LU 3 - Global Communication Flashcards
Name the 10 transformations of communication.
- Geographical Space: A Barrier to Communication;
- Geography and the Mythical World;
- Ancient Encounters of Societies and Cultures;
- Global Explorers: Migrants, Holy People, Merchants;
- Mapmakers in the Medieval World;
- Inventors: Signals and Semaphores;
- The Printing Press, Literacy, and the Knowledge Explosion;
- Scientists and International Networks;
- The International Electric Revolution, and
- Global lmmediacy and Transparency.
Explain the historical path of GC: Geographical Space: A barriers to communication.
For at least 3,000 years, pe0ple have sought to communicate across great distances. Elaborate courier systems were used in ancient China and Egypt. The Greeks announced the fall of Troy by lighting signal tires on the tops of mountains. A Roman emperor ruled his empire by sending messages in reflected sunlight off polished metal shields. From its early beginnings, communication has evolved into today’s elaborate technosystems and networks, transforming world communication. For the list time in millennia, physical space is no longer an insurmountable obstacle to human interaction in international communication.
What was once the “geography of space” has become the “geography of experience” (W ark, 1994). When rudimentary communication began, perhaps with simple symbols such as a mark on a wooden stick, there was no hint of the revolutionary changes to come on the distant horizon. How did global communication evolve from such modest origins? Even though historians have long been interested in oral and written language traditions and technologies, the broader concept of communication is relatively new. It was introduced for the first time as recently as 1979 by medieval historians who examined the cultural and intellectual history of the Middle Ages (Mostert, 1999). Communication history is not just a question of new technologies; rather, it involves questions of how those technologies arise from complex social conditions and, in turn, transform human interactions. With faster and more far-reaching communication, important social and political developments occurred at the margins of technology and ideology, each interacting and expanding the potential outcomes of the other. In the broadest sense, technologies are cultural metaphors for prevailing social and cultural conditions.
In this review, I examine some of the forces at work in how early cultures created the conditions for communication across great distances. I begin in prehistory with the mythical images of ancient life. The fate of people in ancient times was, as often as not, violent, uncertain, cruel, and short. Human encounters with enemies, animals, and nature were &aught with hazards. From a symbolic view, this ancient world was enchanted, filled with otherworldly spirits, creatures, and images.
In time, migrant populations turned to agriculture and commerce, with trade routes extending outward to distant and unfamiliar lands. Science eventually disproved and displaced myths about the outside world. By the late Middle Ages, the “age of discovery” saw explorers traveling the edge of the known world, mapping their paths for others to follow.
Communication strategies and devices of many varieties were used to gain advantage in warfare and trade. Military conquests and religious crusades often resulted in unexpected consequences, including the intermingling of cultures and ideas. The ancient Chinese art of papermaking was carried to Europe by Arab soldiers, eventually making it possible for a German printer to develop movable metal type to print multiple copies of the Holy Bible. The magnetic compass needle, similarly, was carried to Europe from Asia, leading to experiments on electric telegraph signals. The printing press and telegraph challenged the barriers of space and time, redefining individual identity and shrinking the world outside.
Scientists experimented with new devices to solve old problems, seeing every problem as just another closed door to swing open. These social processes, once begun, created the conditions in which technologies made sense at the moment they appeared. Collectively, they ushered society toward the industrial and electrical transformation of the late 19th century, and the information revolution at the close of the 20th century.
Explain the historical paths of GC: Geography and the Mythical World.
Ancient people certainly must have regarded the world with a sense of awe and wonder, struggling to grasp-and control-the unexplained events of their lives. The Greeks used the word mantic to describe ideas. both mythical and supernatural, coming to people from somewhere beyond the immediate world, the “other” world, one not of their own making. These beliefs were part of the ancient mystiiicau‘on, more often implied in their worldview than expressed in their words, about the uncontrolled forces reaching beyond their mundane lives.
Until relatively recently in history, perhaps within just the past century or two, most people knew life only as they saw it unfolding within a few square miles of their rural homes. Travel in most of the historical past was hazardous and unpractical. The vast world beyond one’s immediate reach was grasped through magical or metaphysical images. Beliefs about the earth, heaven, and underworld were built around sacred and profane spaces. Images of these ancient mythic worlds are in the ancient lore of history. The Greek historian Synesius reported on peasants in the Aegean islands who believed in the existence of the Cyclopes, one-eyed giants. Such images appeared in the work of early mapmakers, like the medieval cartographer Pliny, who illustrated his maps with fanciful creatures in strange foreign lands. Monster sightings reported by mariners were used to enliven ancient map illustrations.
Europeans believed that India and Africa were places where pygmies fought with storks and giant humans battled griffins, winged creatures that could carry an elephant in their talons. Foreign lands were believed to be the bizarre and frightening places where gymnosophists contemplated the sun all day, standing in the hot rays first on one leg and then on the other; where humans lived who had feet turned backward and eight toes on each foot; and where others who had only one large leg could run as fast as the wind. There were cynocephali, humans with doglike heads and claws who barked and snarled; and sciapods, people who shaded themselves from the sun by lying on their backs and holding up a single huge foot. There were headless humans with eyes in their stomachs. people who could sustain themselves just on the odors of food, and monsters that had the body parts of several animals.
Myths surfaced in many places during the Middle Ages about the travels and exploits of a fictitious Christian king named Prester John, whose tales were repeated in music and poetry throughout Eumpe. Rumors circulated in the 12th century that he had written a letter addressed to the rulers in Europe, describing both his piety and his fomiidable conquests. According to the historian Albericus. the text of this epistle, spread across the countryside by troubadours and minstrels, contained accounts of a kingdom “beyond India toward the sunrise over the wastes, and… near the tower of Bable” .
