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The Communications Paradox - Globalization - Global Policy Forum The Communications Paradox
By Hamid Mowlana
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
July 1995"Go tell it on the mountain." As the popular spiritual advised, it used to be that if you had a message to get across, you only had to go to the nearest mountain and shout it to the masses. The same is true today--only now an antenna likely perches atop the mountain, and the speaker probably needs a microphone, a video camera, and a corporate sponsor. The consequences of the change from personal to electronic communication are far greater than the simple act of amplifying the speaker's message. In March, with an illuminated map of the world as his background, Billy Graham, the American evangelist, preached to more than one billion people in 185 countries--about one-fifth of the planet's population. Did Rev. Graham's electronic pulpit represent the future of globalization?
Earlier that month, Hollywood's Academy Awards ceremony, for years a symbol of the American cultural and entertainment crusade, was beamed around the world to another (perhaps overlapping) worldwide audience of a billion people. Was this broadcast, hosted by America's midnight storyteller David Letterman, the future of globalization? More and more, it seems that electronic extravaganzas such as Billy Graham's sermon or the Academy Awards--that intricate nexus of American culture, capitalism, and marketing--represent the sole promise of globalization. Globalization is but another word for the impending triumph of American culture: entertainment, fashion, and the American way of life, all combined in one package. It seems that soon globalization will be complete, and Mc-Donald's will be able to send its commercials to every man, woman, and consumer, anywhere in the world, any time of day.
But globalization is more than the worldwide marketing battles of Coca Cola and Pepsi, more than the promotion of Hollywood religion and--well--Hollywood itself. Two decades ago, another man in another culture, with new communications technologies and a totally different message in mind, not only revolutionized his country but also signaled the return of an old tradition. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the spiritual leader of Islamic Iran, then residing in suburban Paris, combined his access to networks of mosques and bazaars with that of electronic communication and cassette tapes in his successful long-distance overthrow of a secular, Western-oriented monarchy. Indeed, the Iranian revolution--and later, the downfall of the Soviet Union by similar means--not only ushered in some of the most profound and wide-ranging developments of twentiethcentury international politics, but also the dawn of a new era in global communications.
Symbolized by the contrast between the centralized media blitzes of Billy Graham and the Academy Awards, and the grassroots revolutions that uprooted Iran and the Soviet Union, modern communication is developing along two fronts, each creating its own parallel and yet contradictory phenomena. On the one hand, there is the promise of the globalization of personal communications, with its potential to empower individuals far beyond the wildest dreams of the speakers who shouted their messages from mountaintops. On the other hand, there is the reality of globalization: continuing centralization of mass communications, with a few players (often international corporations) controlling the chokepoints, leaving the overwhelming majority of the world's people increasingly marginalized on the periphery.
A completely new global information infrastructure has emerged, with the United States, Europe, and a few industrialized countries at its helm. Nations that were rich when the process of globalization began have been able to leverage their advantages into new realms. This is especially disturbing because dominance in "global" products implies not just the ability to ship products around the world, but dominance in cultural exports. This dominance provides the potential to displace indigenous culture with a tide of largely Western, largely consumerist, global conformity. Perhaps globalization is just a nice word that multinational corporations use to hide their efforts to infect the entire world with the cultural virus of commercialism.
The world is being engulfed in a tide of American culture-inspired secularism. And yet, just when the virus seemingly has become ascendant, a ray of hope emerges. Disenchanted and disenfranchised people everywhere are discovering that they have alternatives. In some cases, people are revolting against global uniformity and establishing their own niches within the new information infrastructure. The costs of communication technology are (finally) falling enough to allow peripheral groups to gain an ever-so-small ability for individual empowerment. From these tiny acorns perhaps can grow a mighty oak--a world in which all people have the means to participate in a dialogue across the globe, rather than just getting the viewpoint of the globe's strongest beamed directly to them.
