Chapter 5 The Cultural Imperialism Debate Modernization theory regards development as a movement from traditional to modern societies. One of the earliest proponents of modernization theory was Daniel Lerner. According to his Western model of modernization, the first step in the process of modernization is that of urbanization. Urbanization, he says, is the transfer of population from scattered hinterlands to urban centres that stimulates the needs and provides the conditions needed for takeoff toward widespread participation 1. This rising urbanization leads to rise in literacy, which in turn leads to greater media exposure. This is followed by wider economic participation and social participation. This is the ultimate objective of modernization. Development is viewed as evolving beyond traditional structures which supposedly cannot accommodate rapid social change and economic growth; the attitudes, values and social relationship which support them are frequently conveyed by media and educational systems. Development communication study in the last three decades, it has been pointed out, has been characterized largely by the application of Western, especially American, generalizations and research methodology about mass communication and the modernization process. 2 Modernization theory including its mass communication versions held that the media would play a crucial role in promoting economic development through attitude change and the encouragement of innovative behaviour. This perspective was dominant during the first two decades of postwar economic prosperity that lasted until the oil shock of 1973 and consequent economic troubles exhausted the long wave of global capital accumulation. The surge of academic interest in transforming traditional societies into modern Western style democracies 25
could be observed in many fields of the social sciences. Communication and the media studies have been the most prominent of these. Wilbur Schramm sums up the situation as follows: In those heady days development meant either the creation of stable democratic governments to replace traditional, authoritarian regimes or more frequently government programmes to improve social conditions, agriculture and literacy. In both cases, mass media were assumed to be capable of compressing the time required for change and of multiplying the impact of development programmes. But even as efforts to mobilize mass media in support of development were gathering strength, objection were heard. 3 Development has been the single most important theme in the field of theorization of international communication, be it the perspective of modernization or the perspective of cultural dependency or cultural imperialism. In most cases development and modernization are used interchangeably to refer to examples of industrialization, economic growth, cultural and social differentiation and secularization. Lerner further advocates that Western society still provides the most developed model of societal attributes power, wealth skill, rationality which the less developed societies aspire. Westernization and Modernization are according to Lerner, synonymous and he chooses to speak of modernization only not to hurt middle east : sensibilities. A complication of Middle East modernization is its own ethnocentrism expressed politically in extreme nationalism, psychologically in passionate xenophobia. The hatred sown by anti-colonialism is harvested in the rejection of every appearance of foreign tutelage. Wanted are modern institutions but not modern ideologies, modern power but not modern purposes, modern wealth, but not modern wisdom, modern commodities but not modern cant. 4 There are two important points in this perspective, one is the importance of mass media as the disseminator of modern values. The second is the adoption of western values for development. 26
Lerner also emphasized the role of media as a mobility multiplier. The expansion of the psychic mobility means that more people now command greater skill in imagining themselves as strange persons in strange places, situations places and times than ever before. 5 There have been a number of other studies since then on the relationship between mass media and development/modernization. 6 However there have been critical perspectives of the modernization theory as well, since empirical evidence suggested that modernization led to more inequality and often was not environmentally sustainable. In a very important work Park talks of the possibility of development paths other than one based on Western experiences and other factors like the quality of life, degree of income distribution, etc that were factored in. Quoting the work of other authors like Reeves Park concludes that there would be substantial differences in the timing and sequence of modernization processes from one nation-state to another. 7 Melkotefor example, on the lines of Lerner suggested participation as an important model of development. 8 These dependency theories, often characterized as Neo- Weberian models were more concerned about the negativeness of external factors in the process of development. Almost echoing the modernization theories in communication, theories of economics too speak of a similar model. According to one such theory, the development process can be divided into five stages: traditional society, establishment of preconditions to takeoff, takeoff into sustained growth, the drive to maturity and the age of high mass consumption. 9 In most versions of this scheme, traditional and modern societies are placed opposite ends of the evolutionary scale. Not only was modernization a necessary condition for takeoff, it was also responsible for sustained development. According to subsequent studies, social modernization was able to generate continuing change, and also to absorb the stress of change and adopt itself to changing demands. In other words, the process seemed irreversible. Once the necessary conditions were established for take-off a country took off, became modern and stayed modern. 10 It is interesting to note at this stage that even contemporary theories accord an important place to media, in its empowering role by keeping tabs on the powerful. 27
