World Dissemination and Cultural Hegemony: A Historical Perspective on Ideas and Strategies

Author: Ammon Matteo
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-02-01
Features: A monograph with independent thinking, a must-read for communication professionals. In the book, the author outlines the history of continuous ideas, theories, and doctrines in the development of communication studies, enabling us to understand how the international dimension of communication formed, evolved, and gradually spread worldwide under the drive of technology and capital. Ammon Matteo is a renowned scholar in Western communication studies. In today's world, from the leap of the information industry to the development of the media industry, it is evident that the penetration of communication into modern society is an industrialized production method: continuously producing information, continuously circulating information, and continuously generating new information. From radio waves to communication satellites, from news agencies to databases, the internationalization and incremental speed of communication networks and communication flows are constantly changing the world. How did the "internationalization" or "globalization" of information communication form? What role has information communication played in the evolution of world history in the modern and contemporary era? These are the questions that the renowned Western scholar Ammon Matteo attempts to explain in World Communication and Cultural Hegemony.
As a famous French left-wing scholar, Ammon Matteo began observing the threads of international communication in the 1960s, moving beyond Europe to witness the shifting dynamics of global affairs. Over more than 30 years, he has published numerous works, covering topics such as culture, politics, mass media, and the history and theory of communication. In World Communication and Cultural Hegemony, Matteo presents three key arguments. First, war has a driving effect on communication. The functional demand for information dissemination during war initially shortened the need for spatial and temporal distance (for example, the precursor to mobile phones was the walkie-talkie invented by Motorola during World War II; the computer network of the Pentagon's combat command system gave birth to the internet). At the same time, the need to boost morale during wartime also spurred the development of propaganda and even gave rise to the specialized discipline of psychological warfare.
Second, the myth of developmentism has led financial capital toward economic globalization, thereby blurring the boundaries of nation-states. Ultimately, new transnational communication networks, based on the production and distribution of economic and cultural capital, have redivided the world. Third, the global flow of information culture, particularly audiovisual culture, has triggered crises in cultural identity and cultural recognition. Under the label of consumer goods, transnational media groups promote culture through industrialized means, turning it into a universal cultural commodity, while "consumer rights" become the driving force of cultural communication. Matteo meticulously observes and critiques the global campaign launched by transnational media groups of communication powers to dominate the culture of other nations, localities, or groups through coercive communication. He argues that the fear of cultural assimilation and the hope for cultural identity have become elements of international relations since the industrialization of communication. However, culture is also influenced by social, economic, and other factors, making cultural issues fundamentally an economic and political issue.
The so-called "choices of modernization" that transnational media groups tout, while seemingly emphasizing the rights of information recipients, overlook a more critical issue: true communication should be an interactive dialogue between recipients and communicators. Behind the inequality of information exchange, Matteo predicts that humanity will face numerous crises.