In short, the information infrastructure, which during the past century has helped to accelerate the process of modernization and was the hallmark of the Western way of life, is now undermining the very nature of modernity itself. Secularism, the lifeblood of modern national and international systems, is both ascendant and under attack. Perhaps it can be deconstructed into something better--not the sole viewpoint, but one of many viewpoints in a great global dialogue. But communications technology is not value-free.
Whose Globalization?
The term "globalization" has become a common buzzword in both academic and professional circles. The word has assumed expansive and fuzzy connotations that paper over a host of significant issues. How does it function? Who or what controls globalization and for what purpose? Is the process of globalization now under way producing qualitative changes in traditional forms of communication and will it lead eventually to the transformation of social structures? What are the new ethics of such structures?
Take, for example, the innovations of advanced communications technology. Who has ownership of such technology? Who has access to it? How is information technology used? What structures of social existence have to be modified or even eliminated in order to accommodate the use of these technologies? Will globalization mean more of the same communications, electronically reproduced over and over again, or will it truly lead to more variety and choice in the global context? If groups of human beings are far from being globalized, then what are the true indicators of globalization? How do we balance wants versus needs, public versus private communication systems, centralized versus decentralized infrastructures, and individual versus public knowledge? What information is privileged? How do we establish community, national, and international priorities? And how do we choose which of these questions to answer first?
Before we can think of answering even a few of these questions (which really boil down to: What is the future of interactions among the members of the human race?), we need to examine how we got to the current system. Initially, the theory of communications and development was easy to grasp. The dominant perspective that characterized the early stages of technological development supported humanistic values of universalism--the ability for all people to communicate, both receiving and distributing their messages. Norms such as the right to communicate and freedom of speech were embodiments of human rights declarations. The advantage of these developments, which seemed to empower the disenfranchised to participate in the intellectual commerce of the world, was unquestioned.
Even the growth of technology seemed to fit into this dominant paradigm. Indeed, some of the most significant inventions of the era were designed to allow widely separated people to communicate. It was more than the Pony Express undergoing the slow evolution to Federal Express, for the history of communications is marked by the growth of qualitatively different means of communication. Local mail service gave way to universal mail service at the same time that the postal service was supplemented by the growth of telegraphs, telephones, telecommunications, and fax machines. Television didn't just offer the ability to simultaneously broadcast a program to many viewers; it also allowed one to simultaneously affect the emotions and viewpoints of millions of people. Broadcasting a television program provides an unparalleled ability to manipulate the collective human psyche.
If the ability of the individual to reach around the world grew by small steps, the ability of dominant providers to reach around the world grew by leaps and bounds. To be certain, the individual gained an ability to reach beyond the local community by using a fax machine, but this did not constitute globalization. The opportunities of the individual to communicate with others have perhaps increased a hundredfold--if he or she lives in a country rich enough to afford a communications structure, and is rich enough to take advantage of it. But the ability of the truly elite to affect the world has been multiplied a millionfold. Few are wealthy enough to go head-to-head with Ted Turner's Cable News Net-work (CNN).
In short, "global" is not "universal," and "global communication" does not mean "universal communication." Although the distribution of information has become global, the distributors are few. While we are verging on global reception, we are still not anywhere near the ideal of global communication.
More frightening is that the trend toward communications oligarchy is growing. Consolidation and merger is the name of the game in the industry. In the United States, cable and telephone companies race to form joint ventures that will deliver the "information highway" to America's, and later the world's, consumers. Japanese hardware companies like Sony seek to vertically integrate consumer electronics and media content under a single corporate owner. In the United States, the Rupert Murdoch-led News Corporation and MCI Communications have formed a "grand marriage" between their respective houses, seeking to provide "new media services on a global scale" like no other company. These giant corporations talk about exploiting the "synergies" of combining disparate businesses and how they will be able to span the globe with one efficient communications web. But these corporations, while global in origin, are anything but universal in their centralized control of the world's information.