Whereas the Panoptic renders many people visible to a few and enables poser to be exercised over the many by subjecting them to a state of permanent visibility, the development of communication media provides a means by which many people can gather information about a few thanks to the media, it is primarily those who exercise power, rather than those over whom power is exercised, who are subjected to a certain kind of visibility. 11 In earlier modernization theory, the dominant communications and national development paradigm emphasized the contribution of mass media to promotion of western-style capitalist development. This approach encouraged the view that industrialization in the developing world would be facilitated by the replication of these essential features in them. The transplantation of western media technologies and models would be an important factor in ensuring that poorer economies would ultimately become facsimiles of advanced capitalist ones. 12 Even later day media theorists as Lee have suggested that the media should be harnessed to such development objectives as political integration, socio-economic modernization and cultural expression. 13 Dependency The modernization theory position that the media would play an important role in promoting national development through encouragement of attitude change and the dissemination of useful information ran counter to the dominant view in advanced capitalist societies. In the latter the mass media were to play mainly a reinforcing role with respect to attitudes and values. Radical critics, strongly influenced by Frankfurt School critical theory, emphasized that the mass media, as large-scale commercial-industrial enterprises, were crucial in reproducing he dominant ideological-cultural relations of that society. As the forces of production develop, particularly under the aegis of capitalistic production, the individual cedes control of his life circumstances to the dominating influences of machines and markets. What is originally human becomes alien; human powers are experienced as forces emanating from an objectified social environment. 14 28
Western countries, especially the US, riding on unprecedented economic development, set up a huge communications infrastructure. The United States became the only country in the world to have two international news agencies and thus a dominant position in the world news market. This development took place simultaneously with the United States expansion in cable communications, radio and motion pictures. And in the entertainment industries US pop products are rivaled only by aircraft manufacturing as the nation s most profitable export. The historical perspective in modernizing countries quickly controverted modernization assumptions about the role of mass media in achieving development goals and contributing to social change. Privately owned media groups, although subject to often harsh governmental constraints and threats of nationalization in many countries, had little incentive to engage in development-type programming if this threatened profits or worked against the interests of capital associated with the media. 1 5 According to Golding, Cultural imperialism and dependency analysis is predicated on the interrelatedness of economic (including technological) structural relations, and ideological-cultural relations between advanced capitalist or industrial societies and those of most of Africa, Asia and Latin America. 16 This is the question for the grounds for attributing domination (expressed in the peculiarly martial language of invasion, attack, assault and so on) rather than the neutral or even positively valued notion of influence. 17 This emphasizes that the mass media in Third World regions were not the result of indigenous evolutionary development. Rather, they developed almost invariably as derivatives of those in the major capitalist societies and were transplanted and imposed from their metropolitan centres of origin during the extension of colonial and imperialist power from the nineteenth century onward. Scholars like Herbert Schiller believe that communication activity driven in the interests of multinational corporations brings about systemic, negative cultural consequences on a global scale. 18 According to Schiller, American cultural images and commodities have overwhelmed a good part of the world by smothering the senses with a consumerist virus. 29
Schiller blames such imperialist exploits mainly on the domestic and international political-military-industrial ambitions of the United States. Media and cultural imperialism is thought more of a corporate than a political force. In a majority of cultural imperialist theorizing, the emphasis is on the penetration of the Third World by advanced capitalist media and cultural production industries. A symbiotic relationship between multinational corporations and the advanced capitalist states is predicted to extend and defend international capitalism. Critics of imperialism saw the unequal development of media industries and imbalanced cultural flows between the developed countries and the developing world as an extension of domination and subordination evident in the economic sphere. They argued that the domination in the global communications media was consciously driven and aided by advanced states, prominently the U.S.A, in order to extend and defend the international market economy. 19 The large scale diffusion or transmission of values, ideologies, myths and images developed in advanced countries diminished traditional life styles and values, eroded indigenous culture and cultural identities in the developing world, and absorbed or integrated people in the developing societies into an international market-oriented economy. 20 In this process, the developing country and its ruling elite were perceived as either defenceless against or ideologically and economically subordinate to the internationally dominant powers. In order to maintain their own interests and hegemony, the ruling elite reproduced values and ideologies that originated from the dominant West, and promoted models of development which led to the intensification of dependence. 21 According to Schiller the involvement of the military-industrial complex in communications took two basic forms. In the first, control of the allocation of broadcasting frequencies and the making of national telecommunications policy was placed in the hands of the United States Department of Defense, and the not the Federal Communications Commission. In the second, indirectly, major electronic companies such as RCA-NBC are holders of important defence contracts. American media dominance stems from the implementation of United States foreign and defence policy, with the media at the same time being a crucial instrument of that policy. The dominance of American mass media is thus the direct product of the rise to global dominance of the United States after World War II. 30
