Media,civilization and the international order

Media and civilization

It is ironic, then, that Clark’s Civilization: A Personal View (1969) is considered a landmark in the very modern history of colour television. Nonetheless, it also needs to be understood as an attempt to recover a narrative of European civilization after half a century of self-immolation. Similarly, Fernand Braudel’s contemporary exposition of ‘A history of civilizations’ in 1962 was also located in the context of trauma, anxiety and recovery amidst the rubble of post-War Europe (Braudel, 1995 [1962]). For Braudel, a civilization represents a cumulative whole that subsumes the cultures within it and which operates on a greater time-scale than the societies that sustain it. Thus, French civilization encompasses the regional cultures of Brittany and Alsace, and the full range of folk, bourgeois and high cultures and their varied manners. As an historical entity, ‘French civilization’ traverses shifting forms of social organization, as evidenced by the transition from agricultural to industrial society, and a procession of monarchies, empires and republics. It does so because, as much as civilizations assimilate their constituent cultures in the greater whole, they also accrete the creative achievements of their members over the longer sweep of history. As a consequence, civilizations accrue a certain way of thinking as much as a certain way of speaking and this, in turn, inculcates a self-awareness that guarantees their reproduction. Thus, Braudel, echoing Innis, argued that civilizations operate across scales of both time and space, that they are in both senses bigger than cultures and societies (1995 [1962]: 3–18).

Arguably, Braudel’s demarcation of half a dozen distinct European civilizations was incommensurate with this broader argument, and also with his delineation of the whole of India and China as single civilizations. What Braudel does argue for successfully, however, is the inherent unity of the material and expressive pillars of human achievement in the shaping of each civilization. Consequently, the everyday operation of commercial exchanges, ideas and modes of expression across the world’s surface becomes powerfully predisposed by the existing disparity of biological concentrations, idiomatic conventions, ideological platforms, matters of taste and the functional limits of comprehension. These are, if you like, some of the underlying trade barriers that stand in the path of any global media corporation. At the same time, these patterns of differentiation are also the historically constituted treasure house of human culture, without which such a sophisticated media apparatus would be neither necessary nor conceivable. Culture, in this sense, becomes simultaneously implicated both in the reproduction of difference and the necessity of translation and adaptation, since:

The stability of these cultural zones and their frontiers does not however isolate them from cultural imports. Every civilization imports and exports aspects of its culture. . .. Civilizations continually borrow from their neighbours, even if they ‘reinterpret’ or assimilate what they have adopted. At first sight, indeed, every civilization looks rather like a railway goods yard, constantly receiving and dispatching miscellaneous deliveries. Yet, a civilization may stubbornly reject a particular import from outside. Marcel Mauss has remarked that every civilzation worthy of the name has rejected something. Every time, the refusal is the culmination of a long period of hesitation and experiment. Long mediated and slowly reached, the decision is always crucially important. (Braudel, 1995 [1962]: 14, 29)

The key point is that civilizations incorporate external influences, and everyday exchange between civilizations forms a vital component of their social and cultural development. In this productive interchange, various forms of knowledge and modes of social organization are either adopted, adapted or discarded for reasons of material practicality or ontological incompatability. Thus, each civilization exerts it own inertia over new ideas and practices, both from within and without. As meta-structures of a grand scale, civilizations possess their own gravitational mass. By this reading, a civilization must be substantial enough to cast an influence upon other cultures, and upon the world as a whole. Thus, while Hong Kong and Taiwan have distinct cultures of their own, they are nonetheless subsumed within a broader Chinese civilization. Equally, while Hmong culture may be ancient and enduring, it lacks sufficient mass to exert civilizational claims. There can be many cultures, but relatively few civilizations and, as such, Braudel’s notion of civilization denotes a particular form of social and cultural tectonics predicated upon scale.

Media systems are attributed a vital role in the co-evolution of civilizations. Braudel’s account of civilizational interchange requires a system of communication with global reach, both logistically and sematically. His equal emphasis upon material conditions as a determining factor in civilizational distinctions converges with Innis’s emphasis upon the materiality of media. They both assume that the prevailing technologies infuse everyday rituals and relationships, livelihoods and habitations, as echoed by McLuhan’s (1964) aphorism that ‘we shape our tools and our tools shape us’. If we proceed to McLuhan’s grander conclusion that media ‘work us over completely’, it becomes logical that ‘media civilizations’ will supplant the material norms established with agricultural and industrial technologies. Indeed, McLuhan went on to claim that the affordances of media technologies effectively re-regulate the emotional and mental state of entire cultures, therefore transforming the basis upon which the transmission of civilizational norms can be conveyed and understood. This proposition chimes with Benedict Anderson’s (1991) equally famous proposition that the ‘imagined communities’ of the modern world were catalysed by the particular qualities of the print medium, engendering radically new forms and standards of culture and association. These are overarching arguments for ‘media civilizations’ in both a material and epochal sense, although as Partha Chatterjee (1991) once pointed out, their technological determinism leaves little room to explicate the enduring distinctions, or the potentials for divergence, between civilizations.

