Chapter 3: Global Economy and International Telecommunications Networks

Introduction:

- The global economy should not be considered as an abstract term that does not affect us; on the contrary global economy is present in a variety of forms and consumption products in our daily lives

- Global economy and global communication are strongly related: global economy needs global communication to control and coordinate global division of labor

I. Premodern World

1. In the 13^th century, people’s possessions were locally made, and foreign products were exotic items that only the nobility and the rich could afford

2. Everyday goods were made by artisans and craftsmen that tended to work independently (which at the end affected productivity as we would conceive it nowadays)

II. Division of Labor

1. The main difference between the premodern world and the modern world is the fact that division of labor started to be used to enhance productivity: craftsmen and artisans started to work together, each one having a specific task (a specialization that permitted expertise and that increased efficiency)

2. The possible disadvantage of division of labor is that it creates interdependencies since the system is based on the coordination of the work

3. The problems that arise from coordination increases as the factory grows or managers decide to delocalize part of the production because some components could be made more cheaply in other parts of the world

4. Division of labor today happens in a greater scale (internationally), and it wouldn’t be possible without our modern communication technologies

5. Global trade in the past was limited to light weighted items, but thanks to transportation technologies weight is not an issue anymore. Global trade is, as a result, no more restricted to luxury goods, but also includes everyday items consumed by the common people

III. Imperialism

1. In the 13^th century the world was multipolar, in other words, dominated by several centers of power with decentralized but interconnected trading circuits

2. In the 14^th and 15^th centuries, the emergence of western powers (France, Britain, Spain, or Portugal) transformed the world into a monopolar one, organized around Europe, who was superior to the rest of the world in many aspects thanks to the development of science, and who had great colonial empires

3. The main motivation for European countries to have colonial empires was economic: they were interested in the raw materials they could acquire in their colonies to use them in the industries of the “mother country”. But once the raw materials transformed into finished goods, the colonies were their perfect market for selling their products

4. To maintain the colonies Europe created with the use of the military force, they adopted a strategy of cultural imperialism that went beyond the colonial elites to the masses (especially using the educational apparatus)

5. Telegraph lines can be used as analogy to better understand the relationship between the center and the peripheries (everything goes through the center, so the peripheries is inevitably subjected to the center)

IV. Electronic Imperialism

1. Global media flows

a. After World War II and the process of decolonization, the center of the world was no longer Europe, but the United States

b. US power over the peripheries was economic and more lately cultural, rather than military as it was the case with European imperialism

c. Many scholars argue that even in the European Empires dissolved, the mechanics of interdependency that existed at that time remained in place creating a global relationship of dependency between the rich countries (north) and the poor countries (south)

d. Today the US dominates the panel of electronic entertainment (mostly through movies and TV shows). This domination considered as simple business from the US side is viewed by the rest of the world as a dangerous cultural influence

e. The fear concerning US cultural influence comes mostly from developing countries who consider this influence as a new form of imperialism: cultural imperialism (also referred to as cultural invasion)

f. There is a disproportion among the different communication flows around the world, and the flows that goes from the US to the rest of the world is the most important, which is a further illustration of the center-periphery organization of our modern world (1970: major debate around this “one-way-flow”)

g. Many nations call for a “New World Information Order” (NWIO) to change the asymmetry that exists among global communication flows. However, it will be extremely difficult to implement (technologies are more and more difficult to control) and it implies that governments start to regulate information flows, in other words governments would control the media, which is an undemocratic solution.

(cf. US first amendment that guarantees the freedom of the press)

h. However, today, US first amendment protects media conglomerates in a country where setting up a printing press has become almost impossible

2. Transborder data flows

a. Even if with the improvement of transportation technologies international trade wasn’t restricted to light weighted items, services remained local because of the need for interaction between the service provider and the consumer

b. With the emergence of modern telecommunication networks services become finally tradable

c. Global division of labor evolved since the its beginning: manufacturing jobs have moved from the US to developing countries, where labor is usually cheaper (new world of international division of labor)

d. The US became the command-and-control node for global business activities (the money saved by the delocalization manufacturing jobs is invested in research and development, corporate services, management, and other activities of coordination and control)

e. The US encourages free trade and free flow of information, but developing countries are suspicious about it because they fear the US would exploit weaker countries that are US sources of cheap labor and raw materials + in the developing countries point of view, the free flow of information “blurs national boundaries and threatens national sovereignty”

f. Industrialized countries tend to take a huge share of the benefits generated by the global division of labor in comparison the amount developing countries get in exchange for their contribution

g. To sum up:

- Major similarity between imperialism and electronic imperialism: a strong central-periphery relationship with few lateral connections among the periphery

- Major difference between imperialism and electronic imperialism: the center employs more subtle ways to dominate the periphery than the brute military force used in the era of colonialism

V. Emerging Network Structures

1. The new transmission systems of communication do not follow the same logic as the previous centralized means of information (TV, radio, newspapers): we moved from a top-down communication organization, were few broadcasted to many, to a many-to-many communication logic (mostly via the Internet )

2. The idea that the internet is a democratized medium is subjected to debate starting with the inequality of people around the world to have access to it

3. The center-periphery organization the world exists also within the nature of the internet, the US being the center of this system in many aspects

4. New network investment patterns makes us presuppose that new regional network might emerge in the future in Europe and Asia, but a “change in the overall structure of the Internet” is unlikely in the near future