In addition to these there are various categories of trans-media support activities, most important of which are advertising agencies, market survey and opinion polling services, public relations firms, government information and propaganda services and traditional media. 22 The extremely asymmetrical flow of communications materials and cultural commodities between the advanced capitalist countries and those of the Third World is not simply a commercial exchange, but rather a part of the process whereby the latter are dominated by the communications ideologies of the major capitalist countries. Also integral to this process is the incorporation of these countries into the market-oriented, consumer-capitalist economies through apparently neutral or harmless media products. In Nordenstreng and Varis s (1974) approach the expansion of the market and control in communications, and cultural production in general, stems from the internal contradictions of the capitalist system, including its financial, industrial, military, advertising, and cultural structures. This cultural imperialist position, as with economic dependency models assumes that there are levels of dominance and dependency amongst nation: there are exploiting metropoles or centres, and there are exploited satellites or peripheries. 23 The dominant nations exercise a largely unchallenged dominance in scientific and technological research and development, and produce the basic technical means of media and cultural production throughout most of the dependent world. One of the postulates of this dependency model is that local cultural identity is subverted and destroyed so that the values of the dominant metropolitan economies and their transnational corporations can be adopted, even imposed. Dependency writers often verge closely on the economic and cultural autarky view in which a necessary connection is established between an independent cultural and economic development. Hamelink, for example with his notion of cultural synchronization, makes independent development dependent on a cultural autonomy which can only be secured through the pursuit of policies of international dissociation. 24 In much of the dependency writing on ideology it was assumed that the dominant ideologies in the dependent social formations are either imposed by the metropolitan capitalist powers (or their agents, the transnational corporations) in accordance with their interests or else adopted by the ruling classes in the dependent countries as a way of defending and extending both their interests and those of international capital. 25 31
Other critics have argued that any theoretical elaboration of the cultural dependency position suffers from internal contradictions which stem from a mechanistic approach to society and from an essentially dichotomous view of social reality that fails to apprehend the complexity and variety of the so called Latin American culture. 26 A Latin American study states, To struggle to make oneself independent of colonial power in a head-on combat with a geographical defined power is very different from struggling for one s own identity inside a transnational system which is diffuse, completely interrelated and interpenetrated. 27 Modelski, on the other handdraws the link between multinational business activity which originates either in North America (US & Canada), in Western Europe or in Japan and cultural dominance. 28 American predominance in this field is of quite long standing, because the management and operation of mining and manufacturing establishments in foreign countries has been for US companies a significant experience for the past one hundred years. The great bulk of multinational activity in the early seventies was still accounted for by a few industries, each controlled by a few large companies. The most important was the oil industry. Standard Oil of New Jersey, the Royal Dutch-Shell group, Texaco, Gulf, Mobil and British Petroleum together controlled close to three-quarters of the free world market in petroleum.next in importance was the automobile industry: General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Volkswagen, Fiat, British Motors, Nissan and Toyota dominate world production and account for perhaps another quarter of multinational activity. The third most vital industry but rising in importance concerns electronics and computer and here the crucial firms include IBM, IT&T, Westinghouse Electric, Philips, Siemens and Hitachi. 29 He however does not find any relation between the growing strength of the multinationals and their participation in wars in the period since 1945. Modelski does not find any motive for political domination by these giant multinational companies. The cultural dependency/imperialism perspective instead of providing a positive role to media in the cause of modernization, criticized the role of mass media in helping the status quo of existing power structures. Park sees three different threads in the impact of western media products on the developing countries. a) the monopolization and transnationalization of Western 32