High nationalism and the new international communication order

Despite the grand claims that major theories of media and civilization make upon each other, it is striking that the vast bulk of media and communications scholarship rarely refers explicitly to either the scale or notion of civilization. In a large part, this reticence appears to have arisen from the incongruence of such claims with the United Nations (UN) system. The development of audio-visual media systems, and their scholarship, took place alongside a profound change in the political organization of our world. It is too easy to forget that the UN, forged in the rubble of empires, is a historically unique framework for managing human affairs. It was founded upon the guiding principle of ‘self-determination’, conferring statehood upon the basis of ethnic particularity and geographic contiguity. As such, the UN provides a collective guarantee for the sovereign rights of all such nation states, safeguarding the political, economic and cultural sovereignty of its members. During its heyday from 1946 to 1990, the UN formally institutionalized an ethos of ‘high nationalism’ in the world system, playing a central role in processes of decolonization. Nonetheless, while the UN system recognizes political sovereignty on the basis of cultural nationalism, an attendant assumption of national cultural autonomy does not necessarily follow. While all nations may enjoy legal equality over matters of culture, they do not typically possess equal means for cultural production, nor possess equal range in terms of the bandwidth that each national culture comes to occupy within the world system (Wallerstein, 2004). While the incremental collapse of European imperialism saw a host of ‘new’ nations joining the UN, they typically inherited underdeveloped economies, narrow state institutions and only in very rare cases (such as India) possessed the luxury of anything like a media industry.

Previously, the predominant culture within each of the most powerful empires enjoyed the greatest reach, regardless of the aesthetic merit or social benefits of that culture per se (Winseck and Pike, 2007). This legacy of large-scale imperial systems, tied to the discredited ‘civilizing mission’ of colonial ‘tutelage’ in Asia and Africa, persisted throughout the early decades of the UN system, with international news issuing from London, Paris, Moscow and New York, and film and television content overwhelmingly dominated by US productions (Tunstall, 1977). For the postcolonial states, the realization of national media systems was therefore considered a crucial component of statehood and a necessary vehicle for governance and economic development. Beyond its functional purpose, the formation of a postcolonial public sphere had powerful cultural connotations. In many cases, the rallying cause of ‘indigenous’ culture had been mobilized in driving out rulers from an ‘alien’ culture. As the radical Afro-French thinker and Algerian revolutionary, Frantz Fanon (1967), argued, the recovery of ‘native’ subjectivity was critical to decolonization, without which there could be no meaningful liberation. Fanon’s influential critique of a ‘neocolonial’ class of leaders simply adopting the role of their former rulers, highlighted the residual power of a cultural and intellectual influence that had been constructed over several centuries.

Fanon’s strident demand for a ‘decolonization of the mind’ and a ‘native awakening’ required a sweeping rejection of the purported superiority of ‘Western civilization’. His plaintive call to restore indigenous cultures drawn from the peasantry proved seductive in Africa and Asia, but putting it into practice was no simple matter. In practice, the majority of postcolonial states were home to several different cultures, and the question of whose culture should be elevated to the centre of national life frequently became a bloody affair (Burleigh, 2014). Nonetheless, the fundamental premise of Fanon’s argument was widely accepted: that the cultural legacy of imperialism must be confronted. Palestinian intellectual Edward Said (1978) would later describe in great detail how the ‘Orient’ had been symbolically constructed as the inferior ‘other’ to European civilization in centuries of representations in art, print and on screen. For their own part, European countries had become sensitive to the aggressive expansion of American media interests into their own cultural domains, thereby developing shared concerns with the dependency theorists of Latin America (Cardoso and Faletto, 1971). In the English-speaking countries, Innis’s earlier anxieties over the impact of US popular culture in Canada were echoed in the UK, Australia and New Zealand (Jarvie, 2000; Turner, 1994). Consequently, US dominance of the audio-visual trade was seen as evidence of neo-imperial domination in the field of international communication (Schiller, 1976). A pushback against ‘cultural imperialism’ in favour of a ‘New World Information and Communications Order’ became a central trope of UNESCO debates on ‘cultural diversity’, culminating in the McBride Report to the UN in 1980 (Sparks, 2007; Tomlinson, 1991).

