Volume 1, No 1.

 
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Shapes of the future: International Communication in the Twenty-first Century

by Hamid Mowlana

With the end of the twentieth century and the turn of a new millennium, the global arena and the field international communication are undergoing significant change. Looking back on the field, both the international order and many international communication topics stemmed from the post-World War II order and the Cold War. With the collapse of the Soviet Union the shadow of the Cold War has lifted to reveal shifting political, economic, and cultural alliances and conflicts spanning from Eastern Europe, to the Middle East, to the Pacific Basin. The increasing importance of these currents, especially in the cultural sphere. Demands a reconsideration of the nature of the international communication field within the rublic of international relations. This article specifically addresses these changes and their implications for study within the field through the discussion of ten major points, eight of which are current phenomena in international and global systems and two of which are underlying methdological and epistemological elements of the field.

Globalisation or Glocalisation

by Roland Robertson

This paper deals with the idea of glocalisation as refinement of the concept of globalisation. Globalisation is apparently widely thought of as involving cultural homogenisation; even more specifically, as a process involving the increasing domination of one societal or regional culture over all others. However, by no means all of those who have directly theorised the concept of globalisation have seen it is as inherently homoginising. In order to make very explicit the ‘heterogenising’ aspects of globalization the idea of glocalisation is introduced.

Broadcasting international crises: retrospect and prospect

by Irving Goldstein

roadcasting international crises: retrospect and prospect Irving Goldstein INTELSAT has the most experience and is best equipped to accommodate the requirements of the broadcasting community at a time of international crisis. The extensive resources and unparalleled global connectivity of the INTELSAT satellite system have provided the tools – and the unfolding of modern world history has provided the programming – for live, on-the-spot coverage of the major news events of our time: conflict, political unification, political disintegration, the triumph of victory and the desolation of defeat. The last five years alone have witnessed an incredible series of events that will affect our world well into the 21st century, the unification of Germany, the end of the Cold War, the Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, to name just a few. And we have seen it all, played out on our television screens.

Vectoral Perception and cultural studies

by McKenzie Wark

While the broadcast appeared on Iraqi television, the program seemed entirely aimed at a Western audience. Western media picked it up quickly and broadcast it around the world the next day. It drew instant and predictable official and media responses. The British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd called it the "most sickening thing I have seen for some time". Rupert Murdoch’s English tabloid press dubbed Saddam Hussein the "Butcher of Butcher of Baghdad". The American State Department called this event "shameful theatricals". A "repulsive charade" said the British Foreign Office. What can we make of his event, starting form the metonym of this detail rather than from the metaphors of social science? Following the lineaments of such as event, grasped at a point of salient detail, we might be able to develop a way of thinking abstractly about media events which follow the lies of abstraction in the real that make such events possible in the first place.

Addressing crises through new channels in the post-New World Information & Communication Order era:

by Brian Martin Murphy

This paper examines the emergence and application of computer networks controlled and operated by non-governmental organisation (NGOs) as a platform for the construction of alternative news agencies demonstrating democratic broadcasting options other than multinational wire service models in the post-New World Information & communication Order (NWICO) era.

South Africa’s television experience of the Barcelona Olympics

by P Eric Louw

Local conflicts become international property, when those controlling the transnational news-flow latch onto certain happenings and make of them crises for world consumption. When this happens, local pain becomes a globalised media show. CNN’s handling of the Gulf War is perhaps the pre-eminent recent example of war as international entertainment. At any particular time a predictable set of lead stories can thus be found reproduced across the world’s news media – currently the crises in Bosnia, Somalia and South Africa serve this purpose, while Zaire’s crisis, for example, seems not to have become a global issue. it is perhaps less common to think of an international news event becoming the property of a local conflict. But this is what happened to the 1992 Barcelona Olympics in the South African context.

Revolution through narrative

by Gina Bailey

  
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