Prester John was believed to rule over a land inhabited by men with horns. along wrth grants and curious creatures, like Cyclopes. What frightened many Europeans most of all was the threat conveyed in this epistle that Prester John could command his fearsome legions of soldiers, accompanied by cannibals and flesh-eating animals, to sweep across western Europe. Pope Alexander II in the 12th century even drafted a response to Prester John to be carried by his personal envoy. The messengers left Rome and never returned.
Attila, king of the medieval Hons (406-453), understood the psychological power of such mythical beliefs among his enemies and encouraged the circulation of such exaggerations in his campaigns throughout Bumpe in the 5th century. Popular lore about dragons, sea serpents, and other creatures was repeated among diEerent people throughout the late medieval age and early Renaissance, even though the stories were most prevalent among the poor and uneducated. As historians have concluded, the metaphysical world was “no less ‘real’ to those societies than [was] the physical world of Western culture”.
The product of fear and imagination, these mythical ideas among ancient cultures were richly symbolic and were accompanied by expression in art, science, language, and ritual. Art historians believe that even cave art, such as the 30,000-year-old drawings of prehistoric animals discovered at Vallon-Pont-d’Arc in the Ardennes region of southern France, were used for rituals associated with hunting. A small horse carved in mammoth ivory, only 2 1/2 inches long and found near Vogelherd, Germany, has a small marking deciphered by historians to be associated with animal killing.
Explain the historical path of GC: Ancient Encounters of Societies and Cultures.
When Greek and Arab philosophers and mathematicians sought to rise above mythical beliefs and to construct rational models of knowledge, they saw the world as measurable, even suggesting the use of coordinates to divide geographical space. The earliest history of Western geography as a science began for the ancient Greeks of lonia in the 12th century BCE, from whom both Plato and Aristotle inherited their vision of the physical world.
The early Greeks regarded the remote islands to their west as the horizon of the known world. One of the momentous voyages of discovery in Greek history was recorded in the 4th century BCE. when the Greek explorer Pythcas sailed around Spain into what must have been to him a strange and alien world, along the coast of Gaul (France), around Britain, and into the Baltic regions. His astronomical and mariner records were used in Greece for several centuries as the basis for the earliest writings on mathematical geography and cartography.
Alexander the Great stretched the geographical boundaries of the European worldview even farther in the 4th century BCE. His empire covered a vast region from Egypt through the Balkans, and Asia Minor, east to the Ganges river in India. Trade routes established in his empire brought geographical knowledge back to Alexandria from Southern and Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia. The accumulation of knowledge on papyrus rolls in the renowned library of Alexandria, Starting about 300 BCE, was a momentous achievement but one soon lost because of the fragility of papyrus and the political upheavals that swept across the region. The library. founded by Ptolemy Philadelphus, was built through Alexander’s conquests of Europe, Asia, and North Africa and, in an ironic turn of history, was destroyed by fire in the first millennium. The library held half-a-million papyrus rolls, which constituted the largest library in antiquity.
The learning of the Greeks survived the Roman Empire, being revived in Latin translations by the Byzantines in the 5th century. Arab translations of the Greek manuscripts appeared in the 9th century. Maimonides, a leading 12th-century Jewish scholar, also studied Aristotle’s writing and helped spread his influence.
Explain the historical path of GC: Global Explorers: Migrants, Holy People, Merchants.
For ancient pre-agrarian societies in Europe, migration was a way of life. Changing climate conditions and food supplies required a nomadic life before 2000 BCE. Improvement of fanning techniques and implements allowed many nomadic groups to settle on fertile lands, unless they were confronted by disease, invasion, or war. Except for trade caravans and emissaries on state business with armed escorts, travel was always considered hazardous and diiiicult. Asians, for their part, did not travel far. The cultures of the Far East, especially the eastern parts of Asia governed by the hereditary monarchy of China (which encompasses today’s China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam), were loosely united by a Chinese worldview, while the western region of Asia responded more particularly to India’s religious influences of Hinduism and Buddhism.
By the 9th century, Arab ships made regular trips from the Persian Gulf to China. A North African scholar, al-Idrisi, wrote a document in 1153 titled “Amusement for Him Who Desires to Travel Round the World.” Records show that Egyptian merchants engaged in trade in India and the Spice Islands at the end of the 13th century. Lamenting the sketchy knowledge of the East, one Arab writer noted:
Writers on the customs and kingdoms of the world have in their works mentioned many provinces and places and rivers as existing in China . . . but the names have not reached us with any exactness, nor have we any certain infonnation as to their circumstances. Thus they are as good as unknown to us; there being few travelers who arrive from these parts, such as might furnish us with intelligence, and for this reason we forbeax to detail them.
After the fall of the classical Greek and Roman empires, substantive knowledge and curiosity about China and India ebbed among Europeans. Historians puzzle over the LOCO-year gap in East-West contact from the end of the late classical Greek period to the 17th~century Renaissance. Even though the period has long been described as static, brutal, and benighted, some historians now suggest that the so-called Dark Ages instead was a dynamic period when social and intellectual life was in transition.
It is hard to believe that for almost two millennia people were any less curious about the construction of practical methods for long-distance communication. . . but the sobering fact is that throughout this period only occasional references were made.
The disappearance of Greek scholarship on geography left Europeans without many clues about the outside world, but their desire to explore would soon lead to the expansion of their knowledge of the shrinking world. Europeans were introduced in the 15th century to the Arab translation of Geographia, by Claudius Ptolemy, written in the first century BCE. Widely used as a reference by map makers despite its miscalculations and errors, it was a guide for Christopher Columbus in his search for a new western trade route to India. “The purpose of Geographia is to represent the unity and continuity of the known world in its true nature and location,” Ptolemy wrote.