Calls for the ‘de-centring’ of media studies persisted for another twenty years, although US predominance over global popular culture had already reached its peak and would decline steadily, leaving US diplomats to lament the strategic loss of ‘soft power’ by the end of the century (Nye, 2004; Tunstall, 2007). Many, if not most, readers will be familiar with this story, not least because researchers who took part in the drive to de-centre media and communications research in favour of the erstwhile ‘Third World’ are only now concluding their academic careers. My central purpose in revisiting this period is to demonstrate how discourses of civilization were effectively nationalized in the period from 1946 to 1991, along with much else. Indeed, despite consistent attention to sub-national cultural diversity in cultural studies research, a nationalist order of cultural sovereignty has never been formally disavowed by our political or academic institutions. Similarly, the multilateral debates on the New World Information and Communication Order were framed on resolutely nationalist lines. They claimed the inalienable right of every nation state to enjoy its own cultural autonomy, to preserve the legacy of its cultural distinctions and to exercise the right to acculturate its population without the undue influence of other national actors. This outcome was, in effect, predetermined by the mutually reinforcing principles of cultural nationalism and self-determination. In reality, however, while there were many pretenders to civilizational states, there was scarcely a handful of real contenders. More often, several nations emerged from a larger civilization, while many others are located in areas where civilizations meet, overlap or otherwise coexist. Even at the apogee of the UN system, tidy matches between nations, cultures and autonomous media systems remained rare as hen’s teeth.

Audiences and geolinguistic civilizations

While the principle of cultural sovereignty supported national media industries politically, cultures with the greater wealth and the largest populations enjoy inherent advantages in the business of communication. Consequently, like civilizations, multinational media corporations are inherently economies of scale. Throughout the second half of the 20th century, access to print, radio and television expanded inexorably across the world. Then as now, one of the central contradictions of espousing ‘cultural protectionism’ at the political level is that it is typically accompanied by strenuous efforts to succeed in the export market. Consequently, Braudel’s railway yard became very busy indeed during the heyday of national media systems. In the 1990s, the coming of satellite television in earnest negated the geographic constraints of terrestrial broadcasting, further cementing the operations of television as a transnational business (Chalaby, 2004). Contrary to expectations, however, this did not mark the triumph of American producers over national markets, but rather the emergence of a multi-polar media system (Thussu, 2007). In explicating the transition of television culture in Brazil from US television towards domestic production and a growing range of Hispanic imports, Straubhaar (1991) offered a relativistic approach to the cultural preferences of television audiences. He argued that: ‘countries and cultures . . . prefer their own local or national productions’ due to various factors, including the local appeal of celebrities, locally specific humour, locally relevant issues, culturally specific styles and ‘the appeal of similar looking ethnic faces’ (Straubhaar, 2007: 91). At the same time, ‘if countries, did not produce certain genres of television, then audiences tend to prefer those kind of programmes from nearby or similar cultures and languages’ (2007: 91).

Straubhaar (1991) identified Brazilian programming as the first choice for local audiences, followed by Hispanic programming which is more culturally proximate than US programming. This notion of ‘nearby’ cultures suggesting that differences between national cultures are incremental rather than absolute. Consequently, Straubhaar’s notion of ‘cultural proximity’ indicates a putative scale of affinity between cultures. On this larger map, with strong links to Braudel’s world of civilizations, proximity creates a form of radial gravity, structuring cultural compatibility relative to each region. ‘Native’ culture comes first, followed by neighbouring (or ‘familiar’) cultures. More distant formations become marked as exotic and only likely to exert an appeal in instances where they create novelty. Straubhaar also observed that ‘omnivorous’ media consumption tends to be stratified by social class. Members of the Brazilian elite were innately cosmopolitan, with regularized access to a broad range of international culture. The upper middle classes aspired to this ‘globalized’ example, although their exposure to the transnational was largely restricted to media consumption. The middle class proper was more oriented towards Latin American media and their interests focused within a national framework. Increasing television ownership among the urban poor prompted them to emulate this example, By contrast, the rural poor were intensely local both in their media sources and modes of consumption (Straubhaar, 2007: 207–8). At the top of the social spectrum, access to greater wealth, education and capacity to travel appeared to mitigate the primacy of proximity. At the bottom of the social spectrum, however, cultural proximity is intense, and even sub-national.