media industries and the control of information on a global scale; b) the result of the one-way flow of media products from advanced capitalist countries to developing countries and c) the transfer of Western media institutions and capitalist ideology to the Third World. 30 One important feature of the cultural dependency perspective was the primacy accorded to economic relations. The economic imperatives of the Western media institutions was regarded as the driving force for cultural dependency. Media Imperialism The terms media imperialism and cultural imperialism have been used interchangeably in a number of studies. Boyd-Barrett in his groundbreaking work used the term media imperialism and defined it as the process in which media ownership and media systems become subordinate to the pressure of the other country. He highlighted the issue of the unilateral flow in the international trade and the monopolization in the global media market by a few countries. 31 Schiller (1971) on the other hand, suggests that it is pointless to pursue the media imperialism line of inquiry since the consequences of the heavy impact of the cultural-ideological outputs of the transnational corporations are not open to any meaningful measurement. 32 The media imperialism discourse was firstly catalyzed by Nordenstreng and Varis in their UNESCO sponsored study of media products trade in 1974 33. They pointed out the inequality of trade and manifested that there existed a one-way flow of media products from the advanced countries to the developing and the less developed countries. Furthermore, those media products imported to the developing and the less developed countries worked as a factor in building the international capitalism structure. As a result, not only can a few western countries dominate the global media trade, but also can disseminate their capitalistic and cultural values: the individualism and the consumerism. 34 Also, the unilateral and asymmetric flow of media products contributes to cultural homogenization and the dissemination of consumerist ideology. 35 33
For many neo-marxists the concept media imperialism is too constricting in the sense that it isolates individual media from an overall set of economic and ideological-cultural relations. 36 Tomlinson, however sees a definite design in the usage of either cultural or media imperialism to define the process. Although he agrees with the notion of imperialism and domination, he is unsure of the roots of domination. At their most usefully general, both imperialism and domination contain the negatively marked notions of power, domination or control. The real problem for us is that there are various orders of power, domination or control involved in claims about cultural imperialism: those exercised by the nations for example, or by capitalism or some global process of development or context of modernity. 37 The usage of cultural or media imperialism accords a particular status to media. Neo Marxists prefer the broader term cultural imperialism because they adopt a more holistic view of the role of the media, seeing them as implicated in the larger totality of domination. Non-Marxists on the other hand are said to prefer to deal with media imperialism rather than the all encompassing cultural imperialism, since they do not accept, a priori, the implied broader context of domination, nor media imperialism s situation within it. The non-marxist (pluralist) preference is for a term that grasps a more specific range of phenomenon that lends itself more easily to a rigorous examination. 38 Leesuggests that whatever links that exist between the media and other aspects of culture, or indeed the connections between the economics, politics and culture generally are not assumed in terms of a grand theory at the outset. He seems deliberately to accept the pluralist view in that media imperialism is a viable term on its own, deliberately restrictive, grounds. 39 Though the media may be analytically connected or separable from other aspects of culture, it is clear that they are intimately connected with these other aspects in terms of people s lived experience. People s experience of television, for example, is very often within the cultural context of the family and this context has a significant mediating effect. The general principle, then of an abstraction from a cultural totality is highly problematic. 34
Tomlinson sees arguments about the media as aspects of cultural imperialism and finds it necessary not to try to separate out a discrete range of phenomena called media imperialism having no imputed connection with a broader cultural totality. Media imperialism then is a particular way of discussing cultural imperialism. 40 According to him, some writers use the two terms as synonyms and this might imply that the media have an overwhelming importance in the process referred to as cultural imperialism. Culture imperialism might seem to centre on media in two ways: either as the domination of one culture s media (texts, practices) over another; or as the global spread of mass-mediated culture. Both involve the idea that the media are at the crux of modern culture. 41 Tomlinson s Cultural Imperialism Discourse Tomlinson speaks of the relationship of the media to other aspects of culture without assuming its centrality from the outset. One of the constructs is to consider cultural imperialism as a discourse of nationality. His contention is that if the media are the most common focus for discussions of cultural imperialism, the idea of the invasion of an indigenous culture by a foreign one is the commonest way of articulating the process involved. Indigenous may be taken uncontroversially as a synonym for native meaning belonging to a geographical area. A subsidiary sense of indigenous is that of belonging naturally, and though this may offer a sort of answer to how a culture belongs, it is one fraught with theoretical problems. For if we take anything for granted about culture, it is that it is not a natural phenomenon. Talk in the Unesco is indeed in a certain sense restricted to nations. This being so, the arguments we shall have to examine cluster around the idea of a national cultural identity and the threats posed to this by cultural imperialism. 42 The second discourse is of cultural imperialism as the critique of global capitalism. It usually involves seeing the world as a political-economic system of global capitalism, rather than the more common view of it as a collection of political entities 35