Among the known records of Jewish travelers are written accounts of the trade. paths followed into the farthest reaches of the known world. Jacob ibn Tank carried astronomical books from Ceylon to Baghdad in 820. Another traveler, Joseph of Spain, introduced Arabic numerals to the Western world &om India. Jewish merchants from Persia brought goods from China to Ant-la-Chapelle (now Aachen, Germany). Radanite Jewish merchants also traveled overland routes from Spain across Europe, as far north as Kiev and east to India and China. An Arab geographer, Ibn Khordadbeh, composed the Book of Roads and Kingdoms in 847, tracing numerous trade routes throughout Europe, stretching from Spain to Asia. In the book, he described Contact with “ar-Rus merchants,” early ancestors of Russian-Scandinavians: “They are a tribe from among the as-Saqaliba . . . [who] bring furs of beavers and of black foxes and swords from the most distant parts of the [land] to the sea of Rum [Mediterranean]”.
Vikings, or Norsemen, were known to have plied sea routes in the northern oceans, raiding cities in Western Europe as far south as Seville and the Andalusia region in southern Spain in the 9th century. The population centers of Europe were long plagued with raids and incursions by these nomadic tribes. These tribes also settled western regions of the north Atlantic, including the coastal areas of Iceland, Greenland, and Newfoundland.
When Marco Polo’s caravan ventured From Venice to the kingdom of the Mongols, and then to the court of the great Kublai Khan about 1260, European traders speculated much-~but actually knew little-about life in Asia. Traders had an interest in obtaining silk from the East for European trade. Scholars now have grave doubts that the Polo family actually merited their far-flung reputation for bringing down barriers between Europe and Asia and instead attribute their good fortune to storytellers’ exaggerations. By 1340, trade with Asia was Virtually cut off because of economic collapse in Europe and danger on the trade routes east.
Explain the historical path of GC: Mapmakers in the Medieval World.
Mapmaking was an integral part of communication history. Maps were widely considered to be valuable keys to unlocking unknown worlds. Walter Ong (1982) describes how printed maps enabled exploration and discovery:
Only after . . . extensive experience with maps . . . would human beings, when they thought about the cosmos or universe or “world,” think primarily of something laid out before their eyes, as in a modern printed atlas, a vast surface . . . ready to be “explored.” The ancient oral world knew few “explorers,” though it did know many itinerants, travelers, voyagers, adventurers and pilgrims.
Maps were closely guarded by European royalty and considered to be state secrets. Maps and charts from Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas were deposited for safekeeping in Seville’s most secure vaults. This extreme secrecy probably accounts for how the original maps used by Columbus, Cortez, and Magellan, among others, were lost. The reliability of maps was, in any case, rife with uncertainty. Columbus thought he was making landfall on the coast of Asia, instead of the Caribbean isles.
Mapmaking spurred empire building by some European powers, especially after the introduction of gunpowder. The information on most ancient maps reflected the mapmaker’s cultural and religious orientations, and much of the information was estimated, distorted, or just plain wrong.
Maps served many purposes in ancient times, including maritime navigation, religious pilgrimages, and military and administrative uses. In the more symbolic view, “maps make the invisible visible”. Asian maps were drawn as art. Tibetan maps, by contrast, led travelers along a spiritual path through one of many possible universes, vertically ordered, from an imagined world of “desire” to a world of “non-forms”. Because maps were an intellectual tool of the most educated in ancient Greece and Rome, travelers and military leaders probably seldom had access to them or practical reasons to use them. Maps were used instead as intellectual tools among the Greeks, as objects for meditation.
After the fall of the Roman Empire, Europe was roughly divided by Islam in the south, the Christian kingdoms in the west, and the Christian Byzantine Empire in the east. Medieval geographers depicted the world on rough maps divided among three continents-Asia, Africa, and Europe. In one version of these ancient maps, the world was contained within a circle, with Asia, the largest of the three continents, filling the upper semicircle. In the lower halfis a “T” dividing Africa on the right from Europe on the left by the Nile River. Because travel involved venturing beyond safe and familiar terrain, it was often regarded as an act of religious devotion. Religious belief systems were directly reflected in many medieval European maps. Such maps were centered, explicitly or otherwise, on jerusalem and were meant to be interpreted like scripture, as a kind of “moralized geography” as much as an instrument of science. Such maps used a measured grid system that diminished in size around Jerusalem.
The relative isolation of the European populations in the Middle Ages between the 4th and 18th centuries was reflected in their incomplete road systems. According to a leading medieval historian, no real roads existed in llth-century Eur0pe other than the remnants of a few old Roman roads. Travel and commerce relied almost exclusively on a few navigable rivers, such as the Danube and the Rhine. Trade and commerce were hindered in France because of the lack of inland waterways.
A new awareness of geography arose with the Christian Crusades, beginning at the end of the 11th century and continuing into the 15th century. The Crusades marked a new wave of exploration. During these military expeditions across Europe into the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean, many Europeans became more familiar with distant languages, cultures, and locations. Crusaders developed a taste for goods they found during their travels, including goods from China and India. The Crusades constituted a major chapter in international communication, even though they had both complex and contradictory effects.
Ultimately, the Crusades ignited a chain of events extending the trading activity of European merchants, changing attitudes in Europe toward the outside world, and launching the “age of discovery” with 15th-century explorers like Columbus, Bartolomeu Dias, and Vasco da Gama of Portugal, and others. Commercial centers, including Venice, became trade centers linking Europe and the Middle East.
Muslims, for their part, observed for 1,400 years the sacred direction toward their holiest shrine at Mecca, the edifice that symbolizes the presence of Allah. In the Middle Ages, they used two traditions to determine the sacred direction, one that sought to locate certain stars and the equinox of the sun, and the other using the direction ofa circle on a terrestrial sphere. The Muslims were also responsible for acquiring ideas and devices from many lands. An Islamic proverb offered this insight into their transcultural consciousness: “Allah has made three marvels: the brain of the Greek, the hand of the Chinese, and the tongue of the Arab”.
