Class reveiew ending friday the 27th, 2008

USA has become the power center of the world economy. This power is exercised thanks to the american cultural invasion that we can see in our everyday life.
Globalization of the telecommunication
Thanks to Reagan' startegy of "OPEN SKIES", we assit today to the 3 global trends that revolutionized the international communication:

• Liberalization: private operators are allowed to operate in the national telecommunication arena.
• Deregulation: Regulate to deregulate.
• Privatization:state owned business were offered to private investors.

In 1984, Reagan broke the ublic monopolies and allowed private telecommunication networks to operate in the american telecommunication arena. In 1995, the UK followed. European countries followed but at a slow pace.

Free trade in communication was also encouraged by the WTO. It argued that dissiminating barriers to the free flow of information was essential to the economic development.

Regional satellite services

In the arab world, ArabSat was created in 1976 by the arab league. It was used only in 1990 (time of the end of communism).

As the power is exercised through th emonopolization of th information pipelines, Saudia Arabia, Qatar, and UAE distinguished themselves as leaders in the telecommunication industry.

Who benefits from the liberalization and privatization of the telecommunication sector?

It is the transnational companies and gloabl players dominating global trade that do.

Who are the leaders in the intenational television news brodcasting?

CNN(USA), BBC(UK), France 24(FRANCE), Al Jazeera(ARAB WORLD). Each "core" wants to braodcast teh news according to its interest and perspective.

Who are the heavy international news agencies today?

1.Reuters (UK)

2.Associated Press (USA)

3.AFP(agence france presse)

Then comes united press international (USA), ITAR TASS (Russia), Kinhua news agency (China).

To all those news agencies, we can associate a media regime.

The arab satellite media:

Ahmed 3ayach divided the history of satellite TV in 3 phases:

Formative phase (1954-1975)

National expansion phase (1976-1990)

Regional and global expansion phase. As an example, we can cite Al Jazeera. It was created in 1996 by a Qatari Emir and was a state owned channel.

Globalization of western culture

It mainly deals with the economic dimensions at the expense of the the cultural aspects of th einteraction between and among world people. People argue that the globalization of culture in Americanization of this later.

Hibridity: it refers to how global genres are adapted to suit the mixture of cultures. Example of Spanglish or Hinglish are very illustartive.

Lingua Franca: it is the global english that emergerd 200 year sago as the global commerce and communication language.

To protect their cultural goods, European states adopted several strategies. These startegies are quotas, subsidies and grants, regional alliances (creation of joint ventures), and resistance.

To overcome this resistance, the US led regionalziation (example of CNN arabia), localization, or global popular.

Important concepts

Embedded journalism: refering to a journalist who is attached to a military unit involved in an armed conflict.

CNN effect: real time communication technology that provokes major responses from domestic audiences and political elites to global events. It has the ability to affect the conduct of US diplomacy and foreign policy.

Foreign policy: policies of a government directed to matters beyond national borders, especially relations with other countries.

Media coverage: when media report son a specific event and present it to the audience.

Priming: enhancing the effects of themedia by offering the audience a prior context that will be used to interpret subsequent communication

Framing: provide meaning through selective simplification, by filtering people's perceptions and providing them with a field of vision for a problem.

Frame analysis: it consists of examining the ways experience is organized for individuals and gives meaning to events in life.

Content analysis: it is a quantitative method that is used to make inferences by systematically and objectively identifying special characteristics of messages.

Discourse analysis: set of methods and theories for investigating language in use and language in social contexts.

Conversation analysis: examines the methods people use to make sense of their everyday social world.

Sociolinguistics: treat language as a set of precise rules which must be adhered to in order to facilitate efficient communication.

comment on Bill GATES' view of the chinese expansion

Bill Gates is certainely one of the most known person on earth. He built his reputation thanks to the success he achieved in the software industry.
After watching the video referred to in the blog and also reading the text in relation with the acts that Bill Gates is leading in China with regard to the extensive use of computers and the internet, we can say that this very famous person is also playing a major role in the application of the commodification of culture and cultural hegemony. Bill Gates is spending a lot of money to make computers and the internet accessible to a huge number of chinese. By doing so, he is aiming at achieving several goals. It is not a secret anymore: china is the most interesting market for any business because of the large population in the country which constitutes a market in which we have mass consumption. Then, by providing computers and access to internet to the chinese, Bill Gates is preparing that market to receive _maybe_ an innovation that he will create.
Another perspective to consider is the team work and the global vision that he focuses on. He claims that he did not innovate and get engaged in his field to keep it for himself. the notion of sharing is at the essence of his acts. By doing so, he is giving to the chinese the opportunity to use his knowledge to create more and more innovations that will benefit to the whole world.
He is encouraging chinese to innovate, making them -unconsciously- believe in capitalism - an ideology that has been disapproved in china for decades.
From those perspectives, we can see all the changes that we can introduce to the arab/moroccan behavior that would help us expand our ideology and culture. If all of us could have been innovative, engaged, and ambitious as Bill Gates, we would believe in our selves and be able to criticize our selves to get over our mistakes. By doing so, we would encourage team work achievements and plan to have a global vision allowing us to have access to broader markets with broader distribution channels.
If we behave the way Bill Gates did ,as did many other "Bill gates" in favor of the US and western countries, we would also have the opportunity to exercise hegemony and to stick and spread our culture and _one day_ a unified vision and ideology.

