International Encyclopedia of Communication Online

Extract

The first phase of a truly global media network ran from the 1860s through the 1920s. Two major interpretations of this era are available. One, long established, emphasizes how aggressive nation-states deployed communication firms to further their own economic and political goals in carving up the planet (→  Cultural Imperialism Theories ). Another, more recent, reads the period as one of capitalist cosmopolitanism, noting the international cartels and other multinational enterprises that in actual fact dominated the growth of the first global technical infrastructure for communication. However, growing nationalism and protectionism over the 1920s put paid to early proposals for a constructively regulated global communication system. The flow of →  news and →  Information has followed channels of trade, migration, and cultural contact for millennia. Media historians, however, usually look to the period between the second half of the nineteenth century and the turn of the twentieth, when a global media system emerged consisting of a worldwide network of submarine cables and →  news agencies interlinked with urban and national telegraph systems and national commercial press systems (→  Telegraph, History of ; Telegraphic News ). While access was limited to financiers, traders, diplomats, and military strategists, the rise of these global media coincided with the birth of the commercial ... log in or subscribe to read full text