Dwayne Winseck

Communication and Empire: Media, Markets, and Globalization, 1860-1930

Filling in a key chapter in communications history, Dwayne R. Winseck and Robert M. Pike offer an in-depth examination of the rise of the global media between 1860 and 1930. They analyze the connections between the development of a global communication infrastructure, the creation of national telegraph and wireless systems, and news agencies and the content they provided. Conventional histories suggest that the growth of global communications correlated with imperial expansion: an increasing number of cables were laid as colonial powers competed for control of resources. Winseck and Pike argue that the role of the imperial contest, while significant, has been exaggerated. They emphasize how much of the global media system was in place before the high tide of imperialism in the early twentieth century, and they point to other factors that drove the proliferation of global media links, including economic booms and busts, initial steps toward multilateralism and international law, and the formation of corporate cartels.Drawing on extensive research in corporate and government archives, Winseck and Pike illuminate the actions of companies and cartels during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, in many different parts of the globe, including Africa, Asia, and Central and South America as well as Europe and North America. The complex history they relate shows how cable companies exploited or transcended national policies in the creation of the global cable network, how private corporations and government agencies interacted, and how individual reformers fought to eliminate cartels and harmonize the regulation of world communications. In Communication and Empire, the multinational conglomerates, regulations, and the politics of imperialism and anti-imperialism as well as the cries for reform of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth emerge as the obvious forerunners of todays global media.

Netscapes of power: convergence, consolidation and power in the Canadian mediascape:

Grounded in a study of the Canadian mediascape, this article argues that trends toward media ownership consolidation are having a fundamental impact on broadcasting and the evolution of cyberspace as a whole. I argue that current trends reflect the rise of what we can call ‘Machiavellian media’ - communication and information systems saddled with three tasks: building the information society; populating cyberspace with workers/citizens/users; and projecting the ‘brand image’ of nation-states on a global plane. The article critiques the notion that new media, especially the internet, are disruptive technologies. Among other things, cyberspace is a class-divided space. More than this, though, networks - the basis of many ‘new media’ - are powerful entities and those who control them influence content providers’ access to people and people’s access to content. The article also analyzes three other factors that are affecting the evolution of networks and cyberspace: attempts to design ‘netscapes of power’, the privatization of cyberlaw, and ‘walled garden’ strategies. Together, these strategies seek to change the Internet into a mainly ‘read-only’ medium and to cybernetically integrate audiences, content and all organizational resources into a self-referentially enclosed information system governed by multimedia conglomerates’ need to defend their investments in a model of media evolution that has, at best, weak cultural foundations.

The Politics of Global Media Reform, 1907–23

In contrast to contemporary discussions of globalization and the rise of the global media that see these as fundamentally new phenomena, recent research suggests that the rise of the global media system can be traced back to a period between, roughly, the 1860s and 1920s. During this era the outlines of a global media system became apparent as a worldwide network of cable communications arose to support international markets, the expansion of global news agencies such as Reuters and Associated Press and, of course, colonialism. This article explores the era between 1907 and 1923, a second moment in long-standing efforts to change the way the global media system of the time was owned, regulated and used. This period followed an earlier one stretching from the 1880s to around 1902, and was anchored in three key issues: the critique of cable cartels, advocacy of state-owned cables and efforts to secure cheap rates. The politics of global media reform between 1907 and 1923 paralleled some aspects of the first period, as well as being distinguished from it, on the basis of a half dozen key themes: (1) debates over cable cartels and press/news agency monopolies; (2) continued, but weaker, advocacy of state-owned cables; (3) attempts to extend national regulatory authority to the global plane; (4) efforts to secure ‘cheap rates’ so that cable communications and telegraphy could become means of mass communication; (5) efforts to challenge cable cartels through radio before this ‘new medium’ succumbed to the idea that it would largely develop as an adjunct of cables and as part of the strategic arsenal of empire; and (6) the formalization of US global communication policy under the rubric of Wilsonian ‘internationalism’ linked to abortive efforts to establish a robust League of Nations.

THE GLOBAL MEDIA AND THE EMPIRE OF LIBERAL INTERNATIONALISM, CIRCA 1910–301

This article briefly sketches the rise of the global media system after the mid-1860s before turning to the transformation of that system during the First World War and until the end of the 1920s. In particular, we look at how technological changes, especially the development of wireless and, by late 1926, short-wave radio, were dealt with by the companies that ran the worlds vast network of undersea cables, news organizations and governments. We show that responses to new technologies varied greatly, with some trying to blunt their impact while others embraced them. Mergers and acquisitions were a key response to the new technologies and to the worldwide economic boom of the 1920s. However, by the end of the decade, the economic logic behind these changes was eclipsed by a discourse of technological determinism, nationalistic corporate patriotism and imperial security. These ideological discourses underpinned a series of mergers throughout Europe and Britain, most notably the formation of Cable and Wireless in 1929. Similar pressures were at play in the USA, notably in RCA and the International Telephone and Telegraph Companys own bid to create a global multimedia conglomerate, although restrictions on cross-media ownership in the Radio Act (1927) and Congressional concern about the formation of a military–communications–media complex stymied the attempt. Altogether, however, the reorganization of the global media business at the end of the 1920s reflected and reinforced the collapse of this early era of globalization – the empire of liberal internationalism – and the rise of a new geopolitical–economic regime based on the struggle for the control of global communication, virulent nationalism and relative autarchy, not to be reversed until the revival of globalization in our own times.