John Sinclair (1999) also directed his attention towards the phenomenon of television in the continent of South America. By his argument, the vast transmission ‘footprint’ of satellite broadcasts revealed a supra-national media geography, delimited less by the sovereignty of nation states and more fundamentally by a larger map of linguistic and cultural affinities. Consequently, Sinclair (1999) mapped the world’s television markets as series of ‘geolinguistic regions’. Cultural studies researchers exploring audience geographies have gone on to explore other examples of regional groupings organized around cultural proximity (e.g. Turner and Tay 2009). A useful set of studies has emerged from East Asia, a geopolitical region containing three major geolinguistic formations: Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Eschewing the contingencies of modern politics, research into the regional popularity of Japanese television dramas by Anthony Fung (2007) found close similarities in the narrative structures of Japanese and Hong Kong dramas, with these ‘Intra-Asian homologies’ making them distinct from Western content. Fung (2007: 282) found that 60% of his audience respondents believed the popularity of Japanese dramas rested upon cultural similarities between Hong Kong and Japan. In the subsequent era of the ‘Korean wave’, Korean exporters proved expert in providing content that remained culturally proximate to both the Chinese and Japanese markets. Thus, the tripartite relationship between Chinese, Japanese and Korean geolinguistic regions reveals a high degree of civilizational interaction in their media markets, where media producers negotiate the ‘complicated currents’ of their cultural proximity and bilateral relationships (Black et al., 2010; Fung, 2013; Tay and Turner, 2015).

High globalization and the worldwide web

The back-story of television traces a trajectory from the (mostly) state-led development of national broadcast systems to the commercial predominance of supra-national audience markets based upon various configurations of linguistic and cultural affinity. This involved significant changes of direction, as a period of high nationalism (1945–91) gave way to a period of high globalization (1991–2007). This rupture had its various ideological, geopolitical and technological components, with media systems playing a critical role in each of these domains. Given the simultaneous advent of the public internet and ‘globalization’, the worldwide web was widely seen as a fundamental catalyst for the inexorable shift to a global network society (Castells, 1996). In an outpouring of euphoric ‘newness’, the shift into what Mark Poster called the ‘second media age’ and what Francis Fukuyama called the ‘end of history’ was embraced by a host of neoliberals, neoconservatives and Californian futurists (Fukuyama, 1992; Poster, 1995; Toffler and Toffler, 1995). More serious historians, such as Anthony Hopkins (2002), were keen to point out that periods of greater and lesser exchange between civilizations were a recurring feature of world history. Nonetheless, in the decade that followed, light-speed exchanges of capital and information across the world via the internet, driven by algorithms, ushered in a ‘great integration’ of the global economy. The same media infrastructure facilitated the instantaneous dispersal of cultural forms to every corner of the globe. Interactivity gave private citizens the means to communicate with their counterparts around the world, superseding national parameters and jurisdictions (Athique, 2017). These media affordances were taken to imply the fulfilment of a unipolar global culture characterized by connectivity, accumulation and consumption.

Under the emergent ethos of high globalization, the digital re-mediation of the world system was seen initially as reinstating the centrality of Western interests and exacerbating the disparities of the global information order in the form of a global ‘digital divide’ (Norris, 2000). Given that much of the value of digital systems is derived from network effects, proportionate access to the system became the litmus test for inclusion in the information age (Ragnedda and Muschert, 2013). In theory, the gains made by individual citizens scale up to macroeconomic advantages due to increases in the reach and efficiency of network transactions (e.g. Tapscott, 1995). Because the internet represents a logistical system as much as a content delivery vehicle, the digital divide was a more pressing concern than earlier disparities in broadcasting. Attentive to being left behind in the sweeping digitization of the global economy, information infrastructure enjoyed priority investment during the 1990s from every nation that could afford it. For their part, technology companies were driven by the opportunity to realize huge profits margins by making use of cheap labour pools in Asia, and to expand internet usage in those ‘emerging markets’. The immediate consequence of this was that unprecedented transfers of technology and capital moved eastwards, thereby laying the foundations for multi-polar competition in the global information infrastructure (Sparks, 2013). Consequently, the Western bias in internet traffic decreased rapidly after the first decade of the internet, as Asia steadily progressed towards preponderance in user numbers over the rest of the world (Athique and Baulch, 2019).

Embracing the commercial potentials of the medium inevitably entailed facilitating access to large volumes of unvetted foreign content. In that respect, the purported ‘neutrality’ of the worldwide web threatened the role of individual states as cultural gatekeepers. Consequently, a number of states raised concerns about the circulation of ‘alien’ material via the internet. If anything, the individuated access of content via the worldwide web appears to have been more threatening to culturally conservative and/or authoritarian states than the mass address of satellite broadcasters. A number of Gulf states, for example, consistently raised objections to the open architecture of the medium on moral and cultural grounds. In international forums, nations came to be rated (often negatively) in terms of ‘internet freedom’, a proxy measure increasingly taken as evidence of social and political freedom (MacKinnon, 2012). Such a convention rests implicitly upon the acceptance of a distinctively American conception of ‘free speech’ as a global norm. Given that the benefits of globalization and the digital were placed beyond question, the imposition of universal norms across the worldwide web went hand in hand with the widely assumed irrelevance of the nation state in a world of digital flows of finance, information and ideas. Consequently, the interaction of the global and local came to the fore, with the civilizational implications taken to be a choice between ‘McDonaldization and Jihad’ (Rinnawi, 2006).

