World Communication: Principles, Politics and Law

Howard Frederick's unique book treats international communication in an international relations context--the first truly comprehensive study of its kind. This book discusses how the modern media face the challenge of promoting peace, building confidence among nations and peoples, and strengthening understanding. Accelerate by the rapid advances in electronic technologies, global information networks have been central to international relations. Its topics include: History of Long-Distance Communication; A World of Communication; The Channels of Global Communication; The Dimensions of Global Communication; Communication, Information and 'New World Orders'; Contending Theories of Global Communication; Communication in War and Peace; International Communication and Information Law; Global Communication as we enter the Twenty-First Century.

In: Giuliana Ziccardi Capaldo (ed) Global community: yearbook of international law & jurisprudence. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014

In G Ziccardi Capaldo (ed) The Global Community. Yearbook of International Law and Jurisprudence, Oxford University Press, 2014

2008

Many researchers consider that the forces of globalization and informatization have a great importance for communication; these forces have already caused changes in some industries, policies, cultures and societies. Societies and communities must take part in this new global communication as they have no other choice; although, their way of participation depends on their specific social, cultural, economical and political environment. Nowadays, we have a global commercial communication system which is dominated by a small number of very powerful transnational companies. Until now, the companies from the communication field have sold information and entertainment to the people. Now they prefer to sell consumers (readers, listeners, TV spectators, internet users). We can easily notice the ambition of the new communication empires: to control the whole network, as everything is passing through these networks-broadcasts, movies, books, music, magazines-means communication.

The Social Science Journal, 2003

and Bacon, 2002, 272 pages Just as media delivery systems are converging from separate mass mediums, so are the once-distinct fields of the social sciences beginning to coalesce and congeal in their studies of how people get and use news and information. That is one of the more important inferences readers draw from Thomas McPhail's latest effort. McPhail's book bridges some important gaps between the international fields of politics, public administration, and mass communication theory and practice in his attempt to synthesize the dialectic divide between disciplines. Intellectual transformation is no longer limited by distance or time, nor, for that matter, artificial academic constructs. What is happening globally impacts not only journalism and communications, but economics, international relations, sociology, and all the other humanities as well as fields in business, trade, and even the military. All aspects of social and communal life are affected and all who have access to the new technologies are stakeholders in what is taking place globally. The author melds several theories of mass communication and international relations, and ties them neatly into a bundle with a single ribbon: Wallerstein's core-periphery world systems theory. The basic premise of the theory, which often makes conservative media scholars jittery in its neo-Marxist, class-struggle overtones, is that 30-plus countries are "core" nations that are highly resource developed and technologically advanced. Led by the United States (the core of the core), and European Union states, the core includes others such as Canada, Israel, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. Core nations deal mainly with elites in 20-plus semi-periphery countries (such as Egypt, South Africa, and Mexico) and the 100-plus periphery of the less-developed countries in the former Third World, mostly in Africa, the Middle East, East Europe, and Central Asia. Information flow from the core to the periphery is uneven, so the theory goes. While news and information speeds like a Mercedes down an autobahn into the semi-peripheral and peripheral countries, communication from the lesser-developed countries meanders into the core like a donkey cart on a goat path. The uneven distribution, variety, and speed of information from the core to the periphery create changes in tastes, cultural orientations, and ways of doing business, all oriented toward the core. This is at the heart of the so-called Electronic Colonialism Theory. McPhail's notion of stakeholders is thought provoking since it fundamentally changes the prevalent Western Concept view of mass media as a market-driven capitalist force. The market to which this concept refers is advertising, the "spear point of capitalism," as Edward Herman and Robert W. McChesney say (Global Media: Missionaries of Capitalism, 1997). McPhail sees stakeholders rather than shareholders as the "owners" of the product, an idea that plays well among supporters of the moribund New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO). Once a consultant to UNESCO during those fractious cold war years of the 1970s when NWICO bubbled to the top of the East-West debate, McPhail provides the reader a noble service. He charts the developments from the MacBride Commission to the UNESCO walkout by the United States and Great Britain 16 years ago and the changes in the international organization that reversed field so that both Western countries could return.

Communicatio, 2007

For centuries, communication has played a powerful role in exacerbating tensions among nations. From the Peloponnesian war to the Nicaraguan war, nations have used communication channels to manipulate domestic public opinion and to disinform opposing populations.(2) Mass communication media also have the potential to bring about peace, build confidence among nations and strengthen international understanding. In the last forty-five years, the world has witnessed an increased role for the media in international relations, an intensification of ideological struggle, and a tremendous explosion of global information technologies. These facts challenge the international law of communication and information to keep apace.

This special issue of Review of International Studies focuses on how International Relations (IR) communicates with the world, and vice versa. It opens up the discussion of the politics of communication within the discipline and beyond. With a variety of different mediums ranging from media, film, memory, music, culture, and emotions, this book seeks to accentuate their importance for IR, both as a source of knowledge and as an ideational exchange which shapes IR. It examines the diverse ways that multidisciplinary thinkers try to understand and explain global routes, mobilities, cultures, commodifications, singularities, discourses and aestheticisations. This special issue specifically addresses three interrelated themes: How international and global studies approach the question of communication, how to conceptualise and respond to the globalisation of communication and how global problems get communicated within and across the institutional settings of the epistemic disciplines in general, and the IR discipline in particular.

2016

Over the past 50 years, both policy and research debates have at times raged over how change and power should be interpreted in global communication. This introduction to the Special Section titled "Global Communication Power: Shift or Stasis?" makes the case for the need to explore this question from fresh vantage points. It frames critical and creative pathways for thinking about and rethinking current transformations in global media. The introduction, then, provides an overview of the contributions and draws recurring themes together, posing key questions for further research. In an age of disruption, legacy media find themselves in a struggle to transform and reinvent themselves. At the same time, media innovators are emerging in both expected and unusual places. As a result, the landscape of global media is undergoing a creative, technological, economic, cultural, and political metamorphosis that extends the reach of dominant players while simultaneously ushering in a...