That is not to say there is no resistance to such centralization of information resources. The increasing monopolization and corporatization of information is being fought--by other giant corporations. Some firms, for example, gradually are leaving the telephone companies and building their own privately based global data and voice networks. General Motors, IBM, and GE, for example, all have their own private data systems, operating independently of traditional common carriers. Such "competition" may be of interest to the world's people in their capacities as corporate shareholders, but it is of little value to them in their roles as participants and global communicants.
Essentially, the promise of the globalization of information--that more and more people will be able to participate in global communications--has been replaced with this reality: Fewer and fewer firms can now effectively span the globe. For most people, the only impact of globalization is that they have been universally empowered to act as receivers for the broadcasts of a privileged few.
Information Control
Because the control over the means of international communication is expensive and subject to economies of scale, there is little room for smaller countries to inject themselves into the increasing global communications markets. Today, the world's seven richest nations--the United States, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan--control not only the bulk of the world's wealth, but also the bulk of its future. But even within these rich countries there is concentration of wealth, and smaller countries such as France and Canada fear that their own cultures will be overtaken by the American cult of commercialism. In the global society, those who hold mastery of information and ready capital, rather than military might, dictate the course of the world.
For more than three decades now, the flexibility and power of transnational communications corporations has silently grown until they challenge the power of many nations. Indeed, many decisions affecting the global economy now occur largely outside the local and national political systems. In terms of real world control, if access to transnational sustained networks--such as telecommunications, computer networks, airline reservation systems, or world health and weather information--were cut off, no developed nation could survive for more than a few days.
In the new global environment, even such fundamental governmental roles as control over a nation's economic destiny are no longer completely within government hands. Simultaneously linked through telecommunications and data transmission, Tokyo, New York, Frankfurt, and London can marshal capital and lay siege to national economies at the touch of a figurative computer button. When the world's currency traders can trade billions of dollars daily, the power of governments to withstand their will is muted. When the world's 17 largest banks, led by the U.S. Federal Reserve, tried earlier this year to prop up the falling dollar, they could come up with only $ 5 billion in support. And before that, it took a month of government negotiations and a presidential order for the United States and Canada to come up with $ 20 billion in credits to reverse the collapse of the Mexican peso and save what was left of that country's economic power. In a globalized currency market, however, such sums are paltry; currency traders can move a hundred times as much with ease.
As shown by this example, while globalization is primarily about communications among people (and businesses), it contains much broader implications. It is not just communications that have been globalized, but also capital, labor markets, even culture. In the United States, for example, the telecommunications and related information industries have an impact far beyond their $ 600 billion contribution to the U.S. economy. The economic importance of the telecommunications sectors of the industrialized countries lies not merely in quantitative overall economic output, but in the technical properties of telecommunication, in its rapid development and proliferation, and in its implementation. Bill Gates, the CEO of Microsoft and perhaps the country's richest man, decides that the world needs a new version of Windows, and millions of people must either re-learn how to use their computers, or face the loss of their livelihood.
Globalization has been hailed as the harbinger of a new world order. But while globalization has ever more firmly shifted power to the richest corporations in the wealthiest states, is has not, ironically, translated into increased power for the governments of those states. The implications of this shift of power are potentially profound.
I believe we have entered a period of challenging and chaotic digital transformation. The result will be a redefinition of international politics in terms of communication and cultural activities. The unpredictability of international events and the insecurity of the major powers, who are no longer necessarily masters of their own fates, are included in this unsettling reality, as are the erosion of the legitimacy of the nation-state system and the increasing demands for change from smaller nations and groups. It is neither an "end of ideology" as American sociologist Daniel Bell predicted some years ago, nor the "end of history" that one conservative commentator, Francis Fukuyama, recently opined. Simply put, history clearly is open; quests for new ideologies and a new world order have begun.