Dismissive of such a choice, the People’s Republic of China inaugurated its ‘Great Firewall’ project in 1998, followed in 2003 by the ‘Golden Shield’ project (Zhang and Zheng, 2009). Both programmes reflected the pursuit of a ‘Chinese Information System’ as a national and sovereign internet. For China, the goal of digital infrastructure development assumed the conformity of economic interests with cultural and political sovereignty, with gateways for the worldwide web in China put very firmly under state control (Yu Hong, 2017). Rejecting the global consensus, the People’s Republic of China was thereby able to use its sheer mass to determine the creation of a ‘civilizational’ internet (Keane, forthcoming). This zone is now the largest single user-base for the worldwide web. For its part, the US characterized much of Asia as being a pirate zone, where unlicensed software was underpinning economic modernization and providing the means by which Asian populations accessed digital content (Sundaram, 2011). Indubitably, the expanding flow of transnational content had a transformative effect upon popular culture across Asia, not only from ‘Western’ material but also from regional producers such as South Korea (Yong Jin and Kwak, 2018). The advent of the smartphone era, where Korea’s Samsung played a key role in providing affordable hardware, massively extended the distributive capacity of the internet down to the individual scale and, critically, beyond metropolitan districts (Goggin, 2011). As mobile devices became the primary means of cultural interaction, Braudel’s railway yard was replaced figuratively by hordes of private cars.

Digital civilizations

Following Innis, we are prompted to consider whether we have entered a period of ‘digital civilization’, where the establishment of new communicative norms transforms the material basis of everyday life and the longevity of cultural knowledge. Popular arguments in this vein are to be found everywhere, highlighting (as per McLuhan) the cognitive and material consequences of a new scale of everyday connectivity and mediation. As technological practices are increasingly synchronized, the variability in the adoption, regulation and usage of the digital could be taken as an indication of the countervailing influence of civilizational distinctions (as per Braudel), most obviously in setting the functional limits of linguistic association across internet zones. Yet, ultimately, whether the emergent technological apparatus determines the evolution of human civilizations or whether the extant presence of civilizations shapes the variability of digital applications can only be determined over the longue durée. In temporal terms, the massive growth of media access and synchronous communication across the world implies the expansion of the present, but the profusion of digital information also indicates the likelihood of an historical account of greater breadth. What can be ascertained in the present is the degree to which a set of apparent certainties around digital technologies and/or cultural reproduction are fostering imperial claims over civilizational domains by a range of political actors.

The commitment to a universal internet, and its leadership, remains a core belief of Silicon Valley companies, with the cultural topography of the world reduced by the likes of Eric Schmidt to an engineering problem (Schmidt and Cohen, 2014). In procedural terms, Google’s use of datafication to ‘solve’ and ‘leapfrog’ linguistic barriers indicates the extent to which they approach cultural difference as a functional rather than subjective obstacle. Until very recently, the ‘universal’ platforms of the social media age have given scant concession to the complexities of human cultures in the broader anthropological sense. While ‘variables’ can be conceived for different categories of product and for different patterns of consumption in particular market societies, these ‘algorisms’ fall well short of an inquiry into a whole way of life (Striphas, 2015). In that sense, it is not simply consumer taste or linguistic comprehension, but considerable variations in environmental, ontological and cosmological consciousness that inform culture with a big C. Nonetheless, the individuation of user data via individual addressability, geolocative data and ubiquitous surveillance over the past decade has made internet users visible in new ways. Mobile devices have tripled the user-base of the internet in the global South and, with the advent of vast troves of ‘big data’ and new visualization tools, we are becoming able to investigate the purported effects of cultural proximity, linguistic clustering, geopolitical domination and civilizational gravity in real time and at scale (Athique, 2018). Thus, the existence of civilizational zones in the digital domain (if not ‘digital civilization’ itself) can be tested to a certain extent by mapping content, usage and interaction among users.

