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A Clash of Civilizations

What is roiling much of the world today is a clash of civilizations. This is not new, for clashes of civilizations have formed much of history. These clashes go back well beyond the 19th century opening of Japan and the savaging of China, beyond the colonizing of Asia, Africa, and the Western Hemisphere starting in the 15th century, beyond the Crusades of the 12th century and onward, back beyond the expansion of the Roman Empire, and no doubt back beyond the spread of the Egyptian, Sumerian, and Chinese empires at the expense of the weaker tribes around them.

What is new is that today, in the present clash of civilizations, less has to do with armies occupying territories and more with culture. It is Western media that are invading traditional cultures. In terms of the conflict, the results are little different than in those centuries when Roman culture or Chinese culture or British culture or French culture was imposed on the conquered peoples. This should be familiar to anyone who has lived in countries filled with the advertising, products, sights and sounds sent from America, Western Europe, and Japan, much of it in the form of communication media or delivered by media.

National borders are eroding. Nation-states have been losing authority to multinational business and to media, including the Internet. Parallels can be drawn to Europe in the Middle Ages, when power passed from feudal barons to commercial interests, a change helped by the spread of another means of communication, printing.

 The Sorcerer's Apprentice

The sorcerer's apprentice has discovered media, and no sorcerer exists to put things back the way they were. It took the telephone 75 years and television 13 years to acquire 50 million users. It has taken the Internet five years. Today, more than 500 million people around the world are connected to the Internet. Its development is a historical prime mover like the alphabet and the printing press.

It is not only the Internet. Year by year more people are saying more over more channels on more topics to a bigger total audience. Internet growth is explosive. Simultaneously, the talk in cable television is of 500 channels. As DVD technology spreads, videotape stores sell used tapes to clear their crowded shelves. Desktop publishing pours out newsletters, self-published books, magazines, and multimedia presentations. New computer software arrives every day. In free industrial nations, bookstores and magazine stands are jammed with product. Libraries hardly know what to do with all their books.
It has been true for decades that anyone can own a book. Now in industrial societies, almost anyone can own a movie. Producers of movies, music, and computer software desperately, and so far futilely, try to control the unauthorized making of digital copies. Meanwhile, more movies are being shot than ever. Desktop video allows Hollywood production in basements and garages.

At the same time, and in so many ways, email has changed the way people interact. Businesses depend heavily on email communication. E-learning has carved an educational niche that grows rapidly.

Meanwhile, hundreds of departments and schools and colleges of mass communication proceed bravely to examine communication in a world that has changed so much and so rapidly that even their own names have been made obsolescent by communication technology. If the subject ever was truly limited to "mass communication" as contrasted with personal communication, it no longer is. What the schools are teaching is "mediated communication"; that is, communication employing an external medium between sender and receiver.

 

 mediahistory.umn.edu

Because all these changes in our lives have been so rapid and so profound, we would do well to ask ourselves how all this came about. How did mediated communication become so important to almost everything we do?

 

The tale of media is a vast historic web composed of many fibers. It is to identify those fibers and to tell the stories that went into their making that the Media History website is dedicated.

-- Irving Fang

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