Chin-Chuan Lee - Internationalizing “International Communication”

Joseph Turow
SERIES EDITOR

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Internationalizing International Communication
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DIGITALCULTUREBOOKS, an imprint of the University of Michigan Press, is dedicated to publishing work in new media studies and the emerging field of digital humanities.

CHIN-CHUAN LEE, EDITOR

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS
ANN ARBOR

Copyright by Chin-Chuan Lee 2015
Some rights reserved

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

Published in the United States of America by the
University of Michigan Press
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed on acid-free paper

2018 2017 2016 2015 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/nmw.12748916.0001.001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Internationalizing international communication / Chin-Chuan Lee, editor.
pages cm. (The new media world)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-472-07244-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-47205244-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-472-12078-9 (ebook)
1. Communication, International. I. Li, Jinquan,
1946editor.
P96.I5I55 2014
302.2dc23

2014024947

1. 
   Chin-Chuan Lee
2. 
   Elihu Katz
3. 
   Tsan-Kuo Chang
4. 
   Jan Servaes
5. 
   Paolo Mancini
6. 
   Michael Curtin
7. 
   Jaap van Ginneken Page vi
8. 
   Colin Sparks
9. 
   Silvio Waisbord
10. 
    Chin-Chuan Lee
11. 
    Judy Polumbaum
12. 
    Zhang Longxi
13. 
    Rodney Benson
14. 
    Peter Dahlgren
15. 
    Arvind Rajagopal

Critical Reflections and a New Point of Departure

Chin-Chuan Lee

Various attempts (Curran & Park, 2000; Thussu, 2009; Wang, 2011) have been made in recent years to de-Westernize or internationalize media studies. What justifies another volume seeking to internationalize what is purported to be the most internationalized subfield in the whole gamut of media and communication studies? In short, it is because international communication as a field of inquiry actually is not very internationalized. But why should we fix our horizon on international instead of, say, intercultural communication, or the even trendier global communication? First, it should be acknowledged that nation-states remain central to any theories and practice of the contemporary world order, and that international communication is always (but not completely) intermixed with intercultural communication. Second, international processes obviously are increasingly globalized. However, we wish to emphasize a double-bind fact: if democracy is to survive in the post-communist world, as Alain Touraine (1997) maintains, it must somehow protect the power of the nation-state at the same time as it limits that power, for only the state has sufficient means to counterbalance the global corporate wielders of money and information.

Perusing three major handbooks as signposts immediately discloses that international communication has led a relatively marginal existence in the pantheon of media and communication studies. The more generous Page 2 treatment was given in what was legitimately claimed to be the most comprehensive anthology, Handbook of Communication (1973), which ran over 1,000 pages under the eminent editorship of Ithiel de sola Pool and Wilbur Schramm. Six out of 31 chapters (approximately one-fifth), all written by political scientists, addressed in whole or in part selected issues of international communication. All the topics nonetheless concentrated on vital Cold War concerns of the United States: international propaganda, Third World modernization, communication systems in primitive societies, and Communist/totalitarian communication systems. There was a sequel after a lapse of 14 years, the Handbook of Communication Science, edited by Charles Berger and Steven Chaffee (1987). Amid its self-congratulatory claim to the self-sufficient status of communication science, this volume turned cripplingly inward-looking. Showing little welcoming gesture to social scientists from other sister disciplines, it devoted only one chapter to cross-cultural comparisons, and none to substantive issues of international communication. An updated Handbook of Communication Science, edited by Berger, Roloff, and Roskos-Ewaldsen (2010), devoted only one token chapter out of 29 to intercultural communication. What comes to mind is local TV news practice in the United States of covering the world in a minute.

Surely international matters deserve more time, space, and concerted attention. Why have they been so neglected in our field? Asserting the hard-nosed presumption that science is of universal applicability, those defining the field through these influential anthologies did not seem to believe that cross-cultural, national, or systemic differences should matter. The world amounted, ontologically and epistemologically, to America writ large. This prevailing stream of (un)consciousness was widely shared among most members of the U.S. social science community for decades, following on Lerners conviction (1958) that the entire developing world was emulating the American model in a linear progression to modernization. Moreover, well into the 1980s, even as scholars of communication sought to define their realm as one of overweening importance, the fields vision seemed to be narrowing. Even a cursory glance at the table of contents of the three defining volumes shows an inexorable move toward the process of what Geertz (1963) calls involution, characterized by greater self-absorption, isolationism, internal development, and parochialismand this in spite of the vast and rapid march of globalizing processes out there. Under the pretense of science (more aptly, scientism), the succeeding generations of editors have embraced a far narrower horizon of global landscape than their mentors.