called nation-states. This has the consequence of casting capitalism itself, rather than particular nation-states as the imperialist power. 43 Lurking behind them these specific difficulties is the big general problem of how we are to think about capitalism as culture. Capitalism as Marx certainly saw is more than a mode of production. It implies a cultural totality of technical-economic, political, social-relational, experiential and symbolic moments. There ought therefore to be a way of speaking of cultural imperialism as the global dominance of capitalist culture. 44 The final way of speaking is that which stresses the effects of cultural imperialism not on individual cultures, but, as it were on the world itself. It is what is described as the critical discourse of modernity. Modernity refers to the main cultural direction of global development. Thus the drift towards a sort of global cultural homogeneity is (toward) a particular modern way of life and includes capitalism, urbanism, mass communications, a technical-scientific-rational dominant ideology, a system of (mainly secular) nation-states, a particular way of organizing social space and experience and a certain subjective-existential mode of self awareness. Cultural imperialism as the critique of modernity implies a critique of the domination of these global cultural determinants. 45 Cultural Imperialism The media/cultural imperialism thesis was the embodiment of the dependency paradigm in international communication research. As we have discussed in the earlier sections Boyd-Barrett, Mattelart, Schiller and Tunstall were among its leading founding figures. They analyzed how Western multinational corporations, with the support of political regimes of wealthy countries and national elite groups in the developing world, dominated international cultural and media flows. This paradigm continued to be influential, especially in the context of the New World Information and Communication Order debate. Cultural imperialism is defined as the process by which the developed countries subjugate the media systems of the less developed countries and economically profits from the subjugation; the local cultures are supplanted with the ideology, value 36
system, and lifestyle of the developed countries resulting in the extinction of the local culture; and eventually, the dependency of the less developed countries is perpetuated. This idea is closely associated with political economist and communication studies scholar Herbert Schiller, who initially proposed a broader thesis of cultural imperialism. 46 He described cultural imperialism as: the sum of the processes by which a society is brought into the modern world system and how its dominating stratum is attracted, pressured, forced and sometimes bribed into shaping social institutions to correspond to, or even promote, the values and structures of the dominating center of the system Schiller argued that cultural industries of the West, including the mass media, are part of a world capitalist system and serve as the ideologically supportive informational infrastructure of the modern world system s core the multinational corporations. The task of the cultural industries was to extend and defend these transnational corporations. Schiller further argued that the point of globally distributed cultural products from the West was to create packaged audiences whose loyalties are tied to brand-named products and whose understanding of social reality is mediated through a sale of commodity satisfaction. This relationship makes weaker states dependent on the stronger foreconomic and cultural resources. 47 Referring to the role of media in Western models ofdevelopment, Schiller says in this process the media are the means that entice and instruct their audiences along this path, while at the same time concealing the deeper reality and the long-term consequences that course produces. This version of media imperialism has two components: The first componentargues that the global growth and reach of western media industries is closely linked to the broader trend of western transnational corporations dominating the global political economy. The increasing global prominence of western media giants, their links to transnational corporations and the global predominance of western media products is well documented. 48 The second component asserts that the Western media products manipulate audiences to think and behave in ways that are beneficial for the profit-making goals of the western transnational corporations. 37
The definition of cultural imperialism varies. Schiller defined culture imperialism as the comprehensive explanation of the process in which a society or a country is incorporated into the international structure and the ruling classes of the society maintain and even reinforce their value system and order within its own country. Galtung focused more on the pattern of the communication distribution by viewing the communication and cultural imperialism as an advanced form of imperialism and the basic form of the future imperialism. 49 He defined cultural imperialism as the normative element in the structurally dependent relationship between the advanced and the undeveloped society, indicating that the effect of international media is significant. Another important area of study during the period was the development of capitalism and imperialism. A number of important studies were conducted during the sixties on these lines. Frank for example contended that underdevelopment was not an original state but a result of colonial exploitation which went back to the sixteenth century. As early as 1957, Baran argued that imperialism reinforces the gap between First World and developing countries. 50 Tunstall included culture more explicitly in his definition: authentic, traditional and local culture is being battered out of existence by the indiscriminate dumping of large quantities of slick commercial and media products, mainly from the United States. 51 Beltran considers cultural imperialism as a verifiable process of social influence by which a nation imposes on other countries its set of beliefs, values,knowledge, and behavioral norms as well as its overall style of life. 52 Fejesconcludes that cultural imperialism research perceives the mass media a primarily manipulative agents capable of having direct, unmediated effects on the audience's behavior and world view. 53 Boyd-Barrett prefers the use of media imperialism as a distinct analytical tool because it restricts the range of phenomena to be dealt with and allows for a more rigorous examination of the specific institutional arrangements and mechanics of imperialism. For Fejes however, the empirical studies inspired by the media imperialism thesis have little explanatory power since they are not located in any theoretical framework. 38