Islam’s scholars recognized that the earth was a sphere, and they used Ptolemy’s Geographia to improve their measurements until they employed longitude and latitude by the mid-9th century. Such grid coordinates became the basis of extensive and elaborate mapping of Islamic regions and cities. Only later did innovators like Roger Bacon (c. 1220-1292) blend insights of both Greek and Islamic science in his encyclopedia of medieval science, Opus Maius. European scholars, such as Bacon, began to weigh the value of advancements from other cultures, borrowing elemental ideas for development of a telescope, gunpowder, air flight, and maritime navigation.
Explain the historical path of GC: Inventors: Signals and Semaphores
The historical succession of technologies used for communication is lengthy. A time line tracking the emergence of information technologies shows a bewildering array of conceptual and material inventions. The chronology of innovations can be atomized to discrete events or viewed from evidence of cultural continuities. One review has categorized them by their domains: either alphabet and mathematics, or optical and audio media.
At their simplest, most information technologies were solutions to tangible and immediate problems. The earliest known communication use of a simple signal system over distances employed fires or beacons. Aristotle (384-322 BCE) described in Peri Kosmon an elaborate signaling plan in 500 BCE to inform the Persian king within one day about everything of significance that took place in his empire in Asia Minor. Three Greek writers-Homer, Virgil, and Aeschylus-described signal systems for military use. Aeschylus wrote in Agamemnon about the arrival of news of the conquest of Troy (1184 BCE) in Mycenae, a distance of 400 miles: “Yet who so swift could speed the message here?” The message was conveyed, the writer answered, “beacon to beacon” across mountaintops and “urged its way, in golden glory, like some strange new sun”.
The Greeks attempted to develop a more elaborate torch signal system based on letters of the alphabet, but it proved to be too cumbersome for practical use, according to the historian Polybius (c. ZOO-c. 118 BCE).
Interest in signaling systems among the Greeks was based on potential military purposes. Homer wrote in The Iliad around 700 BCE:
Thus, from some far-away beleaguered island, where all day long the men have fought a desperate battle from their city walls, the smoke goes up to heaven; but no sooner has the sun gone down than the light of the line of beacons blazes up and shoots into the sky to warn the neighboring islanders and bring them to the rescue in their ships.
Roman rulers adapted a type of heliograph, or visual signal system using reflected sunlight. The emperor Tiberius ruled Rome (26-37 CE) from the island of Capri, sending signals from a mirror of polished metal. No records have been found of the code used for the reflected messages, raising doubts among skeptics about the practical value of the attempt. The Moors also used a type of heliograph in Algeria in the 11th century.
In-transit message systems employed couriers both on foot and on horse. In ancient Babylon, King Hammurabi (1792-1750 BCE) dispatched messengers on a regular two-day route to Larsa, riding continuously day and night. Egyptian scribes tracked the daily passage of messengers for military and diplomatic missions along the kingdom’s Syrian and Palestinian border outposts. These messengers were wary of being attacked en route by Bedouin robbers, prompting the posting of royal guards at stations and the eventual use of fire-beacon signals on the frontiers.
Herodotus, a Greek historian, described in minute detail a pony express-style relay system during Xerxes’ rule over Persia in 486-465 BCE, modeled after a torch race to celebrate the Greek ruler Hephaestus. King Cyrus the Great of Persia made significant improvements in the courier system.
[Cyrus] experimented to find out how great a distance a horse could cover in a day when ridden hard, but so as not to break down, and then he erected post-stations at just such distances and equipped them with horses, and men to take care of them; at each one of the stations he had the proper official appointed to receive the letters that were delivered and to forward them on, to take in the exhausted horses and riders and send on fresh ones. They say, moreover, that sometimes this express does not stop all night, but the night-messengers succeed the day messengers in relays, and when this is the case, this express, some say, gets over the ground faster than the cranes.
The Greek historian Herodotus reported there were at least 111 courier relay stations between Sardis and Susa, a distance of about 1,800 miles. In the Battle of Marathon (490 BCE) near Athens, in which Greek forces withheld an invasion of the Persians, the Persian king Cyrus dispatched a message to his field commanders, using the words later adopted as a slogan by the U.S. Postal Service: “There is nothing in the world which travels faster than these Persian couriers. . . . Nothing stops these couriers from covering their allotted stage in the quickest possible time-neither snow, rain, heat, nor darkness”.
The Romans adapted the Persian courier and message systems, using the famous Roman highway system for moving troops, commerce, and communications. Both government and commercial services delivered correspondence throughout the Roman Empire. Messages were conveyed on papyrus, parchment, and wax tablets. The courier system used elaborate relay stations to sustain the rigors of overland travel. Each station maintained a stable of 40 horses and riders, known as strators, who carried special licenses from the emperor to obtain fiesh horses. In this arrangement, mail could be delivered 50 to 100 miles per day. The system eventually collapsed over controversy about who would be responsible for supplying horses and provisions.
Throughout the Middle Ages, regional commercial postal services were maintained around merchant centers, such as Venice and Bruges. Charlemagne directed a courier system among France, Italy, Germany, and Spain. In 1464, Louis XI of France reintroduced a network of relay stations with mounted couriers for ofhcial communiqués. England began a comparable service in 1481. Private commercial systems, based on royal franchises, began as early as the 15th century in Venice.
Reliability and speed of delivery through the medieval postal systems were remarkably good. Historians have found evidence that some messages traveled up to 150 miles in one day from the 15th to the early 19th centuries in Britain. By 1900, the delivery service offered one-day service within 350 miles.