The political economy of Chinese internet companies: Financialization, concentration, and capitalization:

The rapid growth of the internet in China has been propelled by the Chinese government’s push to develop the country’s information infrastructure and its tight control over the internet. The most recent stage of internet development in China, however, has been driven by a three-way dynamic between the State, internet companies, and international finance capital. This relationship has yielded three internet giants—Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent—that stand at the apex of the internet economy in China. They also rival their US counterparts like Google, Facebook, and Amazon, on several key measures. We examine annual reports and other financial documents to better understand these three companies’ character as ‘capitalist enterprises’ and the tight nexus that links them to international investment banks, venture capital funds, and other foreign investors. While these processes are now fundamentally shaping ‘the Chinese internet’, they have not yet been adequately explored in the scholarly literature, we argue.

The quest for information highways and media convergence in Canada

Studies media convergence in Canada, arguing it has always been a possibility as change is not a consequence of new technologies but a shift from efforts to prevent cross‐media combinations, to initiatives that promote this aim. Sums up that media reconvergence and the information highway are at the top of the communications policy agenda, but how it will involve is unclear.

Networking China: The Digital Transformation of the Chinese Economy, by Yu Hong: Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2017, 225 pp., ISBN No. 978-0-252-04091-7 (hardcover).

The compact book Networking China: The Digital Transformation of the Chinese Economy offers us a sweeping but nuanced account of how “Chinese ruling elites have prioritized communication industries...

Broadcasting Empire: The BBC and The British World, 1922–1970

Simon Potter’s second major effort to map out the history of the flow of information within the British world follows many of the same lines of analysis presented in his first book. While News and the British World: The Emergence of an Imperial Press System (1) charted the advent of imperial media discourses and the organizations that sustained them from the late nineteenth century through the First World War, his most recent volume chronicles the role the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) played in unifying and developing broadcasting across the British world from the 1920s forward. The BBC had a significant role in the advancement of public and semi-public broadcasting corporations across the dominions – especially the Australian Broadcasting Commission, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), and the New Zealand Broadcasting Service (NZBS), as well as their predecessors – and attempts to integrate them into a more unified imperial broadcasting system. The uneven story of the interactions of these bodies, as well as others from the colonies and South Africa, is a tale that Potter warns defies a neat chronological or even steady progression. Instead, the piecemeal attempts at empire broadcasting reflected the centralizing goals of the BBC and the state’s use of the BBC as a ‘subcontractor for cultural diplomacy’ (p. 7), but also resulted in only intermittent cooperation and irregular exchanges.

Network nation: inventing American telecommunications

Network nation is an important book by one of the most highly regarded communication and media historians in the US, Richard R. John. It is probably the most substantive and innovative book in years on the telegraph and telephone in all their business, political and cultural aspects. In the following essay, I review the book and place it within the scholarly literature on the topic, while critically examining some of its key arguments. Situating the development of the telegraph and telephone into a longer history than usual, this outstanding book takes its point of departure not from the advent of the telegraph in the 1830s or 1840s, but decades earlier with the Post Office Act in 1792, which John dubs ‘one of the most far-reaching pieces of legislation enacted in the early republic’ (p. 18). The book finishes with the consolidation of the ‘regulated natural monopoly’ regime for telecommunications and market segmentation between the telegraph, telephone and radio in the 1920s, a situation that stayed remarkably stable for most of the rest of the century. John uses the Post Office Act of 1792 to set the scene because its capacious and open-ended mandate gave the government-owned Post Office a huge role in facilitating the flow of ‘intelligence’ and cultivating republican democracy. In its wake, the Post Office became the first national ‘medium’ to bring correspondence and news to ‘every man’s door’ (p. 20). Its exchange system allowed publishers to swap newspapers and magazines across the country free of charge. It also established the notion that an integrated network operated under unified administrative control – i.e. a network monopoly – and guided by enlightened civic ideals could be a useful support for a multiplicity of commercial uses as well as a diversity of voices; in other words, a sturdy pillar of a dynamic market economy, a democratic society and a free press. Most observers, including the early developer of the electric telegraph, Samuel Morse, simply took it for granted that the telegraph would become an arm of the Post Office. Together, these factors set down several durable principles: first, that networks tended toward monopoly, and that whether that was a good or bad thing depended on how they were managed and regulated; second, that single networks supported a multiplicity of uses and thus whether a monopoly was managed and regulated poorly or well was crucial to the commercial and social life of the nation; third, and perhaps most surprising in light of prevailing opinion, the US government can take whatever steps its citizens approve of to improve the media environment. Indeed, the first amendment, as John stresses more than once, poses few obstacles to doing just that. Network nation crystallises these vitally important principles between the late Business History Vol. 53, No. 4, July 2011, 641–647