Without theory delineating the bounds of explanation, there is the danger of media imperialism becoming a pseudo-concept, something that can be used to explain everything in general about the media, but nothing in particular. 54 If the media imperialism approach has theoretical underpinnings they reside in a Marxist critique of capitalism and the effort to situate the global expansion of western communications media as part of an overall capitalist expansion. However, Fejes, notes, there is little of sufficient precision and detail in the theoretical underpinnings to make them Marxist. For Lee, media, or more specifically television imperialism, is characterized by: first, television programme exportation to foreign countries; second, foreign ownership and control of media outlets; third, the transfer of the broadcasting norms and institutionalizing of media commercialism at the expense of public interest ; and fourth, the invasion of capitalistic world views and infringement upon the indigenous way of life in the recipient nations. 56 Imperialism, for Lenin, is the highest stage of capitalism in which monopolists seek profitable investment abroad as a way of overcoming stagnation at home. His basic thesis was that with the development of industrial capitalism, competition led inevitably to concentration of capital in the form of monopoly, cartels and trade combines. Their control of domestic markets in the advanced economies was so firm that the competition which had fostered innovation had largely vanished, the living standards of the masses could no longer rise, and the expanded profits of the monopolists would eventually find all profitable spheres of domestic investment exhausted. The exhaustion of domestic investment exhausted. The exhaustion of domestic investment outlets abroad, which led to the division and re-division of the world by the leading imperialist states. The media apparatuses of both the metropolitan capitalist and the peripheral capitalist ones are considered important. Ideological-cultural power exerted by the transnational corporations of the advanced capitalist societies is indispensable for the continuing control, the ideological subversion or incorporation of indigenous ruling classes, and the encouragement of consumption preferences and internalization of values conducive to the interests of international capitalism. 39
The neo-imperialist position attempts to locate ideological-cultural relations, and mass media, in a dynamic international political-economic setting. Lee suggests that the media should be harnessed to such development objectives as political integration, socio-economic modernization and cultural expression. 56 An unduly narrow concentration on the flow of media products such as television programmes, films and news stories between the advanced capitalist countries and the Third World both ignores and obscures many important dimensions of the process and misinterprets the basic concern. 57 Schiller s hypothesis For Schiller, communication material from the US offers a vision of a way of life. These messages for him are not value-neutral but they carry along with them the image of a mountain of material of artifacts, privately furnished and individually acquired and consumed. The emphasis in the programming and advertising is on the first and last elements of the American triptych. The imagery envelops all viewers and listeners within the range of electronic impulses patterned after the American model and that radius is untiringly being enlarged. 58 The world order saw a realignment following the Second World War. Schiller traces the historical reasons for the massive shift in the global distribution of power points. The upsurge of American industrial strength more than matched the recession of European authority, which was once the source of its colonial might. Schiller outlines the growth in American communications infrastructure to match its industrial strength. The lopsided growth among nations provides them with huge opportunities in the free-flow hypothesis. Information moving between nations on the basis of economic opportunities and competition unimpeded by other national or cultural considerations, affords American communication media the same advantages American commerce now receives from free world trade paterns that are also minimally controlled by nation states. 59 40
He even refers to the English national policy in the latter part of the nineteenth century, described by certain historians as free trade imperialism, as reflective of the American designs in the later twentieth century. Something that will be described later as soft power. Elaborating on the free trade imperialism theme, he describes it as trade with informal control if possible, trade with rule when necessary. The free trade dictum almost pointed out naturally to the by the free flow of information thesis, whereby no restrictions were to be imposed on flow of information beyond national boundaries. He held that free trade was the mechanism by which a powerful economy penetrates and dominates a weaker one, the free flow of information, would be the channel through which lifestyles and value systems could be imposed on poor and vulnerable societies. The tangible benefits for the developed countries in imposing these lifestyles and value systems were not apparent at the outset. Perhaps a special sophistication is required to comprehend the material benefits that accrue to the transmitter nation from the intangible messages and information it processes for weaker, receiver societies. 60 He quotes extensively from American government sources to substantiate systematic efforts of the American establishment to establish dominance over global information system. Quoting from the Hearings before a subcommittee of the committee on the Government operations, House of Representatives, on the government use of satellite communication89 th Congress, second session, August and September 1966 p 284, testimony before the committee stated: To a certain degree what America does will shape the emerging international communication system Given our information technology and information resources, The US clearly could be the hub of the world communication system. The rapid growth of our International Telecommunication system is a matter of the greatest importance in strengthening our mutual interest and understanding In this connection it is interesting to note that the British Commonwealth still has a somewhat larger international complex of communications than does the US. A comparison is also made with the techniques adopted by Lenin to bypass the communication infrastructure of the bourgeois state to communicate directly to the 41