The Chinese developed extensive networks of messengers and couriers as early as the Chou dynasty (1122-4221 BCE), but few historical details are known, Marco Polo described a relay system employed by the Mongols in the 13th century, dispatching everything from diplomatic messages to fruits from surrounding regions. Each station, separated at 25to 30-mile intervals, was stocked with at least 400 horses. Messengers could travel as far as 250 to 300 miles per day when required by emergencies. The Venetian merchant Polo observed, “The whole organization is so stupendous and so costly that it bailles speech and writing”.
The Mongol ruler Genghis Khan used pigeons in the 12th century for communication in his kingdom, which covered a vast area, including almost all of central Asia, from the Aral Sea on the west to the China Sea in the east (Woods, 1965). Carrier or homing pigeons were also used by Egyptian pharaohs to announce the arrival of important visitors as early as 2900 BCE. News of the outcome of the Olympic Games in ancient Greece was sent to Athens by bird carriers.
The kings of Mesopotamia in 2350 BCE gave a homing pigeon to each royal messenger to carry on dangerous routes. If the messenger was attacked, he released the pigeon to signal that the message had been lost and a new messenger should be dispatched.
The Incas in medieval South America, beginning about 1200, used an elaborate communication system with both smoke signals and a quipu, a cord with knots based on a numerical system, for messages. The numeric cord was sent by relay messengers as far as 150 miles in a day.
Devices such as trumpets, drums, and even ordinary people’s shouting were used by many different cultures to extend the reach of physical sounds. Diodorus Siculus, in the first century, described the use of stentors, or shouters, to pass news across open fields. Other communication innovations that were developed involved tapping codes on metal tubes with a hammer or blowing into cylinders to produce sounds. An Italian scholar, Giambattista della Porta, wrote in Magic Naturalis in 1553 about an acoustical device in which messages were shouted through so-called speaking tubes.
The magnetic compass was introduced to Europe from China at the end of the 12th century. By the 16th century, experiments succeeded in transmitting a cryptographic code using a crude system of magnetic compass needles, leading to eventual development of the electric telegraph.
The enthusiasm of Renaissance inventors for various inventions intended to communicate over distances had detractors. Galileo wrote about his response to one such proposed delvice in Dialogus de Systemate Mandi in 1632:
You remind me of a man who wanted to sell me a secret art that would allow me to speak to someone at a distance of 2-3 thousand miles, by means of the attraction of magnetized needles. When I told him that I would be delighted to purchase the device, if only I was allowed to try it first, and that I would be satisfied if I could do so from one corner of the room to another, he answered that at such a short distance the effect would be barely visible. At that point I said farewell to the man and I told him I had no interest to travel to Egypt or Moscow before I could try the device, but if he wanted to move there I would be happy
to remain in Venice and give the signals from here. (Galileo, 1953, p. 88)
A renewal of interest in signaling systems came in the 16th century as the French, Spanish, and Venetian navies began using flag-signaling techniques Erom their ships. Then the subsequent development of the telescope in 1608 by Dutch spectacle maker Hans Lippersley extended the range of observers.
Interest in optical signals resulted in experiments by the 18th century in Germany and Switzerland. German professor Johann Bergstrasser constructed an optical telegraph line that connected Feldberg, Homberg, and Phillippsuhe. A Czech musician, Joseph Chudy, devised a system of five lights that could be read by telescope at a distance, in effect employing a five-bit binary code, in 1786.
Explain the historical path of GC: Mapmakers in the Medieval World.
Mapmaking was an integral part of communication history. Maps were widely considered to be valuable keys to unlocking unknown worlds. Walter Ong (1982) describes how printed maps enabled exploration and discovery:
Only after . . . extensive experience with maps . . . would human beings, when they thought about the cosmos or universe or “world,” think primarily of something laid out before their eyes, as in a modern printed atlas, a vast surface . . . ready to be “explored.” The ancient oral world knew few “explorers,” though it did know many itinerants, travelers, voyagers, adventurers and pilgrims.
Maps were closely guarded by European royalty and considered to be state secrets. Maps and charts from Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas were deposited for safekeeping in Seville’s most secure vaults. This extreme secrecy probably accounts for how the original maps used by Columbus, Cortez, and Magellan, among others, were lost. The reliability of maps was, in any case, rife with uncertainty. Columbus thought he was making landfall on the coast of Asia, instead of the Caribbean isles.
Mapmaking spurred empire building by some European powers, especially after the introduction of gunpowder. The information on most ancient maps reflected the mapmaker’s cultural and religious orientations, and much of the information was estimated, distorted, or just plain wrong.
Maps served many purposes in ancient times, including maritime navigation, religious pilgrimages, and military and administrative uses. In the more symbolic view, “maps make the invisible visible”. Asian maps were drawn as art. Tibetan maps, by contrast, led travelers along a spiritual path through one of many possible universes, vertically ordered, from an imagined world of “desire” to a world of “non-forms”. Because maps were an intellectual tool of the most educated in ancient Greece and Rome, travelers and military leaders probably seldom had access to them or practical reasons to use them. Maps were used instead as intellectual tools among the Greeks, as objects for meditation.
After the fall of the Roman Empire, Europe was roughly divided by Islam in the south, the Christian kingdoms in the west, and the Christian Byzantine Empire in the east. Medieval geographers depicted the world on rough maps divided among three continents-Asia, Africa, and Europe. In one version of these ancient maps, the world was contained within a circle, with Asia, the largest of the three continents, filling the upper semicircle. In the lower halfis a “T” dividing Africa on the right from Europe on the left by the Nile River. Because travel involved venturing beyond safe and familiar terrain, it was often regarded as an act of religious devotion. Religious belief systems were directly reflected in many medieval European maps. Such maps were centered, explicitly or otherwise, on jerusalem and were meant to be interpreted like scripture, as a kind of “moralized geography” as much as an instrument of science. Such maps used a measured grid system that diminished in size around Jerusalem.