Important books cited in class until friday the 20th 2008

The death of gography and distance by Marshall Mc Luhan in 1962
The death of distance by Caincross Frances in 1997
Imagined communities by Benedict Anderson
Passing of teh traditional society by Daniel Lerner in 1958
Mass media and national development by Wilbour Schramm in 1964
Small media. bid revolution by Annabelle Srebeny in 1994
Mass communication and American empire By Herbert Schiller
Journal of peace research by Johan Gaitung in 1971
The modern world system by Immanuel Wallerstein in 1974The ethics of capitalism by Max Weber in 1904Selections from the prison note books by Antonio Gramsci in 1971
The coming of the post industrial society by Daniell Bell in 1973
Trilogy: the information age by Manuell Castells in 1996
World risk society by Ulrick Beck in 1986

class review ending friday the 20th 2008

Subtheory of modernization theory:
Theory of diffusion of innovation:
Evertt Roger's theory originates from the preoccupations of US sociologists with the questions of how to promote intellectual innovations and how people can adapt to the innovation process.
Diffusion is then the process whereby innovation is communicated throught certain channels over time among the members of a social system.
Depency theory
it emerged in Latin America in the late 1960's as a result of the political situation in the region. This political situation was a consequence of the failure of the developmentalist model to implement the modernization theroty to developing countries.
The depency theory can then be seen as an alternative framework to analyse international communication. it was used to succesfully communicate and to apply the free flow of information theory fom North to South.
Structural imperialism theory
Johan Gaitung - a norwegian sociologist- stated that the worls is divided into developed center and an underdeveloped periphery. he distinguished 5 types of imperialism:
economic, political, military, cultural, and communication.
Immuanual Wallerstein divided the world in 3 parts:
The core which most benefits from capitalsim,
The peripheral zones which lacked central government or were controlled by other states,
The semi-periphery zones which try to improve their relatalive position in the world economic system. they also serve as a buffer between the core and the periphery.
The theory as a whole can be seen as a sophisticated type of dominance where news flow from the core to the periphery via the transnational news agencies. those core actors define the news according to their needs and according to the criteria for the developed world market. This theory makes possible a comprehensive understanding of the modernization process and makes possible analitically sound comparison between different part of the world.
Hegemony
This theory is associated with the italian marxist Antonio Gramsci.
The term is rooted in the notion that the dominant group in a society has the capacity to exercise intellectual and moral control over society at large and to build a new system of social alliances to support its aims. This is reached by building a consent by ideological control of cultural production and distribution. This is done by control schools, religious bodies, and the media.
In international communication, hegemony is widely used to conceptualize political function of the media to propagate and domesticate with regard to the dominant idealogy. This way, the dominant ideology is legitimazed.
Critical theory
It analyses teh industrial production of cultural goods as culture is produced as a commodity in capitalistic societies.
According to Horkheimer and Adorno, the way we produce goods is applied to the way culture is produced.
Industrial production led to a standardization that resulted in mass culture made up of a series of objects bearing the stamp of the culture industry.
The industrially produced and commodified culture led to a deterioration of the culture.
This notion of commodification came from Marx who argued that objects are commodified by acquiring an exchange value instead of their own intrinsic value.
In the international context, mass media and cultural industrialization have influenced debates about free flow between countries.
Public sphere
Jurgen Habermas has defined teh public sphere as the plateform where ideas are exchange and where those ideas can compete. He lamented teh standardization, massification, and atomization of the public. Unfortunatly, public sphere as defined by Habermas does not exist.
Public spheres have become an occasion for displys of power in the style of medieval courts rather than a space for debate on social economic issues. This is referred to as "the refeudalisation of the public sphere".
Theories of globalization
Referring to post industrialism which describes the stage of economy that followed industrialization. It is related to the passeage from the industrial period to the one based on services.
200 years ago, Emmanuel Kant have introduced the notion of globalization be saying that we were" unavoidably side by side".
Discourse of globalization
The concept of globalization was explored by Arjun Appadurai un the 1990's. Zeitgeist (time spirit)was at the essence of globalization in the 1990's. He identified 5 spaces of globalization:
Ethnospaces which denotes the flow of people.
Technospaces referring to transfer of technology across national borders.
Financespaces dealing with the international flow of investment.
Mediaspaces which are the global media especially electronic sites.
Ideospaces suggesting ideological contours of culture.
According to Daniel Bell, globalization was defined as a complex set of processes not a single one. It is related to culture, economy, politics, social life, and communication. It embodies transformation in the spatial organization of social relations and transactions generating transcontinental in interregional flows and networks of activity, interaction, and power.
Globalism is the adoption of globalist interstate policy regime which has dilluted commitment of first modernity state to both social citizenship and to republican constitutionalism.
Globality is a stage meaning that from now on, nothing that happened on our planet is a limited local event. We must reorient our lives along a local-global axis.
Glocalization is a term introduced by Roland Robertson. It refers to the fact that there is a global production of the local (Example of Mcdonalization) and the localization of the global (Example of french Mc donald's).
We can categorize 3 positions with regard to globalization:
Hyperglobalists: they argue that it hollows out the state and citizenship both at the level of global market forces and at the level of regional blocs like the EU.
Skeptics: they argue that globalization is not a new phenomenon and not historically unprecedent. They base their position in the fact that there is statistical evidence that world flow is beneficial only to US, Europe, Japan, and China.
Transfornationalists:they arhue that globalization is a multifaceted contextual phenomenon of human civilization. There position is a mixture of hyperglobalists and skeptics.