masses. For Schiller, the methods adopted by American transnational corporations had a similar objective. From the beginning of the 1917 Revolution, Lenin had emphasized the value of getting the ear of the masses in other nations and circumventing the tiresome and generally unsympathetic channels of the bourgeois state. A half-century later, the combination of prolonged economic prosperity and communications sophistication has produced comparable sentiments in the American command community. Schiller regards the aggressive and powerful industrial-electronic complex working systematically to extend the American socio-economic system spatially and ideologically. 61 A number of pluralist scholars found it misleading to ascribe imperialism to the cultural and economic dominance of western powers. Schiller quotes a number of writers including Daniel H Kruger who writes It is certainly misleading to describe by the same word imperialism both the European statesmen who plan ruthlessly to overrun a country in Asia or African and the American company building an automobile assembly part in Israel. Others, echoing the modernization theory asserted that what was regarded as exploitative imperialism about a half-century ago is now regarded on almost all sides virtually as benevolences extended to economically backward nations starved for development, capital.hobson s imperialism is dead, which is not the same of course, as to say, as some scholars do, that it never existed. In other words, western powers were almost working for the development of backward/traditional societies. Quoting former Deputy secretary of state for Economic Affairs George W Ball delivered to the New York Chamber of Commerce in May 1969, Schiller writes, Ball sees few things more hopeful for the future that the growing determination of American business to regard national boundaries as no longer fixing the horizons of their corporate activity. 62 Schiller, however, is not dismissive of role of media in national development. He regards the dominant patterns of ownership of western powers which almost a priori, uses media for economic gains to be responsible for the present systems of dependency. Communications which could be a vigorous mechanism of social change, have become instead, a major obstacle to national reconstruction. They have been seized by the commanding interests in the market economy, to promote narrow national 42
and international objectives while simultaneously making alternate paths seems either undesirable or preventing their existence from becoming known. 63 He continues with the theme further. He considers the communication technology as value neutral. It is however the uses that they are put to that causes it to be source of domination or enlightenment. Communications media of course are neutral. The purposes to which they are put are not. Modern communications can be given a revolutionary role. The reversal of radio s function in a colonial area once the Algerian liberation war had begun, is a case in point.broadcasting became a means of enlightenment, hope and national unity, contrasted with its earlier source of cultural domination and pressure. If Radio Algiers in the colonial period represented Frenchmen talking to Frenchmen, once the liberation war began it became the instrument of public information for the illiterate Algerian masses. 64 The process of American dominance in media is not just limited to its role in the developing countries. Canadian scholars too have been scathing in their criticism of the American dominance. Canada is in contact with US along a great undefended border, and by the process of Osmosis America is destroying not only our television but our values and our very culture.american television has made the development of a Canadian cultural identity almost impossible Through its own faulty development, American television has negatively influenced the development of a worthy native television in Canada. American television has destroyed television as an art. 65 Schiller describesthe American mass media s penetration (he prefers the term saturation) as representative of a sectorof the staggering global invasion by American electronic communication. This is not just a result of the common boundary that the US shares with Canada but has more to do with deliberate attempts by the US to establish global dominance in media and communications. One area where the dominance is extremely visible is the British film industry. In his celebrated work Guback, for example found that close to half of the films currently made in Great Britain are made by subsidiaries of American companies or by British producers working with American money. 66 A majority of total financing for British production comes from American sources. As much as three quarters of the 43