In mapping the multi-lingual domain of Wikipedia, Liao and Petzold (2010) saw indications that the worldwide web was devolving into ‘cultural markets’. More recently, Taneja and Webster (2015), Webster (2014) and Wu and Taneja (2016) have mapped internet audiences using comScore data from the top 1000 web domains (2 million records). In one iteration of this data, Taneja and Webster (2015) attempt to provide an integrated mapping of the global internet audience that accounts for both the institutional and cultural structuring of audiences. In the first place, Webster (2014) argues for the importance of institutional structures in the form of platform affordances, hyperlinks, data and discovery infrastructure, all of which tend towards a US-centred architecture. The actual user data, however, points towards factors of language and location as being far more significant in terms of shaping user concentrations across hyperlinked domains. The major concentrations are formed around linguistic nodes centred on the largest language groups. By mapping the web domains to their point of origin, Taneja and Webster (2015) are able to visualize how the strongest concentrations of user traffic are found where there is both linguistic and geographic proximity. Hence, both Chinese and Japanese domains form very distinct user concentrations, even though the Chinese user-base is firewalled and the Japanese is not. Taneja and Webster conclude that ‘cultural structures like language and geography are far more potent determinants of global audience formation than institutional structures’ (2015: 175). Thus: ‘removal of all institutional restrictions and achieving a completely connected world where information can flow freely will not homogenize cultural consumption’ (2015: 178).

In another reading of the data, Angela Wu and Taneja (2016) argue that the emergence of ‘online regional cultures’ is a consequence of cultural diversity rather than political coercion. To support this argument they undertake ‘ethnological mapping’ of the comScore data over three census dates (2009, 2011, 2013). To begin with, they undertake a cluster analysis that establishes ‘thickenings’ of internet usage in linguistic domains, and then assess the relative ‘distance’ of each cluster from other clusters and from ‘global’ domains (in terms of traffic shared). Their finding was that the thickening of clusters is strongest in cultures where linguistic and geographic concentrations align. The relative distance between clusters increased over the survey period, with the global domain diminishing in proportional terms as usage in the ‘global South’ expanded, and the major platforms implemented linguistic variants across the various ‘online regional cultures’ (Wu and Taneja, 2016: 240). A consequence of this shift was the emergence of a more distinct US English cluster in its own right. Although Wu and Taneja do not employ the concepts of civilization and cultural proximity used in the Taneja and Webster analysis, their findings are largely commensurate, being that: ‘the locations of online regional cultures in relation to one another and with their underlying geo-linguistic linkages lend support to the common perception of cultural adjacency’, that: ‘regional orientations strengthen as Internet use expands beyond globalized elites’ and that: ‘online regional cultures associated with the global South have significantly grown and thickened’ (Wu and Taneja, 2016: 242).

The evolution of the two mass mediums clearly tells us something about the interaction between media systems and cultural geography. Television was conceived as a national medium, yet devolved under the expansion and direction of audience demand into a set of geolinguistic markets. The worldwide web, conceived explicitly as a global system, is also devolving into the self-same clusters for the self-same reasons. Given Braudel’s account of civilization as the confluence of geography, language and history, the emergence of a handful of supra-national linguistic markets that import and export content, formats and cultural trends while remaining internally coherent as distinct civilizations makes perfect sense. While the space-binding properties of media commonly supersede the national, the audiences they engage are, in the majority, geolinguistic formations rather than a global public. In the present milieu of social media platforms, it is worth recognizing that interpersonal communication is also heavily clustered within ‘online regional cultures’. Taking a vast sample from tens of millions of Yahoo Mail and Twitter accounts, State et al. (2015) mapped interpersonal ties in order to test Huntington’s topography of religious civilizations. They employed two community-detection algorithms (fastgreedy and Spinglass) to test correlations with Huntington’s civilization coding. The density of connections indicated clustering of personal communications between Western, Latin American and Russian Orthodox countries, with Islamic countries having a looser multi-nodal set of ties, and Sinic and Hindu civilizations having strongest links within their relatively lower number of states.

State et al. (2015) note that the interpersonal exchanges may well cluster within the ‘mesh of civilization’ for reasons other than Huntington’s map of religious orientation (which provides arbitrary civilizational affiliations at national level, many of which are contentious). Nonetheless, the prevailing correlation between linguistic concentrations, physical locations, and cultural affinity in all these studies also works against theories of globalization that consider media technologies to be culturally or spatially indifferent (e.g. Giddens, 1992). Research in media and cultural studies, more broadly, has consistently demonstrated that the global media system is heavily structured by the cultural tectonics operating at a regional scale. The density of intra-regional interactions continues to increase, and the space-binding properties of digital mediation are clearly central to this process. Nonetheless, the time-binding ‘inertia’ of civilization appears to have been sufficient to demolish the hubris of a universal digital culture governed by Western norms in little more than twenty years, an ambition that Huntington himself (1996) described as: ‘false’, ‘immoral’ and ‘dangerous’. Thus, we do not live in a universal order of Californian futurism, but rather a world of supra-national digital cultures, the largest of which appear to aggregate at the civilizational scale (see Kraidy, 2013). The composition of these digital renderings of civilizations cannot be explicated by a single factor. There are multi-lingual domains (such as India or the ‘West’) and geographically disparate ones (such as the ‘Anglosphere’). The theological schema is the weakest one, given it doesn’t explain Fung’s intra-Asian homologies, nor provide any effective rationale for multiplying Christendoms and for homogenizing other practices of faith. The only consistent factor in civilizational mapping is mass, figured in terms of population, language, geography and technology.

