UNESCO Courier, Feb 1995 p11(4)
Unequal voices. (The Multimedia Explosion: Quo Vadis?) Armand Mattelart.
Brief Summary: Advanced communications, globalization of markets and freer
movements of
people, goods and messages may be creating new disparities between regions,
countries and social
groups. People should think more deeply about the social consequences of
globalization to avoid its
negative consequences.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT UNESCO (France) 1995 Globalization of markets and
exchanges is
creating new disparities between nations and may lead to a two-speed communication
system as well
as a two-speed economy.
Communication (not only through the media, but also in the sense of exchanges
and the free
movement of persons, goods and messages of all kinds) has become a form
of world organization.
Confronted with the bankruptcy of the old ideology of continuous, linear
progress, communication has
now taken over. It has become the yardstick by which the evolution of humankind
is judged at a time
when people have lost their bearings and are searching desperately for
the meaning of their future.
The English term "globalization" is often used to describe this phase in
the international growth of
exchanges through the development of communications. Globalization has
already become a reality:
increasingly, our societies are linked up by information and communication
networks whose logic
consists in operating in a universal mode. But it is also an over-simplifying
notion - a ready-made
ideological approach which conceals, instead of revealing, the complexity
of this new world order.
Although the idea of the "global village" was first mooted in the late
1960s by the Canadian university
professor Marshall McLuhan(1), this view of our planet did not gain a firm
foothold until the 1980s,
which witnessed the globalization of markets, financial circuits, companies
and all kinds of intangible
exchanges. This trend was made possible by a wave of deregulation and privatization
which turned
the market into the regulating factor of society. This in turn resulted
firstly in the weakening of social
forces, the decline of the welfare state and of the public service philosophy
and, secondly, in the
growing power of the corporation, its values and private interests.
In the wake of this change, which encouraged the deployment of technological
networks and big
multimedia groups, the nature and status of communication itself changed:
it became increasingly
professional and its areas of responsibility and activities proliferated.
As to its methods, which were
presented as models for the management of social relations, they finished
up by penetrating the whole
of society. Today, state institutions, intergovernmental organizations,
local and regional authorities, and
even such varied humanitarian associations as Medecins Sans Frontieres,
Greenpeace and Amnesty
International have no hesitation in using public relations expertise to
establish closer links with the
general public.
From globalization to glocalization
The idea of globalization is therefore the stock-in-trade of marketing
and management experts. In a
sense it is the key to their world-view and the foundation of the incipient
new world order. They see in
it the demise of early-twentieth-century scientific management techniques
because the hierarchy of
authority and the specialization of tasks created by those techniques corresponded
to a structure of
the world that no longer exists. In those days the local, national and
international levels were seen as a
succession of compartments which were impervious to each other. The new
view of businesses and
the world in which they function as a "network" establishes an association
between these three
different levels. Any business strategy on the globalized market must be
at one and the same time
international and local; Japanese managers use the English neologism "glocalize"
to denote this
phenomenon. This new corporate logic is governed by the keyword of integration:
integration of
geographical scales, but also of design, production and marketing or even
of spheres of activity which
were previously separate. This word does of course evoke a holistic or
perhaps cybernetic vision of
the organization of the world into great economic units.
The widespread acceptance of the concept of globalization in the strategic
thinking of entrepreneurs
has changed the rules of the international game, to say nothing of the
course of negotiations embarked
upon in the sphere of communication networks.
A first conceptual shift has taken place in the very definition of freedom
of expression, which has now
found a competitor in the shape of "freedom of commercial expression";
attempts are being made to
elevate the latter into a new human right. This creates an ongoing tension
between the empirical law of
the market and the rule of law, between the sovereignty of the consumer
and that of the citizen.
Organizations of communication professionals saw this as a justification
and legitimization of their
lobbying campaigns in favour of "television without frontiers" in the second
half of the 1980s.
As a principle for the organization of the world, the concept of the freedom
of commercial expression
is indissociable from the old principle of the "free flow of information"
which was invented at the start
of the Cold War and has always come to terms with the unequal distribution
of information flows. The
managerial doctrine of the corporate undertaking has made this principle
popular once again; it
equates freedom to engage in trade with freedom as such.
Another shift, this time geographical, has occurred in the assumptions
underlying the debate on the
subject of communication. In the 1970s and until the early 1980s, UNESCO
was one of the main
platforms chosen by the movement of non-aligned nations to launch the idea
of a "new world
information and communication order". Since 1985, however, studies of this
subject have been
entrusted to a more technical agency, i.e. GATT (the General Agreement
on Tariffs and Trade).
