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Chapter 1
News Communication for a Global System
– Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree
The rapid integration of the world's economy, loosely called globalization, has been facilitated by an information revolution driven by communication technologies that provide a nervous system for our world today. Globalization is a broad and inexact term for a wide array of worldwide changes in politics, economics, trade, finance, life styles, and cultures. To its critics, globalization is trendy and controversial; they see the world becoming a consumer colony of the United States, led by Coke, McDonald's, Nike, and the vast pop-culture output of Hollywood. How people feel about globalization often depends a lot on where they live and what they do.
With just a visit to a mall, one is struck by the plethora of products and services from many distant lands. In the past thirty years, much of the world's economy has become increasingly integrated; direct foreign investment has grown three times as fast as total domestic investment. But globalization is more than buying and selling; some see it as a profound interchange of cultures – a communication revolution that is dissolving our sense of boundaries, our national identities, and how we perceive the world.
Deregulation of telecommunications systems and computerization have been called the parents of globalization. Three technologies in particular – computers, satellites, and digitalization – have converged to produce a global communications network that covers the Earth as completely as the atmosphere. Today's era of globalization is characterized by falling telecommunications costs, thanks to microchips, satellites, fiber optics, and the Internet.
For example, some 400 million viewers world wide watched together on television as Spain defeated Holland in the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.
The popular culture of the West – movies, television shows, music CDs, video- and audiocassettes, books, magazines, newspapers – has been flowing increasingly about the world. It can be argued that the world is beginning to share a popular culture, based only in part on that of the West. Critics differ about what happens when cultures meet.
Rather than fight, cultures often blend. Frederick Tipson noted, “More like a thin but sticky coating than a powerful acid, this cosmopolitan culture of communication networks and the information media seems to overlay rather than supplant the cultures it interacts with.”1 When cultures receive outside influences, it is said, they ignore some and adopt others, and soon begin to transform them. An example can be something called bhangra pop in India – music that sounds like Jamaican reggae but is played on Indian instruments and then amplified.
Critics of this global media market castigate globalization for several reasons: the centralization of media power; and heavy commercialism, which is linked to declines in public broadcasting and public service standards for media performance. Media are seen as a threat to democracy because of lessened public participation and concern with public affairs. Press critics have other concerns about these corporate giants. The news media, they argue, risk becoming submerged and neglected inside vast entertainment conglomerates that are primarily concerned with entertainment profits.
Most of these criticisms are leveled at Western media, and these critics neglect to consider how globalization has spurred the growth of media and their audiences in the developing non-Western nations.
Others see globalization in more positive terms. It is argued that many millions more people than ever before now have access to news and information, especially in such countries as China and India and much of Southeast Asia. Globalization means that multitudes now have many newfound choices: how they will spend their leisure time; what they will watch or read; what to buy with newly acquired personal income from rapidly rising standards of living. Anthropologist James Watson wrote, “The lives of Chinese villagers I know are infinitely better off now than they were 30 years ago. China has become more open because of the demands of ordinary people. They want to become part of the world – I would say that globalism is the major force for democracy in China. People want refrigerators, stereos, CD players.”2
Journalist Thomas Friedman wrote that globalization is essentially about change, which is a reality and not a choice: “Thanks to the combination of computers and cheap telecommunications, people can now offer and trade services globally – from medical advice to software writing to data processing – services that could never be traded before. And why not? A three-minute call (in 1996 dollars) between New York and London cost $300 in 1930. Today it is almost free through the Internet.”3
The primacy of the issue of globalization reminds us of the extent to which most of us now think and act globally – as a matter of course. In his book, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century, Friedman expands his earlier views and sees dramatic changes in the forces for global leveling from the fall of the Berlin Wall, which eliminated the ideological divide in the world, to the rise of the Internet and technological changes that have led to new economic models of production and collaboration, including outsourcing and offshore manufacturing. Now nations such as China and India, as well as others in South Asia, have prospered in dramatic ways. The integration of some 3 billion people into the global economy is of major importance. Just one facet of this global flattening is that the media of communications have become increasingly pervasive in these rapidly modernizing places. Literally many millions are now, through the Internet, cell phones, satellite television, and publications, are “in touch” with the greater world. But while the new technologies are closing gaps between parts of India and China and the advanced industrial nations, the gaps between those countries and Africa have been widened. The world's nations may not have a level playing field, but the world is changing in critical ways. And for many millions in those nations considered to be “developing,” their standards of living have improved rapidly.
