What is Global Communication?

• Juliet's quote from Romeo and Juliet: "What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." Highlights the idea that names are conventions, but these conventions are not meaningless, as communication relies on them.

• Global communication is the field of study, also referred to as "international communication", "world communication", and "trans-border communication."

Different Names for the Field:

• International Communication: Refers to processes among states, recognizing states as powerful agents in cross-border communication. It increasingly involves interactions between state and non-state actors, such as IGOs, INGOs, BINGOs, and PINGOs.

• World Communication: Has a broader meaning, but it can be nebulous and carries romantic associations.

• Transborder Communication: Suggests the flow of messages across national borders, representing a "glocal" process.

• Global Communication: Most fashionable term, but it suggests a one-world community, which is more of an aspiration than reality. Communication globalizes but remains local. It is best termed "glocal", connecting the global with the local.

The Internet:

• The Internet is the largest contemporary infrastructure for global communication, a psychological concept that presents the world as a diversified whole.

• The network is decentralized, horizontally structured, de-territorialized, and localized.

• Global communication has a normative connotation, suggesting a global society where everyone equally matters, although many are still excluded from global connections.

• Communication acts as an "agent" of globalizing processes in various fields, interconnecting people globally and is also affected by these processes

Flows:

• At the core of global communication is "communication."

• Manuel Castells: "Our society is constructed around flows."

• Flow represents multidirectional movements: linear, circular, top-down, bottom-up, engineered, and spontaneous.

Stories:

• Messages transported globally are stories, which are key sources of human knowledge.

• Plato: "Those who tell stories rule society."

• Global communication involves dominant and counter-stories flowing across the globe.

• Key TV story producers: US-based MTV, CNN, and Discovery Channel.

• Counter-stories emerge through local production, storytelling in diasporas, and new storytellers.

• Social networks like YouTube expand the community of global storytellers.

• The essence of human communication is its narrative structure. Flows of ideas, opinions, knowledge, information, data, sounds, and images are forms of storytelling.

Importance of Studying Global Communication:

• Flows of people, goods, money, and stories have occurred throughout history, with stories being essential to the other flows.

• Flows of people are connected to stories about tickets or reservations, movement of goods is connected to stories and messages about those goods, flows of money have become streams of electronic bits.

• Cross-border flows of stories support global trading and financial transactions.

• Worldwide transport of people, goods, and money relies on global communication.

• Global communication provides news, advertising, and entertainment shaping perceptions of others and the world.

• Atilla the Hun: he used stories to spread exaggerated claims about his army.

• Alexa Robertson: "Through the agency of storytelling, our situation in the political and cultural landscape, and that of everyone else, is set out, maintained, negotiated and adapted to new circumstances".

• Kenneth Boulding: "It is what we think the world is like, not what it is really, that determines our behaviour".

• The international political arena depends on stories for diplomatic, propagandistic, and public relations purposes.

Global Communication's Role:

• Global Economy: Facilitated through manufacturing, connectivity services, and content production.

• Global Politics: Essential as flows of stories build discursive power.

• Military Operations: Reliant on command, control, intelligence systems, drones, and cyberwar.

• Cultural Expressions: Distributes cultural icons, causes cultural mélanges, and prompts resistance against foreign impositions.

Globalization of Communication:

• Emerged in the late 18th and early 19th centuries with telegraph, wireless connections, and news distribution.

• Driven by commercial interests rather than imperial powers.

• Companies in these infrastructures were not closely affiliated with national governments.

• Globalization of capitalism influenced the organization and control of global communication.

• Communication networks were densest in developed world markets.

• There was rivalry and cooperation among empires, with international legal agreements.

• Newspapers published world news via transnational agencies (Reuters, Havas, Wolff).

• Governments recognized the potential of international propaganda in the 20th century.

• The film industry and recorded music globalized early on.

Television Satellites:

• Broke national sovereignty of broadcasting space in the late 1970s.

• Driven by economic factors: imports, commercial motives, and advertising.

• Markets globalized, leading to overseas advertising.

• Media products that globalized easily: news, films, music, and TV serials.

Current Media Landscape:

• No real global media exist; hybrid forms are based on national contexts.

• National standards, objectives, and expectations dictate operations.

• Most people prefer their own jokes, music, politics, and sports.

• National and local media are important in populous countries.

• International media productions are localizing.

• Major studios use local production facilities and set up international TV subsidiaries.

• Economic interdependence is increasing, but not media-interdependence.

• Media-regionalization is occurring, especially in Latin America and Arab countries.

• The "national" remains essential, with the national level of media still dominant.

• Audiences prefer local news, weather, sports, comedy, and factual programming.

• National content is generally preferred.