What is happening is simple. Over the past decade, a new global information and communication order has been in the making. The emerging order is fundamentally different from the one demanded 20 years ago by the group of non-aligned nations known as the Third World. That now-forgotten demand was known then as the New World Information and Communication Order. The Third World also demanded at that time a new international economic order. What is emerging now is the new order of the advanced industrialized nations, which has evolved as a result of a number of economic, political, and technological developments that limited and blocked the original demands put forward by the less-in-dustrialized world in the 1970s. These demands included the restructuring of the international communication regime, the correction of the news flow imbalance between developed and developing countries, and favorable provisions for the Third World in the areas of telecommunications and copyright.
The call for equal access to information and resources has been replaced by a worldwide movement toward a market economy and capitalism, headed by the United States and the European Economic Community. The disintegration of the Third World as a political force and the collapse of the Soviet Union as a major competitive power in the international system have accelerated the process of the globalization of goods and commodities and, with that, the emergence of a new global information infrastructure.
The true debate, however, arises over the content of this new world order. At the center stand at least two notions of a new order. One is the official version expressed by the current globalization "leaders," primarily the United States and a number of European countries. This ideal at least rhetorically envisions an unrestricted market economy, globalization of information by dominant Western transnational firms, and military dominance of any challenges to the order by a loose coalition of the same military titans. No role exists in this order for the developing countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, except to applaud the ascendancy of commercial secularism as a fait accompli. The disenfranchised are supposed to participate in this version of the world order as passive receptacles, to be filled by whatever content the titans choose to beam to them.
The second possibility is an unofficial, unpublicized, often desperate call for a new world order by the less fortunate, who are too often taken for granted as the passive audience that will support the movement to disenfranchise them. This vast majority--collectively powerful but individually powerless--are unable to strike any bargain with the powerful due to their lack of resources and to the divisions created among them. If they could but unite and make their preferences known, then they might have a chance. But it is far harder for the 150 smallest nations--and the five billion disenfranchised consumers--to unite than it is for the dozen largest information providers and the global Fortune 500 to insinuate their products into every market.
The Digital Alternative
Is the battle lost? Is there any room for the individual in the global tide of centralized communications? In short, is there any hope that the world's peoples can, as in the days of yore, go to the metaphorical mountaintops and send their messages forth? Despite the gloominess of present prospects, there are seedlings of hope. While centralized communication does have an embarrassing tendency to broadcast the current dominant culture around the world, it has its advantages. Advances in communication and transportation have helped to curtail isolation and to increase the cultural awareness of minorities by allowing them to see the distinctions between themselves and other groups. Communication plays a major role in the creation of ethnic consciousness. If people are bound by poverty to live their lives in their home towns, at least they can electronically view other cultures. It may be a limited window, but it exists. The importance of expanding cultural understanding is underscored by the conflicts caused by ethnic and religious differences in the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere.
Of course, such efforts would be immeasurably aided if there were not 20 or 200 viewpoints being broadcast, but 2 million or a billion. Is there any hope for this, or is the sole prospect for diversity provided by the "Fox model"--the marginal increase in "competition" that occurs when a new corporation occasionally enters the global communications market? Surprisingly, there is some reason to believe that other viewpoints may become represented. Today, many countries are using modern technology the way it should be used--as a supplement to, rather than as a replacement for, indigenous communications. Technology is becoming cheaper and easier to use, bringing it within reach of more people and countries. More importantly, cheaper communication holds out the possibility of decentralization.
Today, electronic communication is defined not only as the traditional, centralized, broadcast media--radio and television--but also by computer networks, fax machines, tape recorders, image recorders, and desktop publishing. The newest technologies have the potential to turn information control back to the people. The difference in the types of technologies is crucial. Traditional electronic communication, by its very nature, is at once both intrusive and less accessible. It lends itself to centralized control and often rolls over indigenous peoples in a seductive tidal wave. The newest communication technologies, however, can be molded into their users' images. Rather than replacing indigenous communications and culture, they can exist side by side with them. The same local information that was not economical to broadcast to an entire country suddenly becomes valuable and pertinent when the medium of dissemination is a computer bulletin board. These new communication technologies can encourage increased participation and equality. By creating an alternative to the temporarily dominant mass media channels, these forms of communication offer the promise of preserving indigenous culture in a new form, rather than simply replacing it with an inappropriate new Western paradigm.
