Differentiation

In Dr. Gary Weaver's reflection at the 10th anniversary of the creation of the International Communications program at Aoyama Gakuin University, he comments at how difficult it was to originally establish the impact of international communication on international relations:

"In the classroom, if you talked about the Vietnam War in the context of domestic turmoil--student demonstrations and civil rights marches--professors would say, "Define your level of analysis." Well, what did they mean? They meant, "Keep the domestic out of the international." "Keep the cultural out of international relations."...Of course, I began to realize that we have to mix these things together to truly prepare students for dealing with the world in which they were living." (3)

Within that context, Weaver argues, the "international and the domestic must come together somewhere, and where it came together is in the area of international communications." (3) As a result, many new theories to analyze the nature of this communication, once it had been established that this communication was a system that helped society function, and deal with one another. As Nathalie touched upon in her entry this week, many of those were covered in the broad sense in the Thussu reading.

On a conceptual level, Thussu's reading is fascinating for one who's never studied theory before, as it serves as an excellent source for demonstrating how some of these theories are connected and evolved, such as with the case of Marxist, Critical Theory, and Jurgan Habermas' public sphere, all of which dealt with on some level the potential impact of commodification and availability of communication technology.

However, on a broader theoretical level, it's interesting to note how Thussu and Weaver differ in their theories as much of the ones the former discusses are based within economics while the latter's are more based in humanism. Weaver argues against some of the economic theories, stating that at their core, they're
biased by the psychology, in particular, the "ethnocentricity" of the proponents of those theories:

"...McClelland was concerned with testing Max Weber's theory that if you have a capitalist economy with people whose values caused them to focus on the future, the immediate family, and delayed gratification, and they value hard work as individuals, you will have economic development in that nation and, in addition, it will probably be democratic development. If you read Weber carefully, I would argue that Weber was arguing that if the whole world was Protestant we would have no problems..." (9)

I think it's difficult to say that any one given system will automatically lead to a certain expected communication situation. Admittedly, the point of theory is not to establish certainty but to quantify general trends. All the same, as Weaver suggests, one must be aware of the potential prejudices, be it privilege, race, gender, sex or creed that will draw them to classify a particular situation as operating within a particular communication theory.