The crash decade and international communication disorder

The geopolitics of information are themselves in a period of transition. The consensus that multilateral institutions were superseding nations as the dominant force in international affairs has not survived the definitively national fallout of the 2008 global financial crisis. The systemic crash of the global network society in 2007–8 revealed the extent to which hyper-connectivity had become intrinsic to the operation of the global economy (Ford, 2009). The increasing scale and velocity of algorithmic control over the super-abundance of data had itself incubated the crisis of undue complexity that spawned the subsequent ‘crash decade’ in Europe and America (Schiller, 2014). Throughout this period, the only evident remedy to this structural and socio-technical crisis has been taken to be the further extension of algorithmic control (as per Ford, 2016). Consequently, a distinctive modus operandi of finance, technology and governance has presided over the virtualization of money, suffused the domains of personal interaction and intimacy, driven the automation of labour and spearheaded the militarization of an increasingly unstable world. Echoing Innis’s warning on the significance of the re-mediation of social communication, digital technologies are at the heart of almost every point of crisis in the global system. At the purely economic level, the shift of venture capital from the banking sector into technology companies, leaving national populations to absorb their losses, and the vast flows of digital money into developing economies have both contributed to the inverse fortunes of technology companies and everything else.

The concomitant political casualty of the crash decade has been the consensus on the merits of globalization, with a long series of ‘protectionist’ moves beginning with the Obama administration and becoming the defining feature of the Trump presidency. Nonetheless, even as the United States became sensitive to the risks of supra-national connectivity, the 2018 CLOUD Act sought to further entrench US jurisdiction over the global internet. Paradoxically, the digital dollars flowing into Asia, and into China’s current account, had already provided the basis for the massive programme of overseas investment in the Belt and Road Initiative, a central feature of which was the creation of an alternate global information infrastructure (Keane and Wu, 2019). The aggressive American response to this unwelcome development has been centred on ZTE and Huawei as they become poised to challenge Silicon Valley as the provider of next-generation internet. Consequently, digital technologies are central concerns of the US tariff strategy, national security sanctions, intellectual property suits and extradition orders. This is because China has placed digital infrastructure at the heart of its world-spanning ‘national rejuvenation’ programme, leveraging its domestic base to constitute a parallel global network under its own direction (Keane and Fung, 2018). Amid the recent pattern of deteriorating relations, international alarm and provocative tweets, Xi Jinpeng hosted the ‘Conference on Dialogue of Asian Civilisations’ in May 2019, stating explicitly that this stand-off was not a ‘clash of civilizations’ (BBC, 2019a). He is right. It is, quite plainly, an old-fashioned imperial contest for dominance of the internet. According to Eric Schmidt, this contest is between ‘a Chinese-led internet and a non-Chinese internet led by America’ (in BBC, 2019b).

The resumption of the Great Game naturally affects everyone else. Thus, this has also been the decade of Snowden and Assange, and of Zuckerberg, Putinbots and Cambridge Analytica (Greenwald, 2014; McIntyre, 2018). The post-9/11 constitution of Web 2.0 as a global panopticon of ubiquitous surveillance and orchestrated influence has violated almost every democratic norm and principle of international law. The endless series of revelations emerging around surveillance, espionage, electoral manipulation, and intrusive scraping have undermined both multilateral and public faith in the neutrality of the global information infrastructure and the custodianship of US technology companies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). African states have been outraged to learn their populations are being used for automated social experiments, while even NATO members have been profoundly disturbed by the extent of digital espionage and personal surveillance orchestrated in their domains, resulting in the implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2018. Equally, growing public awareness of unrestrained commercial violations of privacy, and the dismay of political elites at the consequences of viral politics, is fuelling the backlash against the exorbitant privileges of Silicon Valley. Tougher national regulations on internet content are being instituted in the UK, Singapore, Australia, India and elsewhere (Lee and Lee, 2019). Cyber-security is being beefed up everywhere after scores of high-level infrastructure attacks by numerous state actors confirmed the weaponization of the internet. Somewhat disingenuously in this regard, Russia, having long campaigned for specifically national internet structures at the UN and ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), is about to implement its own breakaway switch from the global internet, fashioned from interventions in DNS (Domain Name System).

