International Communication

Abstract

Rather than ‘wither away’, as feared by Berelson (1959), the overlapping fields of ‘media and communication’ and ‘international communication’, with their respective links to cultural studies and international relations, continue to cross-fertilize each other and yield new harvests. They are contributing to ‘a science of man and society’, a dream of Schramm (1983: 17). A field within communication dealing with the ‘without’ in all its senses, international communication was concerned with the great issues of war and peace. A wartime concern, propaganda studies reaped peacetime benefits. The propagation of modernity became the new battle for the hearts and minds of people the world over. ‘The internationalization of communication was spawned by two kinds of universalism: the Enlightenment and liberalism’, projects that sought to construct republican utopias and a universal mercantile republic respectively (Mattelart, 2000: 1). Founders of the field, Harold Lasswell and Daniel Lerner, were preoccupied with the ‘dark side’ of political propaganda and the ‘light side’ of the propagation of modernity respectively (Chitty, 2004: 42). The field was defined by new technologies and geographies, notably those arising around the Second World War. It was tilled in a climate of scientism, one that nurtured functionalist and behaviouralist shoots. Inevitably, both the developmental and cultural imperialism schools grew to privilege structure over agency. The Lasswellian interest in communication and security was, for half a century, stifled by thick growths of contestation – of the merits of universalization. Remarkably responsive to criticism, Rogers acknowledged the ethnocentrism of the dominant paradigm and the inadequacy of a model that excluded exogenous causes of underdevelopment. He welcomed the après moderne notion that ‘there are many alternative pathways to development’ (Rogers, 1976: 130). Reflecting the historical distance between science and culture as academic projects, Lerner cautioned that ‘“culture specific” findings GAZETTE: THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR COMMUNICATION STUDIES