The impact of global communication

Mgema Musa z.
PRM 42615
06/06/2016

The impact of global communication on international relations in the theoretical discourse, military, diplomatic, economic, scientific, educational, and cultural arenas.

Global communication at the turn of the 21st century has brought about many effects on the one hand it is blurring technological economic political and cultural boundaries. Print photography film telephone and telegraphy, broadcasting satellites and computer technologies which developed fairly independently are rapidly merging into a digital stream of zeros and ones in the global communications networks.

Economically, separate industries that had developed around each of these technologies are combining to service the new multimedia environment through a series of corporate mergers and alliances. Politically, global communication is undermining the traditional boundaries and sovereignties of nations.
Direct Broadcast Satellite is violating national borders by broadcasting foreign news, entertainment, educational, and advertising programs with impunity.

Similarly, the micro-media of global communication are narrow casting their messages through audio and videocassette recorders, fax machines, computer disks and networks, including the Internet and the World Wide Web.

Culturally, the new patterns of global communication are creating a new global Coca colonized pop culture of commodity fetishism supported by global advertising and the entertainment industry
On the other hand, global communication is empowering hitherto forgotten groups and voices in the international community.

Its channels have thus become the arena for contestation of new economic, political, and cultural boundaries. Global communication, particularly in its interactive forms, has created immense new moral spaces for exploring new communities of affinity rather than vicinity. It is thus challenging the traditional top down economic, political, and cultural systems.

In Iran, it facilitated the downfall of a monarchical dictatorship in 1978-1979 through the use of cheap transistor audio cassette recorders in conjunction with international telephony to spread the messages of Ayatollah Khomeini to his followers within a few hours of their delivery from his exile in Paris (Tehranian, 1979, 1980, 1993).

In the Philippines, the downfall of the Marcos regime in 1986 was televised internationally for all to witness while alternative media were undermining his regime domestically.

In Saudi Arabia, a BBC program on "The Death of a Princess banned by the Saudi government as subversive, was smuggled into the country by means of videotapes the day after its premier showing on television in London.

In China, despite severe media censorship, the democracy movement in Tienanmen Square spread its message around the world in 1989 via the fax machines. In the Soviet Union, computer net workers who opposed the Moscow coup of 1991 and were sympathetic to Yeltsin, transmitted his messages everywhere despite severe censorship of the press and broadcasting (Ganley & Ganley 1987, 1989; Ganley 1992). In Mexico, the Zapatista movement managed to diffuse its messages of protest against the government worldwide in 1994 through the Internet. In this fashion, it solicited international support while embarrassing the Mexican government at a critical moment when it was trying to project a democratic image for admission to the North American Free Trade Agreement.

In Burma or Myanmar, as it is officially known, both government and opposition have employed the Internet in their political struggles. Email has been used to achieve rapid global mobilization for withdrawal of Western companies from Myanmar in protestant.

These are only a few examples. However, they demonstrate that accelerating technological advances in telecommunications and their worldwide dissemination are profoundly changing the rules of international relations. On the one hand, they are facilitating transfers of science, technology, information, and ideas from the centers to the peripheries of power. On the other, they are imposing a new cultural hegemony through the "soft power" (Nye 1990) of global news entertainment, and advertising.

Globalizing the local and localizing the global are the twin forces blurring traditional national boundaries. The conduct of foreign relations through traditional diplomatic channels has been both undermined and enhanced by information and communication resources available to non state actors.

The emergence of a global civil society in the form of over some 30,000 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) alongside nearly some 200 state actors as well as intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), transnational corporations (TNCs), and transnational media corporations (TMCs), has added to the complexity of international relations (Commission on Global Governance 1995).

Telecommunications is contributing to changes in the economic infrastructures, competitiveness, trade relations, as well as internal and external politics of states. It also affects national security, including the conduct and deterrence against wars, terrorism, civil war, the emergence of new weapons systems, command and control, and intelligence collection, analysis, and dissemination.

The Persian Gulf War provided a glimpse of what future wars might look like. The emergence of an international politics of cultural identity organized around religious, ethnic, or racial fetishisms suggests what the future issues in international relations might be.

Global communication is thus redefining power in world politics in ways that traditional theories of international relations have not yet seriously considered. More specifically, it is bringing about significant changes in four major arenas of hard and soft power. Hard power refers to material forces such as military and economic leverage, while soft power suggests symbolic forces such as ideological, cultural, or moral appeals. Major changes seem to be taking place in both hard and soft power conceptions and calculations.
First, information technologies have profoundly transformed the nature of military power because of emerging weapons systems dependent on laser and information processing.

Second, satellite remote sensing and information processing have established an information power and deterrence analogous to the nuclear power and deterrence of an earlier era.

Third, global television communication networks such as CNN, BBC, and Star TV have added image politics and public diplomacy to the traditional arsenals of power politics and secret diplomacy. Fourth, global communication networks working through NGOs and interactive technologies such as the Internet are creating a global civil society and pressure groups such as Amnesty International or Greenpeace that have served as new actors in international relations. Although no grand theoretical generalizations on the dynamics of hard and soft power are yet possible, trends indicate that the latter is assuming increasing importance.

International Relations theory has been dominated by five major schools of thought, Realism, Liberalism, Marxism, Communitarianism Postmodernism  provides a synopsis of the major propositions, principles and processes, units of analysis, and methodologies of these schools.

Realists have primarily focused on the geopolitical struggles for power, employed the nation-state as their chief unit of analysis, considered international politics as devoid of moral consensus and therefore prone to violence, and argued that the pursuit of national interest in the context of a balance of power strategy is the most efficient and realistic road to international peace and security.