These developments do not constitute a breakdown of the digital communication order as of yet. Nonetheless, it is not inconceivable that the supra-national institutions such as W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) and ICANN could be diminished in the way UNESCO was previously. In structural terms, a Russian opt-out, following the Chinese example, would likely pull Russian speakers and closely linked states into its own orbit. The absence of both would leave the worldwide web increasingly looking like the worldwide West of the 1970s. Interestingly, there were echoes of that era in Malcolm Turnbull’s reflections on the Huawei affair, where he lamented the absence of Australia’s ‘national champions’ in digital infrastructure. For smaller nations, the kinds of systemic interventions being made by China and Russia are not readily available propositions. Nonetheless, we can expect to see more regulation at the national level, more routine blockages of ‘global’ platforms and, conceivably, over time, we could see the global information infrastructure institutionally reconfigured as a series of civilizational blocks. At the level of affordances, the technical and institutional preponderance towards a universal architecture are no longer inviolable. In the cultural domain, such a re-ordering would largely reflect the formal constitution of internet usage as Wu and Taneja (2016) presently describe it. As such, while the damage to the ideal of a universal global network would be fatal, not many of us would miss access to other ‘civilizational’ web domains, and the Chinese experience suggests that technological fixes will be widely available for those who do.

Civilizing mission statement

We cannot ignore the fact that, at the present time, the term ‘civilization’ appears to have been reduced to a code for certain forms of conservative and authoritarian politics. I will conclude, therefore, by blowing the dog-whistle three times. First of all, I began with Innis’s argument that the affordances of media operate as central processes in each and every rendering of civilization. I concur with his proposition that the study of media forms and practices is essential to any palpable intellectual enquiry into that scale of human affairs. Since the media provide the mechanisms, both international and domestic, for the conduct of civilization, they also provide the most ready means of mapping any such formation, and for understanding civilization as a living and breathing force. That is, as something more than Kenneth Clark’s ossified canon of ethnological anchors. Equally, if a world of civilizations is to have any merit as an analytical framework, then we need to recognize that civilizations only make sense in terms of their interactions within and without. The critical exchanges and the critical distinctions are all largely cultural ones, which makes the ontological expertise of cultural studies central to any explication of human civilizations. The expanding scale of media systems certainly suggests there are cogent arguments for applying the discipline at this level (see Couldry, 2012).

As a second blast, my argument is that we properly appreciate the spatial scale of any civilizational framework, and thereby dissociate the concept from parochial hysteria. In the popular domain, references to civilization are, almost always, tinged with a pairing of anxiety and arrogance. They tend to come from ethno-nationalists, revanchists and imperialists, and to insinuate imminent threats around the theme of miscegenation, dilution or replacement (depending upon which century we are referring to). They also tend to be violently denominational, transnational and theologically under-informed. Blows struck in Christchurch and Colombo in the name of civilization are nothing of the sort, merely expressions of racist and religious hate, narcissism and ignorance. Cultural diversity, by any serious historical analysis, has always been intrinsic to any civilization ‘worthy of the name’. Nonetheless, the invocation of civilizations under threat, seen recently from political actors such as Erdogan and Orban, is a perennial hallmark of majoritarian fascism. Similarly, where civilization is taken as the basis for international claims, it is almost always a statement of imperial intent (Said, 1993). In all these phenomena, media systems are the nerves though which the viral transmission of political violence is achieved. If we want to shine light into these dark places, cultural studies has a moral obligation to engage with the discursive field of civilization.

On a final note, I disagree with Innis’s more secular trope of the apparent decay in the quality of civilization due to the intrusion of modernity and its offending masses. The penny press, television, the Beatles, videogames and mobile phones have all been taken as catalysts for civilizational collapse (e.g. McDonald, 2007; Postman, 2005; Sax, 2016). Yet they have added more to the aesthetic and social repertoire of Western civilization in the past half-century than the time-binding efforts of all the best museums. Even the irredeemably elite should be comforted by the simple fact that the abrupt demise of European high culture circa 1950 has proved to be something of an overstatement. My argument in this respect is that we need to pay more attention to the sheer temporal scale of civilizational processes. If you believe in the longue durée, neither the spatial expansion of popular culture nor the disintegration of the worldwide web provides very much to worry about. So perhaps we need to step out of our Anglo-Saxon cluster and adopt a bit of Braudel’s Gaullist over-confidence. Eternal France survived a century of humiliations, if not without complaint. Equally, Japanese, German and Khmer civilizations endured after utter physical ruin, rape and genocide. In this light, Innis’s pessimism regarding ‘Western civilization’ appears misplaced. Irritating motivational memes may spread like a disease across the world, but they will not provoke civilizational disintegration. What that requires is environmental collapse, and perhaps what growing cultural paranoia really signifies is a ‘great displacement’ of such material threats.