The relative isolation of the European populations in the Middle Ages between the 4th and 18th centuries was reflected in their incomplete road systems. According to a leading medieval historian, no real roads existed in llth-century Eur0pe other than the remnants of a few old Roman roads. Travel and commerce relied almost exclusively on a few navigable rivers, such as the Danube and the Rhine. Trade and commerce were hindered in France because of the lack of inland waterways.
A new awareness of geography arose with the Christian Crusades, beginning at the end of the 11th century and continuing into the 15th century. The Crusades marked a new wave of exploration. During these military expeditions across Europe into the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean, many Europeans became more familiar with distant languages, cultures, and locations. Crusaders developed a taste for goods they found during their travels, including goods from China and India. The Crusades constituted a major chapter in international communication, even though they had both complex and contradictory effects.
Ultimately, the Crusades ignited a chain of events extending the trading activity of European merchants, changing attitudes in Europe toward the outside world, and launching the “age of discovery” with 15th-century explorers like Columbus, Bartolomeu Dias, and Vasco da Gama of Portugal, and others. Commercial centers, including Venice, became trade centers linking Europe and the Middle East.
Muslims, for their part, observed for 1,400 years the sacred direction toward their holiest shrine at Mecca, the edifice that symbolizes the presence of Allah. In the Middle Ages, they used two traditions to determine the sacred direction, one that sought to locate certain stars and the equinox of the sun, and the other using the direction ofa circle on a terrestrial sphere. The Muslims were also responsible for acquiring ideas and devices from many lands. An Islamic proverb offered this insight into their transcultural consciousness: “Allah has made three marvels: the brain of the Greek, the hand of the Chinese, and the tongue of the Arab”.
Islam’s scholars recognized that the earth was a sphere, and they used Ptolemy’s Geographia to improve their measurements until they employed longitude and latitude by the mid-9th century. Such grid coordinates became the basis of extensive and elaborate mapping of Islamic regions and cities. Only later did innovators like Roger Bacon (c. 1220-1292) blend insights of both Greek and Islamic science in his encyclopedia of medieval science, Opus Maius. European scholars, such as Bacon, began to weigh the value of advancements from other cultures, borrowing elemental ideas for development of a telescope, gunpowder, air flight, and maritime navigation.
Explain the historical path of GC: The Printing Press, Literacy, and the Knowledge Explosion.
Throughout the early Middle Ages, clerics were among the few literate people engaged in any task requiring writing. In addition to their religious duties, they drafted legal documents and letters for ofiicial dispatches. On occasions when written communication for diplomacy or commerce was necessary, the preferred means was through epistles.
The circulation of religious and diplomatic correspondence was an ancient practice but was expanded and refined in the high Middle Ages in the 12th through the 14th centuries, a time when western Europe exhibited dramatic changes in literature, as well as philosophy, government, and law. Literacy for the common public, however, required easy access to printed matter and the means to transport and circulate it widely; thus, a printing press and a postal service were prerequisites.
The complexity and diversity of the intellectual and cultural life created a marketplace ripe for information, stimulating the spread of literacy in Europe after the development of the printing press.
Printing presses had appeared in Asia as early as the 8th century, but the success of such presses was hindered by the vast collection of Chinese characters required to reproduce texts. When the Arabs defeated Chinese forces in Samarkand in 751, they captured Chinese papermakers and brought the innovative process to North Africa. Papermaking arrived in Spain around 1150, in Italy in 1270, and in Germany in 1390. France acquired the new process from Spain in the 12th century but did not produce paper until later in the 14th century.
Johannes Gutenberg‘s development of the press in Mainz, Germany, about 1450, stemmed from his concerted effort to print Bibles for use in local churches. Advances in metalwork in Germany made it possrble for Gutenberg to fabricate metal type for only 50 letter characters. He also adapted his presses to allow printing on both sides of a sheet of paper and produced copies with much clearer print than had been possible with older block printing. The social consequences of the printing press were far-reaching, eventually encouraging the practice of reading among common people and the reformation of medieval European institutions, religions, and governments. Still, in 17th-century Europe almost nothing printed was trustworthy. The world of printing was notorious for its piracy, incivility, plagiarism, unauthorized copying, false attributions, sedition, and errors. Books and other printed material eventually sparked social and political changes that gave rise to popular political consciousness and “public Opinion”.
The Industrial Revolution was not finished with printing technology with the advent of movable type. Even after Gutenberg’s innovations, printers set type by hand for almost five centuries until the middle of the 19th century when Ottmar Merx genthaler introduced a machine, the Linotype, to set type in lines and columns with molten metal. The changes set in motion by the printing press were profound. New literacy introduced new kinds of social relationships and networks among both learned and common people.
The postal service was an innovation patterned after older courier and messenger systems. Such a delivery regularized and routinized delivery of epistles and other correspondence at a cost accessible to a growing middle class, opening a market for pamphlets and newspapers.
Explain the historical path of GC: Scientists and International Networks.
The social consequences of the printing press were far-reaching, eventually encouraging the practice of reading among common people and the reformation of medieval European institutions, religions, and governments. Still, in 17th-century Europe almost nothing printed was trustworthy. The world of printing was notorious for its piracy, incivility, plagiarism, unauthorized copying, false attributions, sedition, and errors. Books and other printed material eventually sparked social and political changes that gave rise to popular political consciousness and “public Opinion”.
The Industrial Revolution was not finished with printing technology with the advent of movable type. Even after Gutenberg’s innovations, printers set type by hand for almost five centuries until the middle of the 19th century when Ottmar Merx genthaler introduced a machine, the Linotype, to set type in lines and columns with molten metal. The changes set in motion by the printing press were profound. New literacy introduced new kinds of social relationships and networks among both learned and common people.
The postal service was an innovation patterned after older courier and messenger systems. Such a delivery regularized and routinized delivery of epistles and other correspondence at a cost accessible to a growing middle class, opening a market for pamphlets and newspapers.
