International Communication

Continuity and Change

Daya Kishan Thussu

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781780932668
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The third edition of International Communication examines the profound changes that have taken place, and are continuing to take place at an astonishing speed, in international media and communication. Building on the success of previous editions, this book maps out the expansion of media and telecommunications corporations within the macro-economic context of liberalisation, deregulation and privitisation. It then goes on to explore the impact of such growth on audiences in different cultural contexts and from regional, national and international perspectives. Each chapter contains engaging case studies which exemplify the main concepts and arguments.

1

The Historical Context of International Communication

The study of contemporary international communication can be illuminated by an understanding of the elements of continuity and change in its development. The nexus of economic, military and political power has always depended on efficient systems of communication, from flags, beacon fires and runners, to ships, telegraph wires and now satellites and cables. The evolution of telegraphic communication and empire in the nineteenth century exemplifies these interrelationships, which have continued throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, well after the end of empire. During two world wars and the Cold War, the power and significance of new media – radio and then television – for international communication were demonstrated by their use for international propaganda as well as recognizing their potential for socio-economic development.

Communication and empire

Communication has always been critical to the establishment and maintenance of power over distance. From the Persian, Greek and Roman empires to the British, efficient networks of communication were essential for the imposition of imperial authority, as well as for the international trade and commerce on which they were based. Indeed, the extent of empire could be used as an ‘indication of the efficiency of communication’ (Innis, [1950] 1972: 9). Communications networks and technologies were key to the mechanics of distributed government, military campaigns and trade.

The Greek historian, Diodorus Cronus (fourth century bc) recounts how the Persian king, Darius I (522–486 bc), who extended the Persian Empire from the Danube to the Indus, could send news from the capital to the provinces by means of a line of shouting men positioned on heights. This kind of transmission was thirty times faster than using runners. In De Bello Gallico, Julius Caesar (100–144 bc) reports that the Gauls, using the human voice, could call all their warriors to war in just three days. Using fire at night and smoke or mirrors during the day is mentioned in ancient texts, from the Old Testament to Homer.

While many rulers, including the Greek polis, used inscription for public information, writing became a more flexible and efficient means of conveying information over long distances: ‘Rome, Persia and the Great Khan of China all utilized writing in systems of information gathering and dispersal, creating wide-ranging official postal and dispatch systems’ (Lewis, 1996: 152). It is said that the Acta Diurna, founded by Julius Caesar and one of the forerunners of modern news media, were distributed across most of the Roman Empire: ‘as communication became more efficient, the possibility of control from the centre became greater’ (Lewis, 1996: 156).

The Indian Emperor Ashoka’s edicts, inscribed on rock in the third century bc, are found across South Asia, from Afghanistan to Sri Lanka and writers had a prominent place in the royal household. The epigraphs were mainly in the Brahmi script, but the language used was a mixture of Prakrti dialect, to ensure that such public communication reached the widest audience, as a recent study demonstrates (Lahiri, 2015). During the Mughal period in Indian history (1526–1858), the waqi’a-nawis (newswriters) were employed by the kings to inform them of progress in the empire. Both horsemen and dispatch runners transmitted the news and reports. In China, the T’ang dynasty (618–907) created a formal hand-written publication, the ti pao or ‘official newspaper’, which disseminated information to the elite, and in the Qing period (1644–1911) private news bureaux sprang up which composed and circulated official news in the printed form known as the Ch’ing pao (Smith, 1979).

In addition to official systems of communication, there have also always been informal networks of travellers and traders. The technologies of international communication and globalization may be contemporary phenomena, but trade and cultural interchanges have existed more than two millennia ago between the Graeco-Roman world and Arabia, Iran, India and China. Indian merchandise was exported to the Persian Gulf and then overland through Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean coast and onwards to Europe. An extensive trans-Asian trade flourished from ancient times, linking China with India and the Arabic lands. The Silk Roads through central Asia linked China, India and Persia with Europe. Information and ideas were communicated across continents, as shown by the spread of Buddhism, Christianity and Islam.

The media of communication developed from the clay tablet of Mesopotamia, the papyrus roll in ancient Egypt and in ancient Greece, to parchment codex in the Roman Empire. By the eighth century, paper introduced from China began to replace parchment in the Islamic world and then spread to medieval Europe. Also from China, printing slowly diffused to Europe, aided by the Arab occupation of Spain, but it was not until the fifteenth century, with the movable-type printing press developed by Johann Gutenberg, a goldsmith in Mainz in Germany, that the means of communication were transformed.

