Birth of a new communications order
The global communications order is changing and new theories of communication are needed to understand the changing global media landscape. This was a point researchers from all over the world made time and again as they presented academic papers at the annual conference of the International Association for Media and Communication Research in Dublin, Ireland, recently.
Several papers and panels dealt with the rise of the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and the impact of this on global media. The use of media for soft diplomacy by China was one of the topics that attracted the attention of scholars. In a special session, Hu Zhengrong, a professor at the Communication University of China in Beijing reflected on the conference theme of Crises, ‘creative destruction’ and the global power and communication orders. He asked whether this financial crisis is a Western crisis rather than a global one, given the recent growth of economies outside the Western centers. He nevertheless warned the crisis that originated in the West is also already having an effect on countries such as China, where the stock market recently reached record lows. However, the question is whether China can translate the hard power it still commands in the areas of its economic investments globally, its clout in international trade, its sophisticated technologies and military force to the soft power of global influence over news agendas and global public opinion.
Hu said that China already has a large domestic market for traditional media and a growing market for new media: Almost half the country’s population has access to the Internet and 80 percent of those users are accessing the Internet through mobile phones, tablet computers and the like. But there is also an intellectual property trade deficit because the country is importing more media products than it is producing locally. Moreover a lot of Chinese TV production, such as reality television formats, is copied from the international market.
Despite the country’s big cultural industry market, Hu reckons China’s media content production is not yet strong enough to use in the service of soft power strategies. State-owned media have played a big part in China’s going-out strategy: The Chinese State-owned media including CCTV (50 international bureaus), Xinhua (140 overseas bureaus) and newspapers such as People’s Daily and China Daily have also helped to promote the country’s image to international audiences. But, according to Hu, the country will be unable to contribute to restructuring the global communications order until it has managed to address the value crisis it is experiencing internally. He sees this domestic crisis as a result of the rise of the market society, which has led to “money fetishism, utilitarianism and consumerism”. The State-owned media are also not as powerful anymore to set the agenda for public opinion as they used to be in the 1980s, Hu said.
A survey last year showed 75 percent of the public opinion agenda was set by non-official media, such as social networks. This survey revealed more than half the respondents lacked faith in the government. In order for China to spread soft power globally, it first would need to address these challenges at home, Hu said.
New social media have become like a pressure cooker, said Chen Chingwen of Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Although citizens are using new media to campaign for social justice, they now also spend more time indoors and have become more individual.
China’s soft power is exercised in a global communications landscape that is feeling the impact of the shift of global geopolitical power to the BRICS countries. The impact of the rise of these countries was discussed in a panel by members of a global project on media systems in those countries (of which the author of this column is also a member).
Jyrki Kakonen, a professor at the University of Tampere in Finland, said the rise of the BRICS countries is a symptom of the end of globalization as Westernization. The process of globalization is changing, flowing now from the rest to the West so the West will have to adapt. But what kind of international order the BRICS states want to build remains unclear.
There is wide diversity within the BRICS group, with no common denominator other than being against the dominance of the United States. This anti-US attitude is, however, not enough to provide cohesion among the group. Kakonen says the absence of an Islamic country in BRICS prevents it from representing the whole of the Global South as a new international order and not merely an economic formation.
It would also be a mistake to view the BRICS countries as internally homogenous nation-states each with one stable media system. Within the BRICS countries themselves there are big differences and sometimes tensions between various media models and practices.
In Brazil, for example, professional journalists are experiencing an identity crisis as the rise of new media demands new functions from them. Raquel Paiva de Araujo Soares and Muniz Sodre Cabral, professors at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, talked about a generation gap between journalists in Brazil, where young journalists are not as interested as the older generations was in being champions of civil liberties.
India is another BRICS country whose media system displays internal differences. Sanjay Barthur, a professor at the Central University in Tamil Nadu, India, told of how the media and entertainment sector in India is growing exponentially. However, that growth should not necessarily be seen as an indicator of greater diversity in the media.
Daya Thussu and Savyasaachi Jain, professors at the University of Westminster in the UK, stressed the size and diversity of India’s media audiences and the vibrant media sector serving them. Unlike in the West, where the media is struggling economically, media in India is booming. The author is deputy head of the School of Journalism and Media Studies, Rhodes University, South Africa. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.