SCIENTISTS AND INTERNATIONAL NETWORKS
Technological innovations in travel and the changing role of international science in the mid-19th century brought far-reaching changes in relations between nations. The melding of cordial relations between previously isolated countries into a coherent global network resulted from intermingling both their shared interests and intractable differences through the means of technology.
Introduction of the first user-friendly electric telegraph in 1844 was a breakthrough in the longstanding dilemma over development of two-way information exchange. It also marked a shift between transportation and ritual modes of communication and permitted the dissemination of strategic information over great distances. The electric telegraph was soon followed by the telephone and wireless radio. These instruments opened the door to the subsequent social revolution that accompanied the information age.
Beginning with the railroad and the telegraph, towns and cities were brought closer together within a nation, regardless of whether participants were reluctant or enthusiastic to embrace these changes. Railroad and telegraph companies were built upon the era’s unbridled optimism in empire building.
Oddly, national governments were usually ambivalent about scientific initiatives through the middle of the 19th century. Government cooperation on science often hinged on the preconditions that such projects “did not cost too much, that the scientists themselves were prepared to do the work, and that nothing in the commitment trenched upon national security or sovereignty”.
Because of the strategic importance of communication for military and diplomatic purposes, communication between nations was regarded in most 19th century political circles as strategic and proprietary. Tensions between nation states even prevented the rise of international organizations until about 1850. One of the first modern intergovernmental organizations was the Central Commission for the Navigation of the Rhine, organized by the Congress of Vienna in 1851.
France was positioned to emerge in a central role in negotiation of new international standards of exchange among colonial powers but had a history of guarding communication systems for strategic military objectives. France maina tained one of the best-organized visual signal systems, involving a network of towers across the countryside. The semaphore code used by the French was considered a state secret until about 1850. Eventually, scientists sought to bridge national interests and obtain increased intergovernmental cooperation and support, and a few intergovernmental science ventures were launched by the end of the 19th century.
One of the these projects was an initiative to measure the circumference of the earth, introduced in 1862 by the Prussian Institute of Geodesy, which changed its name to the International Geodetic Association in 1867.
The first standardization of a code of science occurred in 1860 when an assembly of chemists convened in Karlsruhe, Germany, to clarify the general usage of chemical symbols. Within a few years, similar congresses were convened to discuss international cooperation in the disciplines of botany and horticulture (1864), geodesy (1864), astronomy (1865), pharmacy (1865), meteorology (1873), and geology (1878). International agreements were being drafted to regulate postal and telegraph traffic. The International Telegraph Union was formed in 1865, and the Universal Postal Union was established in 1875.
By 1889, there were 91 international meetings held in conjunction with the Paris Universal Exhibition. By the late 18805, the Paris-based Association for Scientific Advancement (Alliance Scientifique Universelle) issued an identity card, or passport, called the diplome-circulaire, which scientists carried during their foreign travels (Crawford, 1992). From such scientific assemblies, 37 international cooperative agreements were drafted between 1850 and 1880, including a compact for cooperative mail delivery issued by the General Postal Union in 1874 and a treaty for the International Regulation of Sea Routes in 1879.
One of the earliest significant steps toward globalizing the world was adoption of a global time system. An 1884 conference on international standards of time reckoning was held in Washington DC to discuss reforming time standards and designating an international meridian.
The selection of Greenwich Observatory near London as the international meridian showed tacit acceptance among negotiators of a shift to a scientific center of global interests, in spite of France’s objections to Greenwich because of French-British jealousy. French officials sought to barter an agreement, trading their acceptance of the proposal to make Greenwich the international meridian in exchange for British acceptance of the French metric system as the basis of international exchange. France promoted worldwide adoption of the metric system as early as 1792, calling the meter a “new bond of general fraternity for the peoples who adopt it” and the “beneficial truth that will become a new link between nations and one of the most useful conquests of equality” (Mattelart, 2000, p. 5). Officers in the American Metrological Society had accepted the challenge to promote the metric system. Their primary objective was universal adoption, especially in the English-speaking countries that had long resisted.
Explain the historical path of GC: The International Electric Revolution
The scientific innovations of the 19th century launched the world on a path to electrification of industry and commerce. Steam power led to what had once seemed to be startling speeds of travel, first by steamboat and then by railroad. The Savannah was the first steamboat to cross the Atlantic Ocean, under power of both paddle wheel and sails, in 1819. The steam-powered railway system in England opened the first rail service between Liverpool and Manchester in 1830, reaching speeds of 45 kilometers an hour. Electrical experiments in England, Denmark, Russia, and Sweden led to the first use of a telegraph by Carl Friedrich Gauss and Wilhelm Weber in Gottingen in 1838. The railroad and telegraph systems were important in establishing international corporate empires that successfully brought technological innovations, linking the telegraph to the railway systems in England in 1839.
Within 20 years of the general introduction of the telegraph in 1844, there were 150,000 miles of telegraph lines throughout the world, but mostly in EurOpe and North America. The transatlantic line eventually became a landmark step in bringing nations together in an international communication network.
One of the earliest proposals for a transatlantic cable line was mentioned in the National Telegraph Review in July 1853, but business promoters failed to attract sufiicient backing. Cyrus Field and Frederick N. Gisbome considered the proposal again in 1854 and sought the backing by telegraph inventor Samuel, F. B. Morse. Consummating the project involved a series of difiicult business agreements, including consolidation of then-independent U.S. telegraph systems into what would eventually become the American Telegraph Company.
Morse was anxious to see the expansion of telegraph technology and promised to allow the use of his patents without charge on a line from the British provinces in Canada to New York and to transmit telegraph messages at half price.