The term Samizdat emerged in Russia during the 1960's. It refers to hand circulated documents which were self published in contrast with the state published documents. It emerged as people did not have access to the public sphere as this later was used only to promote communism or democratic ideologies.

Quiz1

1. What are the 3 development paradigms?
International coverage of events
Comparing media system
Communication for development
2. What does the term "global village" mean? Who did coin teh term?
The term was introduced by Marshall Mc Luhan and means that the whole world is similar to a village as there is no barriers to flow of information.
3. Explain "space of flow" and "the death of distance"
Death of distance: thanks to the free flow of information, distance does not matter for communication.
With the evolution of press, maping , and telegraphs space of flow has evolved.
4. Identify 3 modernization theorists metionned in th etext book.
Daniel Lerner
W ilbour Schramm
Max Weber
5. Elaborate on Daniel Lerner's approach.
Accoring tp Daniel Lerner, the government plays a crucial role in the modernization process of the society. His approach claims that the government should promote western values in order to succeed in the modernization process.
6. What doe steh concept of "free flow of information" mean and explain its relation to international or global communication?
This theory supports the idea that there is no geographical limitation so that information can flow freely and easily.
7. What is the difference between global communication and international communication?
Global communication refers to communication between every single person excluding localities whereas international communication involves communication between nations with information crossing geographical borders.
8.In which context was Wilbour Schramm book's Mass Media and National development in 1964 published?
this book was published during th edecade of development (1960's)
9. What ar the 4 types of media identified by Schramm in his book " the four theories of press"?
Authoritarian, Soviet, Liberal, and Social responsibility.
10. Why scholars add two types. Please identify them.
To add further varietu in the media regimes, scholars added the development and the participatory models.

Class review ending friday the 13th 2008

Introduction

Moving from a geography of space to a geography of experience thanks to the free flow of information covering all except individuals (Example of immigration).

The history of communucation was impacted by the importance of telegraphs and maping as it helped initially the expansion of imperial communication system (example of french colonialism in Algeria).

Printed press is at the foundation of nationalism, reformization, and modern capitalism.

The emergence of the modernity concept / modernization process appeared at 3 levels:
Cultural modernity referred to as consumer society,
Economic modernozation referred to as globalization,
Political modernity known as democracy.

Today, communication is regulated by the ITU. The regulatory bodies cited during the class were:
APF created in 1835
Wolff created in 1849
Reuter created in 1851 and which is considered as the most crucial to the expansion and consolidation of the European empires.

Today, we can recognize 3 types of media:
Printed media composed of books, magazines, and news papers,
Broadcasted media which refers to television and radio,
And new electronic media which refers to internet, satellite, cell phones,and wireless techologies

From another hand, we recognize 4 types of media regimes grouped under 2 categories:

State regulated and based on censorship
Authoritarian: Dictorial regimes such as fascism in Germany at the time of Hitler and Italy at the time of Mussolini.
Soviet: communisy dictatorship aiming to have a just, fair, and equal society such as in North Corea.

Regulated by capitalist and money makers
Liberal: free market based working on a capitalist dynamic such as in the USA
Social responsability: still in a capitalist dynamic but helping citizens to make up their mind on matters of public concern such as in the UK.

To those 4 types were added 2 other models of media regimes:

Development model that adresses issues such as poverty, health care, literacy and education in the developing countries.

Participatory model that is involved in the ongoing life of the communities they serve. This king of media is democratically organized. Public participation and democratic process are central to the operations of that model.

Theories of international communication

We should distinguish between international communication and global communication. international communication refers to the one between nations or cross borders whereas global communication is the one that involves every single person excluding localities.

Our concern is about international communication. The crucial theories to understand international communication are as follow:
Free flow of information.
Modernization
Dependency theory
Structural imperialism
Hegemony
Critical theory
Public sphere
Critical studies
Theories of information society
Discourses of globalization
Critical Pol. Eco. for the 21st century

Free flow of information theory emerged during the cold war between the US bloc and the Soviet bloc. It aimed at promoting the democratic ideology and hence stoping the communist ideology expansion. It contributed to provide channels of communication to the american government for international audiences.

Modernization theory states that mass media communication should trigger the transformation from traditional (community based) to modern (based on individualism and bureaucracy) society. This theory got the support of both national governments and international organizations.