Study Material
International Communication
Areas of study:
Nature of flow of global news and information
Cold war and post cold war world order
Post 9/11 world order
Global media coverage and images of world
Cultural colonialism and emergence of religious extremism
Since the first systems of mass media and telecommunications emerged, their control and structure have been political issues. It has been well understood that the control over the means of communication is an integral aspect of political and economic power. Perhaps the most striking feature of our current age is the increase in prominence -- for economics, politics, and culture -- of technologically advanced systems of communication and information that are often global in scope.
In conventional parlance, the current era in history is generally characterized as one of globalization and technological revolution. The process of globalisation, technology and automation are key components of new economic system and new industrial enterprise. In these areas media and communication play a central, perhaps even a defining, role. Economic and cultural globalization arguably would be impossible without a global media system that promote global markets and to encourage consumer values.
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 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.
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.
Never before in history has so much been communicated so rapidly to so many people. We have entered the age of the global flow of information and entertainment as a result of the technological innovation that followed World War II. The results may yet prove to be the most revolutionary experience that has ever happened to the human race. The end results could well be sweeping changes in politics, in cultures, in national systems, and in international relationships.
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.
In the information society (also terms has been used as post-industrial society, post-ideological 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.
The emergence of unipolar world dominated by the United States to a large extent controlled the global flow of information and news and thus acquired a dominant position in the politics of images. The United States in new order is no not only hub of information revolution but also headquarters of global news and information flow. The age of the global flow of information and entertainment as a result of the technological innovations that followed World War II is deeply rooted in the Unites States.
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’.
Once the process of decolonization was completed, in the 1960s and 1970s the cause of development proved a failure while the process of cultural dependence intensified the receiving nations this losing out in both fields. 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.
NWICO & Balance versus Free Flow
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 colonialism and neo colonialism. 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. 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 freedom of operations of the global media corporations.
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 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 basic premise of the movement for a New World Information and Communications Order (NWICO), was that an imbalance existed in the direction, volume, and types of information exchanged between adequately developed countries and the Third World, which was detrimental to development and systemic in nature. Of equal importance with, and logically prior to this conception, is the ethical notion that information should be viewed a shared resource or as a social good rather than as a commodity.
On the other hand, governmental dominance of news and information too often has been the handmaiden of dictatorships, oligopolies and generally repressive regimes in the Third World. 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.
The major documents of the NWICO include the Unesco Media Declaration of 1978, Unesco's Statement on Journalistic Ethics, and the report of the International Commission for the Study of Communications Problems (MacBride Commission), published in 1980. NWICO premises included the assertion that information is necessary to economic development, and that any attempt to establish a New International Economic Order (NIEO) must incorporate, or even depend upon, reform in the world communications system.
In the wake of McBride 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 big corporations that had most to gain. 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.
Concepts of Selection of News and Images of World
In regard to news content, news everywhere appears to be defined as the "exceptional event," with coups and catastrophes being newsworthy wherever they occur. 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.
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.
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 which results into generation of distorted and fragmented images of the world- people, places and cultures. The fragmentation of information begins by emphasizing individual actors over the political contexts in which they operate. This every event is an isolated happening.
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.
The images of nations are primarily created by means of the news. News contributed to processes of the construction of national identities. It is the news media that present the world outside the domain of direct experience of people. Those who are in control of media also are in control of the process of image formation. That is how the North comes to know the South and the interests that control news are also in control of the images. 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.
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.
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. 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. Issues, personalities, and events appear before the public, only to vanish behind a bewildering glitter of new sensations, disasters, and miseries.
The most contentious area of current debate on international communication has been the role of the Western news agencies as the dominant creators and gatekeepers of news flows. It is widely known that almost over 90 percent of global flow of 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.
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
The TV images of the Gulf War
Some important insights into television's biases and cultural power emerge:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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 thousands of Iraqi soldiers who were fried and pulverized by hundreds of thousands of tons of bombs, or the millions civilians experiencing nightly bombing raids and days with no water, food, electricity or sanitation-were virtually invisible.
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.”
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. 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?
Cultural domination and the backlash
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.
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 flow of information form North to South has intensified and world is witnessing a new scenario in which small and weak cultures are finding if difficulty of ward off the information and cultural onslaught. This is one of the key reasons for emergence of negative resistance of new world order and terrorism also drawing a lot of strength from this situation.
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.
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. Ayatollah Khomeini used the word in Farsi that has been translates as "West toxification," literally like being poisoned by the West.
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.
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 the 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. 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
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.
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 Western n consumer society.
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."
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. But for some 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.
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.
In the United State one study has reveled that more television people watch less they know. 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.
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.
Some key concepts:
Cultural colonialism and information imperialism
Imperialism and Colonialism
Decolonization
Neo-colonialism
Internal colonialism
Liberalism
Neo-liberalism
Neo conservative
Cold war
New World Economic Order
New World Communication and Information Order
Capitalism (free market economy)
Socialism (controlled economy)
Capitalist democracy
Liberal democracy
Socialist democracy
Social democracy
End of history/ end of ideology
Clash of civilizations
Information society, post industrial society, post ideological society
Globalization
Political, economic and cultural synchronization
Corporate Globalisation
Post Cold War World Order
Post 9/ 11 World Order
Westernization, Americanization and Modernisation
CNN Effect
Embedded journalism
Subhash Dhuliya
Professor (Communication)
IGNOU
sdhuliya@gmail.com
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