Many Americans have seen the digital dream of global
communications vividly expressed on TV commercials for Cisco Systems. Eager
to promote its theme of "empowering the Internet generation," the giant
high-tech firm paid for a lot of lovely ads with adorable children from
different countries asking: "Are you ready?"
By now, we understand that our response is supposed to be -- must
be -- affirmative. But our best answer may be a question: "Ready for what?"
History tells cautionary tales. After the first rudimentary
telegraph went into operation 207 years ago in Europe, media analyst Armand
Mattelart says, "long-distance communication technology was promoted as a
guarantee of the revival of democracy." During the next several decades, a
powerful concept took hold -- "the ideology of redemption through networks."
In his book Networking the World, 1794-2000, Mattelart points to
assumptions that have spanned continents and centuries. "Each technological
generation provided a new opportunity to propagate the grand narratives of
general concord and social reconciliation under the aegis of Western
civilization." Whether the instruments of unprecedented change were
railroads, undersea cables or electric patents, promoters spoke of wondrous
horizons. But the gaps were huge between "promises for a better world due
to technology" and "the reality of struggles for control of communication
devices." Elites routinely won those struggles.
In our own time, technology has often appeared to offer the means
for global solutions. "At the end of the 1970s, the nation-state was being
attacked on two fronts: it was accused of being too large to solve small
problems of human existence and too small to solve big ones.... As a way
out of this dual impasse, information and communication networks had become
the panacea."
But hucksterism kept tightening its grip: "Advertising, which
initially seemed little more than a modernized sales technique, gradually
became the vector of the commercialization of the entire mode of
communication and, as such, a key feature of the public sphere," Mattelart
writes. These days, it's a facile corporate feat to conflate democratic
decision-making with global shopping. "The advertising industry strives to
construct vast transnational communities of consumers who all share the
same 'socio-styles,' forms of consumption, and cultural practices."
Today, we hear the latest versions of what Mattelart calls
"messianic discourses about the democratic virtues of technology." Serving
as smoke screens for inordinate privilege and consolidated power, such
rhetorical exercises commonly tout "globalization" -- corporate
globalization -- as an obvious common-sense way of stimulating prosperity
and encouraging democracy. "The idea has taken root in free trade rhetoric
that the spread of products of the entertainment industry automatically
leads to civil and political freedom, as if the status of the consumer were
equivalent to that of the citizen."
Mattelart notes "the rapidity with which Asian and Latin American
countries have adapted to digital technology and the advantage they have
taken of it." But there's a grim flip side. "We cannot deny, however, that
these new sources of modernity coexist -- as the second side of the coin --
with a galloping process of impoverishment and exclusion of large sections
of the population."
Translated from French and published in the United States last
year, Mattelart's book challenges the prevalent, cloying hype about
Internet globalism. The Paris-based scholar is on target: "Only a
mediacentric view of society can delude people into believing that a
planetary perspective can be reduced to being exposed to foreign brands and
trans-boundary information, programs and servers. Connection with the world
is also, and above all, a matter of experience."
But authentic experience is far from the synthetic variety
supplied by most global media, flowing through certain ruts that we're
encouraged to mistake for life itself. "Systems for structuring meaning
through digitization of knowledge underlie a specific geocultural model,"
Mattelart observes. "The risk is that it may impose as a criterion of
universality a particular mode of thinking and feeling..." At the same
time, in effect, New Mediaspeak often equates the universal with the
marketable.
Yet communication from the grassroots, connecting people
internationally as they strive for free expression and social justice,
remains a much sought-after goal. Some excellent work is moving in that
direction. For instance, an innovative website that recently marked its
first anniversary -- www.MediaChannel.org -- is a steady fount of news,
reports, resources and opinion, "featuring content from over 600
media-issues groups worldwide." Founded a few months earlier, the globally
oriented Independent Media Center -- www.indymedia.org -- is a wide-ranging
entryway to progressive media activism on several continents.
Such creative endeavors are in stark contrast to the products of
multimedia conglomerates. It's shrewd to spew out humanistic platitudes
while pursuing rapacious quests for global market share. "Soon, all our
ideas will be free of borders," a Cisco Systems commercial declares. "Are
you ready?"
Norman Solomon is a syndicated columnist. His latest book is The Habits of
Highly Deceptive Media.
