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.