Of course, such progress is limited. While it may be far cheaper to run an electronic bulletin board with a $ 2,000 computer than to run a multimillion-dollar broadcast network, $ 2,000 is still more than a year's pay for most people. Moreover, most of the necessary electronic infrastructure for decentralized communications, such as telephone lines, is centered in the richest handful of nations. We must make sure that the promise of digital technology is not lost to a world in which basic telephone service is still too expensive for most people. The overwhelming prospect is that the developed economies will once again leverage their advantages into global digital dominance. So it has always been; the initial advantage has gone to the well-off. But at least there is hope--and that is something that no one could have said a decade ago.
A Challenge to Secular Society
What of the commercial secularism that has piggy-backed on American advertisements and movies to reach even the smallest villages in the most remote countries? Is there similar hope that the tide of largely Western commercial secularism that has swept the world will recede enough to allow the best attributes of indigenous cultures to coexist?
Again, yes, there is hope. We must remember that there are counterweights to the seeming ascendancy of filtered secularism. Communication is more than commercial broadcasts. The increasing frequency of communication, such as international travel, student and cultural exchanges, and international business transactions, all have produced a global culture that is, to some extent, divorced from national and ethnic ties and is not subject to centralized control. Although the consumption of goods and services may indicate a pattern of homogeneity to the detriment of traditional values, the consumption of Western products--whether Coca Cola, pizza, or television programs--does not in any way imply that consumers across the globe are homogeneous in their values, attitudes, and morals. McDonald's may be in nearly every country, but in Japan, sushi is served alongside hamburgers. In many countries, hamburgers are not even on the menu. Globalization has brought more surface homogenization than fundamental change.
The hunger of people for traditional and even religious moorings has not, contrary to appearances, been displaced. In fact, the rise of a glib secularization of discourse has produced not uniformity, but a yearning for a return to non-secular values. Today, there is a rebirth of revitalized fundamentalism in all the world's major religions, whether Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Shintoism, or Confucianism. At the same time that global homogeneity has reached the airwaves, these religious tenets have reemerged as defining identities.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in modern Islam. As is demonstrated by the rise of anti-secularism in Turkey and Algeria, modern communications not only allows McDonald's to sell its wares from afar, but also allows a leader with a powerful idea to communicate it to his audience from halfway around the world--even if his ideas are not embraced by the "dominant" global powers. Moreover, ever since the Islamic revolution in Iran, there has been a renewed faith in the creation of a general Islamic community. This tendency has only accelerated with the collapse of the Soviet Union (a secular authority) and the birth of new Central Asian states with significant Muslim populations. Islamic countries have created Muslim radio and television networks and revitalized Islamic discourse. Furthermore, Islamic communities have created a new global community that supersedes national divisions and which challenges the currently dominant global secular paradigm. The same growth in an alternative Islamic community is mirrored, to a lesser extent, in other countries--even within the dominant secular powers themselves. In short, the paradigm of secularism--the foundation of modern life--is being challenged in both the East and the West.
These people have done the seemingly impossible. They have restored some measure of equality not by dragging the global giants off their mountain, but by erecting a new mountain of their own. By this act, they have attempted to restore the natural balance that existed for thousands of years when everyone had equal ability to climb a mountain and shout out messages to the people. They have increased the diversity of discourse that was the hallmark of egalitarian access. When Mohammed was forbidden from trespassing on his mountain, they brought a new mountain to Mohammed. This, then, is the hopeful side of globalization. It works best when it brings in new viewpoints from foreign cultures to coexist with indigenous cultures, not to supplant them. Only then will globalization deserve the uncritical acclaim that is currently heaped on the term by academicians. When the mountain is controlled by the few, the people must construct their own mountain.
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