production subsidy from the Film Fund Agency a government sanctioned public body I paid to subsidiaries of American companies for their production in Britain. Almost half of all films shown in Great Britain are distributed by American companies in which there is an important American interest. Considering the number of new films entering into distribution each year in Great Britain, American films outnumber British films. In the later part of his book Schiller concedes that there may not be a conspiratorial effort by transnational corporations in extending and defending their dominance, however, there is all the same a very clear consciousness present of how to utilize communications for both highly ideological and profitable ends. 67 Schiller quotes two distinguished pluralist scholars of his time. Their argument was that any ideological underpinnings were behind American dominance. He quotes Ithiel de Sola Pool: the function that American international communication can serve is to provide people with things for which they are craving but which is not readily available to them. He mentioned world news as an example and added Another thing that people crave is simply to see what a modern way of life is like seeing commodities, seeing how people live, or hearing popular music. And then Joseph Klapper: The broadcasting of popular music is not likely to have any immediate effect on the audience s political attitude. He noted, but this kind of communication nevertheless provides a sort of entryway of Western ideas and Western concepts, even though these concepts may not be explicitly and completely stated at any one particular moment in the communication. 68 In what amounts to an admission of the modernization theory, Schiller is apprehensive of the power of communications technology in shaping a nature s future, specially those of new nations. Mistakes and failures in agriculture and industry if momentarily disastrous are still remediable. Cultural patterns once established are endlessly persistent. The opportunity to freshly mould a new nation s outlook and social behaviour is historically unique and merits the most careful deliberation. Yet in modern mass communications hard and inflexible laws, economic and technological, operate. If these are not taken into account in the beginning, and at least partially overcome, courses of development unfold that soon become questioned natural pattern. 69 He sees the cultural homogenization that has been underway for years in the US could threaten to overtake the globe The era of mechanized and 44
centralisedcommunication via the syndicated press, radio, movies and television, has created a gleichschaltung unprecedented in history. To summarize, Schiller s thesis proposes that global communications controlis indispensable for the exercise of international authority. The breakdown of former colonialism, the independent movements across the world, the emergence of American power, and a breathtaking new technology are creating new patterns in international communications. Two way information flows are replacing the traditional one-way circuits. Regions formerly inaccessible or deemed unimportant to colonial administrators have been or are being drawn into widening informational nets. Radio and television has been controlled continuously by the industrial concerns that organized their discovery and development. Television came into the market as the research product of electronic equipment and radio manufacturing corporations and then incidentally as a news medium of communications. Corporate interests determined the timing of the products introduction, the pace of its technological growth, the sped with which it was delivered to the public, the character of its financing and the content of its programming. Television, the most educative force in existence has been left almost entirely to private considerations and vagaries of the market place. 70 A Structural Theory of Imperialism. The structural theory holds that western media serve as a vehicle for western values, western norms and culture. Along with news and entertainment, western media carry to the developing nations images of a more prosperous life and more exciting lifestyles. Pictures of the western way of life are said to create social political and economic changes in the Third World through the demonstration effect. This is a way of life based largely on capitalist economies and consumer-oriented markets. According to Galtung, the global development of imperialism is a function of the means by which the Western powers have established a harmony of interests between themselves and the dependent economies of the South. In the third and emerging state of imperialism, this means is the instant communication afforded by telesatellite and the movement of (or access to) enormous computer data banks across national boundaries. Such instant communication allegedly facilitates control of the 45
North over the South even more effectively than the old means of military occupation or economic domination by multinational corporations. 71 Galtung identified five types of imperialism: economic, political, military, communication, and cultural. Galtung says that imperialism can be introduced in any of these five forms and then spread to the others, it is in communication imperialism that Galtung finds the primary impetus to cultural imperialism. 72 Electronic Colonialism Electronic colonialism is the dependency relationship established by the importation of communication hardware, foreign-produced software, along with engineers, technicians, and related information protocols, that vicariously establish a set of foreign norms, values and expectations which in varying degrees may alter the domestic cultures and socialization process. Comic books to satellites, computers to lasers, along with more traditional fare such as radio programmes, theatre, movies and wire services to television shows demonstrate the wide range of information activities which make up the broad configuration of what is possible to send and thus to receive. 73 McPhail traces the changes that have occurred in the contemporary society to prove the importance of the communications infrastructure. The two major changes are the rise of nationalism, centred mainly in the Third World, and the shift to a service-based economy in the West which relies substantially on telecommunication system where traditionally geographical borders and barriers to international communications are rendered obsolete. 74 The postindustrial society, with information related services being the cornerstone, has significant implications for industrial and non-industrial nations alike. Military and mercantile colonialism of the past may be replaced by electronic colonialism in the future. A nation-state may now be able to go from the Stone Age to the Information Age without having passed through the intervening steps of industrialization. 75 For McPhail, the displacement, rejection, altering or forgetting of domestic and native materials is a major concern for the Third World. Significantly, he considers, electronic colonialism of the 20 th century to be as dreaded as mercantile colonialism of the 18 th and 19 th centuries. 46