Reaction Paper 2: Approaches to theorizing International Communication

The second chapter of the book is complementary to the first one, in the sense that they both tend to contextualize the study of global communication, through presenting the key references to know. The second one aims on one hand to explain the key theories approaching international communication, and on the other hand, to assess their validity and usefulness in understanding the subject. From the different approaches presented throughout the chapter, the one I was the most interested in was the part on ‘Hegemony’, and this is the one I will talk about here.

The conception of hegemony by Antonio Gramsci is presented in the reading as a strong influence in the study of ideology (which concerns both critical theorists and cultural critics). Gramsci addresses the way dominant social groups or classes exercise control over the society by “build[ing] a consent by ideological control of cultural production and distribution”. Ideological power is therefore exercised through a control over social and cultural institution, and is considered to be more efficient than military power in order to maintain power and to avoid being challenged.

Another key point in this approach is the perception of hegemony as a “process”, in the sense that the ideological control, achieved through building consent in the population, has to be continuously “reproduced, secured and lost” in order to keep its efficiency. At the international level, the hegemonic approach addresses mass media, and the way they are used as intermediaries in propagating and building consent around ideologies serving dominant political actors.

I personally chose this concept to focus on because it was a context I addressed in many politically-based classes, but that I never studied in the context of communication, and more specifically of global communication. The difference was that, whereas I was used to understand hegemony in terms of unipolarity and balance of power, and therefore in terms of political outcomes; this chapter made me think about hegemony in terms of the way it is built and maintained as a process.

I think it is a very interesting theory to use in studying global communication, especially nowadays, in a context of Western clear domination. The amount of western, and more specifically US cultural products that are distributed and consumed all around the world is a very important one. According to the theory discussed above, this would be serving directly the interest of the US as a dominant actor, as it builds ideological consent at an international level and helps maintaining the power relations in place.