• Regional examples: Korean TV drama, Chinese pop-music, Japanese comic strips.

• National media cover more local news than global news.

• There remains a North-South news gap.

• Local framing of global news is paramount.

• Nationalism continues to be crucial in news and entertainment.

• The nation-state is still a significant force.

• Mechanisms used by national states: import restrictions, quota rules, and prime time allocation.

• Globalization occurs as homogenization, glocalization/hybridization, and fragmentation/polarization.

Cultural Mixing:

• Transnational channels proliferate due to the physical movement of people.

• Identity is critical to migrants living "between cultures".

• Cultural mixing leads to "hybridization" of cultures.

• Broadcasters from developing countries export media products.

• Examples: Turkey's TRT targeting Turkish speakers in Europe.

• New national and regional storytellers are emerging, such as Al-Jazeera, Brazilian TV soaps, Mexico's Televisa, and Bollywood.

Global Village:

• Does global communication make the world a smaller place, creating a "global village" (McLuhan)?

• Or is it a "global metropolis” (Fortner) where most people don’t know each other, and message flows are highly unequal.

The Context of Global Communication:

• Global communication does not occur in a vacuum; it requires contextualization.

• Key elements: globalization, urbanization, nation-state doctrine, institutionalization, inequality, and global proliferation of risks.

Trans-localization:

• Global communication takes place in the context of "globalization".

• Globalization is a contested concept, with some arguing it lacks meaning or is just a new name for old phenomena.

• McLuhan revitalized ideas of Teilhard de Chardin and the "old Christian myth of the great human family".

• First reference to "globalization" was in 1970, but it gained popularity in the 1980s.

• Globalization can be described as the distribution of "X" across the globe, with X being anything.

Globalization: The History:

• Ancient phase: Began with Homo Sapiens' journey out of Africa and matured between 500 BC and AD 1500.

• Examples: Silk routes, distribution of Chinese inventions (compass, gunpowder, papermaking, and printing), and export of mathematics from Arab countries.

• Mercantilist, colonial form: Emerged between 1500 and 1800 with expeditions and exploitation of distant countries.

• Modern form (capitalist): Arose after the industrial revolution (18th and early 19th century).

• The globalization phase of the 19th century was deep and durable.

• Worldwide network of cables, telegraph systems, railways, and steamships emerged.

• After World War II, global distribution processes increased rapidly.

• Factors: mobility of capital and consolidation of markets.

• Global polarization occurred between industrial and non-industrial nations.

• Centre nations controlled the periphery through monopolies of technology, finance, resources, weapons, and communication (Samir Amin).

• In the late 20th century, technological innovations and institutions (like the WTO) boosted globalization.

• Essential features: interdependence and the spread of "modernity” with parliamentary democracy, the free market economy, pop music, and fast food becoming global icons.

Globalization: The Analytical Tool:

• The concept has protagonists and sceptics.

Protagonists:

• From the 1980s onwards, more people are affected by free market economies.

• Capitalism has spread from approximately 20\% of the world population in the 1970s to over 90\% in the early 21st century.

• More global trading occurs than ever before.

• Reduced costs of air travel and shipping have expanded cross-border trading.

• Firms take a global approach to sales (global brand names and advertising).

• Global financial markets have grown since 1970s.

• There is increased global mobility of people.

• Globalization refers to the intensification of global consciousness.

• Increasing economic interdependence leads to social interdependence.

Sceptics:

• The "global economy” is primarily the economy of a few rich countries (OECD).

• Most world trading takes place within geographical regions.

• The volume of international trading has not dramatically increased since the early 20th century.

• Capital flows refer mainly to short-term speculative investments.

• Financial mobility is limited for productive investments.

• Most people stay home, refugees stay within their region, and labor is not mobile.

• The world is more a collection of many local villages than one global village.

• The world is a collection of many local villages, not one global village. People side with provincial interests.

• Increased global media is not shared with a collectivized, cosmpolitan consciousness

• Social processes may lead to integration as well as disintegration.

• An explanation based upon technological determinism is too limited.

• Protagonists and sceptics disagree about technological progress and the significance of the national state.

National State and Corporations Disagreements:

• The argument suggests that the national state has lost its sovereign powers.

• The increase of finances, offshore electronic markets, and worldwide marketing of cultural products, affect the decision-making powers of individual states.

The Sceptics Counter:

• Sceptics argue that financial capacities and political power of transnational corporations have increased significantly.

• Some companies' revenues exceed the GDP of important industrial nations.

• The claim that governments have become impotent is exaggerated.

• Many companies rely on state subsidies or purchases for defence purposes.

• National sovereignty helps transnational corporations to avoid genuinesupra-national regulatory institutions.

