Review, March 2001.
137. Robert W. McChesney, Global Media, Neoliberalism, and Imperialism, Monthly Review, March 2001.
138. Robert W. McChesney, Global Media, Neoliberalism, and Imperialism, Monthly Review, March 2001.
149. Robert W. McChesney, Global Media, Neoliberalism, and Imperialism, Monthly Review, March 2001.
140. Robert W. McChesney, Global Media, Neoliberalism, and Imperialism, Monthly Review, March 2001.
141. Ibid
142. Schiller, Herbert I., Information Inequality: The Deepening Social Crisis in America, New York: Routledge, 1996. Page 61.
143.By 1986, before a lot of the huge media mergers of the nineties, the twenty-nine largest media systems accounted for over half of the United State's media output.) "(Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, p.303
144. Robert W. McChesney, Global Media, Neoliberalism, and Imperialism, Monthly Review, March 2001.
145. Schiller, Herbert I. 1989. Culture, Inc.: The Corporate Takeover of Public Expression, New York: Oxford University Press, pp.30-33, 40, 75.
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147. Andrew Horvat, The Media in a Globalized Age– why the Global Village is more village than global, Remarks delivered in Sapporo Conference, Japan, Japan representative, The Asia Foundation, August 28, 2002.
148. Andrew Horvat, The Media in a Globalized Age– why the Global Village is more village than global, Remarks delivered in Sapporo Conference, Japan, Japan representative, The Asia Foundation, August 28, 2002
149. Andrew Horvat, The Media in a Globalized Age– why the Global Village is more village than global, Remarks delivered in Sapporo Conference, The Asia Foundation, August 28, 2002
150. Robert W. McChesney, Global Media, Neoliberalism, and Imperialism, Monthly Review, March 2001.
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