A Big, Cloudy, Blue, Agate Marble
Perhaps one of the most significant photographs of modern times was taken during the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. The astronauts photographed the earthrise as seen from the moon, and there was our planet, like a big, cloudy, blue, agate marble. The widely reprinted picture illuminated the fragility and cosmic insignificance of our spaceship Earth.
That stunning image coincided with the worldwide concern about ecology and global pollution; even more, it made it easy to grasp why many scientists already treated that cloudy, blue marble as a complete biological system, in which change in one part will inevitably affect other parts.
Certainly in the years since, concerned persons around the world have become more aware of our global interdependence. Although some experts disagree, an important trend of our times is that the world is becoming a single, rudimentary community. Today's world must grapple with an agenda of urgent and complex problems, most of them interrelated: overpopulation; poverty; famine; depletion of natural resources (especially energy); pollution of the biosphere; regional political disputes; continuing arms buildup, including the nuclear threat; global warming, and the widening gap between rich and poor nations, which seems exacerbated by economic integration. Recent events have pushed terrorism high on the agenda. Terrorist acts are somber reminders of how much hate and anger divide our diverse societies.
These and other global crises ebb and flow on the world's news agendas, but they are truly international in scope; the amelioration – much less solution – of any of them requires cooperation and goodwill among nations. To achieve that, there first must be information and understanding of these challenges, for these are crises of interdependence. No one nation or even combination of nations can deal effectively with such global concerns as international monetary crises, pollution of the air and oceans, population control, terrorism, regional warfare, and widespread famine and food shortages, yet the blinders of nationalism and modern tribalism continue to influence political leaders everywhere to react to international problems with narrow and parochial responses. The news media in all nations will reflect the national views and prejudices of their own societies on these pressing global concerns. It's not necessary that all nations agree on how to respond – and here is where the news media come in – but there should be general agreement about what the problems are.
Lester Brown, an authority on global needs, described the problems of our times as “unique in their scale.” Previous catastrophes – famines, floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions – were local and temporary. But now, the world's more pressing concerns can be solved only through multinational or global cooperation, yet the institutions to cope with them are largely national. And because each technological innovation seems to create new problems but not the political will capable of resolving them, Brown sees global conditions worsening in the years immediately ahead. Brown's view of world problems, although shared by many, is still not truly understood by great numbers of people. Americans, for example, periodically turn inward and become self-absorbed, failing to comprehend how domestic problems have roots in events that may occur thousands of miles away.4
Westerners and some leaders of developing countries are becoming aware that population growth is putting intolerable pressures on the Earth's land, water, and energy resources as well as its economies.
The world's population in 2008 was 6.8 billion with 37% of its population living in China and India. The US Census Bureau projected that in 2025 India will surpass China. The other most populous countries are, in order, the United States, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Russia, and Japan.5
Africa is currently gripped by one of the greatest population explosions ever recorded. Over the past 60 years Africa's population has quadrupled to 1 billion people, an epic baby boom that threatens to trap a generation of children in poverty and strangle economic progress on the world's poorest continent. With low rates of contraception and high social pressures to have large families, African women bear 5.3 children each on average, compared with 2.1 in the United States. By 2050, Africa's population will reach 2 billion.6
Scientists and development experts have been racing to increase food production by 50% in the next two decades to feed this growing population. The global number of hungry people increased to 1.02 billion in 2009 or nearly one in seven, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. A central problem is whether food can be grown in the developing world where the hungry can actually get it at prices they can afford to pay. Poverty and difficult growing conditions plague the places that need new food production most – in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.7
The world's political structures, many believe, must be reshaped to enable us to cope with these global challenges: hence the great importance, despite their shortcomings, of international organizations such as the United Nations and its attendant agencies. Recently, there have been frequent calls for reform of the United Nations.
Public opinion polls have long shown that many people are uninformed about international affairs. For example, one Gallup Poll found that half of all Americans did not know that the United States had to import petroleum to meet its needs.
As important as formal education is, its influence sometimes does not change attitudes or improve understanding until a generation or two later. In immediate terms, the media flow of information and news throughout the globe can have a greater impact than education on the world's ability to understand its problems and dangers. Since World War II, an intricate and worldwide network of international news media has evolved, providing an expanded capability for information flows. This relationship between the capacity and the need to communicate rapidly has resulted from the interaction of two long-term historical processes: the evolution toward a single global society and the movement of civilization beyond four great benchmarks of human communication – speech, writing, printing...