• Transnational corporations need national governments to guarantee safe investment environments, create market opportunities, or promote trade.

• States play a role in health care, social services, and education.

• The retreat of the state tends to be partial.

Globalization: The Political Programme:

• The political programme has advocates and critics.

Advocates:

• Argue that globalization creates worldwide, open, and competitive markets, promoting global prosperity.

• Political programme is that a global free market leads to more employment, better quality of goods and services, and lower consumer prices.

Critics:

• Globalization agenda is a neo-liberal political programme that promotes the interests of the world's most powerful players.

• They believe that large numbers of farmers, workers, immigrants, youth, and women are negatively affected by economic globalization.

• The Advocates claim globalization process as unstoppable and beneficial process for everyone in the world, the Critics disagree and say that is the globalization of poverty.

• Advocates defend that globalization promotes cultural differentiation, while the critics believe in cultural imperialism.

• Current views on global landscape includes homogenizing, local developments and hybrid forms that are called "glocalization".

• The standardization of food, clothing, music, TV drama, Anglo-Saxon linguistic convention create the impression of cultural homogenization.

• However, distinct cultural entities and inter-ethnic conflicts remain.

• There is an increase in cultural contacts beyond national boundaries.

• Parallel with the homogenization of consumer lifestyles there is also local cultural differentiation.

• Locality and nationality continue to play important roles.

• Globalization is often described as a transfer from the West to the Rest.

• This Euro-American centrism is contested by the economic emergence of the new BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) and to break through conventional dichotomous schemes that creates divisions between modern and non- modern, or the de-Westernizing of modern research.

• Because the distribution is embedded in localities, this factor is also referred to as "trans-localization".

Urbanization:

• In the 21st century, humankind will become an "urban species."

• In 2009, 50% of the global population lived in urban areas, and this is projected to increase to roughly 70\% for the years to follow.

• Cities will be localities for living together and managing conflicts.

• Latin America is the most urbanized region in the developing world (77% of its population), with an increase by 2015 of 81\%. Asia and Africa are also regions with intense urbanization.

• Global cities are centers of finance, fashion, arts, and media.

• They are key hubs in the global economy and actors in globalization.

• Cultural production and consumption have become part of big cities' economies.

• Big cities have also become key places for services, such as legal assistance, marketing, advertising, and architecture.

• Megacities with more than 20 million people are gaining ground in Asia, Latin America, and Africa.

• Increasingly, the sustainability of living in cities will depend upon the ways in which the urbanites manage to co-exist with each other.

• City efforts to enhance social interaction among urbanites is esstenial, they also need economic and socio-cultural elements that enhance or obstruct urban integration.

• Understanding the world requires a grasp of how urban populations will be able to cope with the characteristics of cities such as:

  • Heterogeneity: A place of differences and provocation, it is exceedingly difficult for many people.

  • Speed: The movements and interactions are fast; it demands people learn the art of slowing down.

  • Mindlessness: The urban interaction is mindless. People pass others without responsibility towards others.

Institutionalization:

• Human beings search for adequate adaptive responses to complex problems.

• Institutions have been developed for human desires, the concern about suffering, and the need for humans develop adaptive responses.

• Humans "institutionalize" the satisfaction of basic needs more so than other species.

• Institutionalization is a social process of embedding human needs, ideas, values, and desires in organizational formats with objectives, structures, rules, and procedures for assessment.

• The social process dominant of institutionalization is the "delivery" institution, which encompasses all organizations that transform the satisfaction of human needs into the delivery of addictive commodities in forms of professional products and services.

• These institutions commercialize production and distribution, are competitive, and are run by professionals.

Inequality:

• A standard feature of today's world is inequality in access to resources, experience of recognition, and distribution of power.

• The income of the 600 million best-off people is 60 times that of the 600 million worst-off.

• There is no access to safe drinking water for 1.2 billion people.

• People's dignity is respected unequally, as seen in the treatment of women, gay men and women, disabled people, older people, and people with darker skins.

• The power of decision making is unequally distributed.

• Global communication functions in a hierarchical and unequal set of power relations.

• There needs to be a culture of denial and silence about the abuses that are made from global communication.

Global Risks:

• Ulrich Beck coined the notion of the "risk society."

• Human security is threatened by warfare, terrorism, organized crime, environmental changes, pollution, natural disasters, and genetic experiments.

• Much of the content of global communication adds to these risks, such as the media, hate speech reports, and technological advances into privacy invading people's private lives and may leave behind human beings.

Conclusion:

• Following addressed dimensions need to be understood about global communication:

  • trans-localization

  • urbanization

  • institutionalization

  • inequality

  • global risks