World Dissemination and Cultural Hegemony (A History of Ideas and Strategies)

Author: (French) Ammon Matteo, translated by Chen Weixing
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 2005-02-01
Features: A monograph with independent thinking, a must-read for media professionals. In the book, the author outlines the history of continuous emergence of 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, the author, 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 then 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 ceaselessly reshape the world. How did the "internationalization" or "globalization" of information communication form? What role has information communication played in the evolution of modern world history? These are the questions that the Western scholar Ammon Matteo attempts to explain in World Communication and Cultural Hegemony.
As a famous left-wing scholar in France, Ammon Matteo began observing the threads of international communication in the 1960s, moving beyond Europe to witness the dynamics behind global shifts. 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 drives the development of communication. The functional demand for information dissemination during war—such as the need to shorten spatial and temporal distances (for example, the precursor to mobile phones was the walkie-talkie invented by Motorola during World War II; the computer networks of the Pentagon's combat command system gave rise to the internet)—also spurred the development of propaganda during wartime, even giving birth to the specialized discipline of psychological warfare. Second, the myth of developmentism has led financial capital toward economic globalization, blurring the boundaries of nation-states, and ultimately, new transnational communication networks have redivided the world according to the production and distribution of economic and cultural capital. Third, the global flow of information culture, particularly audiovisual culture, has triggered crises in cultural identity and cultural recognition. Under the guise of consumer goods, transnational media groups promote culture through industrialized means, turning it into universal consumer products, and "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 of cultural identity have become elements of international relations since the industrialization of communication, but culture is also influenced by social, economic, and other factors. Therefore, cultural issues are essentially economic and political issues. The so-called "choices of modernization" championed by transnational media groups, 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.