Communication is treated here on the same footing as services and includes
the products of the
cultural industries, together with telecommunications, tourism and management
techniques.
A special case for culture
The recent GATT negotiations were the setting for a direct confrontation
between the European
Union and the United States on the subject of the "cultural exception".
This confrontation ended on 13
December 1993 in the outright exclusion of audiovisual and cultural productions
from the scope of the
free trade agreements. On that occasion, the gulf could be seen to widen
between the defenders of
cultural identity and the proponents of the intransigent application of
the criterion of "goods" to every
form of production.
During the debate on the liberalization of services, the latter advanced
arguments of a populist kind.
To justify their opposition to the clause excluding cultural products from
the agreements, they put
forward ideas of the following kind: "Let people watch whatever they like.
Leave them to make their
own judgment. Trust in their common sense. The only judgment of a cultural
product must be its
success or failure on the market."
This argument is not entirely negative in that it recognizes that the user
plays an active role, whereas
the determinist theories of the 1960s and 1970s simply put him on the receiving
end of the
communication machine. However, by restoring the consumer's own discernment
and stressing his
freedom to decide for himself, the problem of the inequality of exchanges
on the world market for
cultural products, and that of the need to protect the diversity of cultures
through appropriate national
and regional policies, are sidelined.
Should the freedom granted to televiewers reduce them to wholesale consumption
of the products of
a hegemonic industry, or should they on the contrary be helped to discover
the products of other
cultures, starting with their own? If we are not careful, the one-sided
glorification of the consumer will
lead to legitimization of the subordination of certain peoples and cultures.
Until the late 1970s, this
process was known as "cultural imperialism" and ethnologists continue to
describe it as "ethnocide".
Unfortunately, when these matters are discussed, there is often a slender
margin between
narrow-minded chauvinism and defence of the right of each culture to preserve
its own access and
specific contribution to universal culture.
Creolized cultures
It is disturbing to note the extent to which the concepts inherent in the
idea of globalization are now
taken for granted in any description of the process of internationalization
of cultural and economic
exchanges which is under way today. If we are to do justice to the complexity
of the phenomena
observed, it is imperative to define a new conceptual framework.
I believe that it is preferable to regard the current phase as that of
the emergence of
"world-communication", a notion which explicitly refers back to the idea
of "world-economy" forged
by the historian Fernand Braudel to describe the impact of macro-economic
flows on the evolution of
national economies. As happened during the gradual construction of the
economic world, progress
towards a planetary "world-communication" system is creating new disparities
between countries,
regions and social groups. It is giving rise to new forms of exclusion.
By relegating a part of mankind
to its periphery, it is liable to drag our planet into a two-speed economic
and communication system.
In future, we may have a world structured around a small number of megalopolises
situated for the
most part in the North, but in some cases in the South, from which all
the principal flows of
information and communication radiate out and to which they return. Globalization
is not incompatible
with increasing disparities. These are two sides of the same coin.
While the 1980s saw a quest for a levelling global culture on the part
of the great transnational
corporations in search of "universals" which were capable of facilitating
the penetration of their
products onto the world market, they were also a time when individual cultures
made a comeback.
The tensions and disparities between the plurality of cultures and the
centrifugal forces of commercial
cosmopolitanism revealed the complexity of reactions to the emergence of
a single worldwide market.
Today, greater attention is being paid to the way in which each culture
and each community receives
and adapts the messages carried on the world communication networks. How
do the negotiations
between the specific and the universal, between the national and the international
elements take place?
Can individual cultures survive? Can they adapt? Or will they go under?
These new approaches have
enabled the terms "Americanization" and "dependence" to be replaced by
others such as
"hybridization" and "Creolization".
This new interest in fragmentation and interactions may prove ambivalent.
It obliges us to reflect on
the process of globalization of exchanges and on its relationship with
everyday democracy. But it can
also cohabit readily with nationalist and even chauvinist attitudes. A
lucid and critical observation of
the former without falling into the trap of the latter - such is the challenge
that awaits us on the eve of
the twenty-first century.
1 In war and Peace in the Global Village (1968), a Work written jointly with Quentin Fiore.
ARMAND MATTELART, of Belgium, is professor of information and communications
at the
University of Rennes-2 (France). He is the author of a number of books
on the history and theories of
communications, which have been translated into several languages. His
most recent published work
in English is Mapping World Communication: War, Progress, Culture (University
of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis/London, 1994). His The Invention of Communication is scheduled
for publication later
this year by the University of Minnesota Press.
Article A16791351