By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the printing presses were turning out thousands of copies of books in all the major European languages. For the first time Christianity’s Holy Scriptures were available in a language other than Latin, undermining the authority of priests, scribes and political and cultural elites. As a consequence, ‘the unified Latin culture of Europe was finally dissolved by the rise of the vernacular languages which was consolidated by the printing press’ (Febvre and Martin, 1990: 332). Coupled with vernacular translations of the Bible by William Tyndale into English and Martin Luther into German, the printing revolution helped to lay the basis for the Reformation and the foundations of nation state and of modern capitalism (Tawney, 1937; Eisenstein, 1979; Barbier, [2006], 2017).

Printing in the vernacular languages of Europe, especially Portuguese, Spanish, English and French, became the main vehicle of communication for the European colonial powers in many parts of the world. This transplantation of communication systems around the globe created a new hierarchy of language and culture in the conquered territories (Smith, 1980). The Portuguese Empire was one of the first to grasp the importance of the medium for colonial consolidation, with the kings of Portugal sending books in the cargoes of ships carrying explorers. They opened printing presses in the territories they occupied – the first in Goa in 1557 and in Macao in 1588. Other European powers also used the new technology, and the printed book played an important role in the colonization of Asia, particularly as used by missionaries disseminating translations of the Bible to local populations.

The Industrial Revolution in Western Europe, founded on the profits of the growing international commerce encouraged by colonization, gave a huge stimulus to the internationalization of communication (Bayly, 2004). Britain’s domination of the sea routes of international commerce was to a large extent due to the pre-eminence of its navy and merchant fleet, a result of pioneering work in the mapping out of naval charts by the great eighteenth-century explorers, such as James Cook, enabled also by the determination of longitude based on the Greenwich Meridian. Technological advances, such as the development of the steam engine, the iron ship and the electric telegraph all helped to keep Britain ahead of its rivals.

The growth of international trade and investment required a constant source of reliable data about international trade and economic affairs, while the British Empire required a reliable supply of information essential for maintaining political alliances and military security. Waves of emigration as a result of industrialization and empire helped to create a popular demand for news from relatives at home and abroad, and a general climate of international awareness (Smith, 1980).

The postal reform in England in 1840, initiated by the well-known author Anthony Trollope as postmaster general, with the adoption of a single-rate postage stamp (the Penny Black), irrespective of distance, revolutionized postal systems. This was followed by the establishment of the Universal Postal Union in 1875 in Berne, under the Universal Postal Convention of 1874, created to harmonize international postal rates and to recognize the principle of respect for the secrecy of correspondence. With the innovations in transport of railways and steamships, international links were being established that accelerated the growth of European trade and consolidated colonial empires.

The growth of the telegraph

The second half of the nineteenth century saw an expanding system of imperial communications made possible by the electric telegraph. Described as the ‘first transnational electronic communication system, paralleling the modern internet’ (Lahiri Choudhury, 2010: 2), it transformed global communication. Invented by Samuel Morse in 1837, the telegraph enabled the rapid transmission of information as well as ensured secrecy and code protection. The business community was first to make use of this new technology. The speed and reliability of telegraphy were seen to offer opportunities for profit and international expansion (Headrick, 1991; Hugill, 1999; Hochfelder, 2012). The rapid development of the telegraph was a crucial feature in the unification of the British Empire (Winseck and Pike, 2007; Lahiri Choudhury, 2010). With the first commercial telegraph link set up in Britain in 1838, by 1851 a public telegraph service, including a telegraphic money order system, had been introduced. By the end of the century, as a result of the cable connections, the telegraph allowed the Colonial Office and the India Office to communicate directly with the Empire within minutes when, previously, it had taken months for post to come via sea (Winseck and Pike, 2007). By providing spot prices for commodities like cotton, the telegraph enabled British merchants, exporting cotton from India or Egypt to England, to easily beat their competitors (Read, 1992).

The new technology also had significant military implications. The overhead telegraph, installed in Algeria in 1842, proved a decisive aid to the French during the occupation and colonization of Algeria (Mattelart, 1994). During the Crimean War (1854–56), the rival imperial powers, Britain and France, trying to prevent Russian westward expansion that threatened overland routes to their colonial territories in Asia, exchanged military intelligence through an underwater cable in the Black Sea laid by the British during the conflict. The Crimean conflict was also notable for the pioneering war reports of Irishman William Howard Russell in the Times of London, who was to become the first ‘big name’ in international journalism.

Similarly, during the Civil War in the United States of America (1861–65), over 24,000 kilometres of cable was laid to send more than 6.5 million telegrams. The American Civil War was not only one of the earliest conflicts to be extensively reported, but also the first example both of cooperative news gathering among the American and European journalists and of the use of photojournalism (Hochfelder, 2012). The first underwater telegraphic cable, which linked Britain and France, became operational in 1851 and the first transatlantic cable connected Britain and the United States in 1866. Between 1851 and 1868, underwater networks were laid down across the ...