Global Communication: Theories, Stakeholders, and Trends
Kevin Keenan2003, The Social Science Journal
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Abstract
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.
Key takeaways
- With insider knowledge, McPhail gives us perhaps the best summation (devoting a chapter to the issue) of the 1970's MacBride Commission, which produced recommendations that could have tilted the balance of media and information power and influence to Second and Third World countries, a prospect that might have altered the present and probably could have stalled development of the Internet and computerization and the newest wave of globalization itself.
- Professor McPhail, who teaches international communications at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, arrives at three major conclusions on the effects and promises of global media.
- With transnational communications existing states increasingly are seen as anachronisms of the second millennium.
- Unlike Herman and McChesney, among others, who openly espouse an increase in publicly owned (which would continue state controls) interests as a counter-balance to commercial interests, McPhail tends to be more pragmatic, saying the current media landscape is "dominated by a fundamental aspect of the global economy."
- Similarly, McPhail devotes entire chapters to the role of global advertising agencies, the impact of NGO's and INGO's, and global technologies organizations.