The first transatlantic line did not work, and other attempts to lay lines either broke or failed. Eventually a line was fully operational by 1866. Backers of the project were primarily motivated by their desire to reduce the time required for news to travel from Europe to America by as much as 48 hours. Before the transatlantic project was begun, another entrepreneur, businessman Perry McDonough Collins, began promoting his ambitious scheme to tie the world together by telegraph. Collins wanted to lay a telegraph line from the western United States through British Columbia, Russian America (Alaska), under the icy Waters of the Bering Strait, and overland again through Siberia to connect to a Russian line in eastern Asia. The endeavor also included construction of telegraph lines to Central and Latin America. Collins had obtained approval of both American and Russian governments to begin work on the Alaska-Russia line, and he had dispatched George Kennan to begin surveying a route through the Siberian tundra. The project was aborted in July 1866, upon the successful laying of a transatlantic cable.
Alexander Graham Bell, who considered his true vocation to be a teacher of the deaf, stumbled across the electrical signaling process used by the telephone in his effort to improve the telegraph. Bell sought to devise a system to send several simultaneous messages over a single wire without interference.
When telephones were demonstrated at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876, the public showed little enthusiasm for the device. Even some scientists, who saw the virtue of the science employed in the telephone, were ambivalent about its practical social uses.
The telephone was a communication innovation that was adopted and managed differently in each nation. In the United States, the privately operated Bell Telephone Company oversaw its development. The company sought to sell the first phone patents to the Western Union Telegraph Company for $100,000, but the offer was refiised. Later, Bell franchised rights to lease phones to private agents throughout the country. Governments oversaw commercial phone development in Germany, France, and England, creating state monopolies. Sweden and a few other countries began with open markets but eventually moved toward government control through regulation and licensing.
Once unleashed, the social uses of technologies follow their own paths of social and economic opportunity. One of the oldest news agencies, Reuters, began in 1850 when Paul Julius Renter used 40 carrier pigeons to send stock market prices between Brussels and Aachen to compete with the inefficient European telegraph system. Reuters News Service eventually became a major source of international information because of its emphasis on the speed of information exchange, a value shared in other enterprises:
Speed was prominent in the . . . growth of international wire services. But speedy information was most important for the military (because it meant the difference between victory and defeat, life and death) and international traders (because it meant the difference between profit and loss). International news agencies grew because they served this demand for speedy information.
Inventors of “aerial telegraphy,” sending signals over the air without Wires, filed for the £irst patent in 1872. Later, Thomas Edison and others developed the elemental ideas for wireless transmissions. Edison eventually sold his ideas and patents to Guglielmo Marconi and his Marconi Wireless
Telegraph Company. The first coded trans-Atlantic radio signal was received in 1901.
Broadcast inventor Lee De Forest, who is now remembered as the “father of radio,” made significant advancement in the clarity of sound with his triode vacuum tube, making the transmission of sound-voice and music-possible. De Forest’s vision of the social use of radio was based on his idea that transmissions to mariners at sea would be a kind of musical beacon. He disliked proposals to commercialize radio, believing until his death that the technology was destined for some higher, more transcendent use.
Interestingly, others who devised new technologies for communication also saw hope in the new information machines for ushering in an age of more authentic connections in society. Their dreams, however, were soon displaced by the commercial imperatives and the expanding public appetite for information.
Explain the historical path of GC: Global immediacy and Transparency
Communication across great distance has been a catalyst for many changes in human relationships. Through a variety of mediated technologies, the cumulative effect of these changes was a redefinition of space and time, and increasing immediacy and transparency in global connections.
Echoes of continuity are found between what began in simple signal systems among the Greeks and Romans and the innovations in today’s global society. Taken as a whole, these technologies accompanied the broad movement toward modernism and, later, its nemesis, postmodernism.
Communication is implicated in the sweeping social and political informationscape, including the shifting relations between capital and labor and the continuing struggle over old metaphysical symbols and obstacles. Others have placed these developments within predominant historical themes, such as war, progress, and culture. Global communication always has been bound up in “the geopolitical consequences of human power struggles” or in the rationalizing of the marketplace through technoscientiiic networks of power. Significantly, one of the most penetrating studies of ancient communication practices is contained in a history of espionage. Deciding what is-or is not-distinctive about today’s global communication calls for synthesis of historical evidence.
The challenge of understanding this kind of cultural transformation is only partly explained by technology. We fail to see otherwise: “That our history has been shaped by the form and use of our tools in ways totally unanticipated by their inventors is, as always, conveniently forgotten”. The emergence of global communication imposes new names of meaning about the winding path of historical change.
Explain global advertising and public relations .
Dean Kruckeberg (PhD, University of Iowa) is an APR, Fellow PRSA, and Professor of Public Relations in the University of Northern Iowa’s Department of Communication Studies. He is coauthor of the books Public Relations and Community: A Reconstructed Theory and This Is PR: The Realities of Public Relations. A recipient of several national awards, he is a cochair of the Commission on Public Relations Education and a former board member of the Public Relations Society of America. Ktuckeberg’s teaching and consulting have included work in the United Arab Emirates, Latvia, Russia, and Bulgaria.
Marina Vujnovic (MA, University of Northern Iowa) is a PhD student in mass communications, the School of Journalism and Nlass Communication, the University of Iowa. She is a former newspaper journalist, political columnist, and public relations practitioner in her native Croatia, and she has taught communication at the University of Zagreb and was an administrative assistant for the Croatian Communication Association.
Newsom, Turk, and Kruckeberg (2004) say that public relations practitioners are intermediaries between the organizations that they represent and all of their organizations’ publics. They note, “As a management function, public relations involves responsibility and responsiveness in policy and information to the best interests of the organization and its publics” (p. 2). They further define public relations as “the various activities and communications that organizations undertake to monitor, evaluate, influence and adjust to the attitudes, opinions and behaviors of groups or individuals who constitute their publics” . Noting that the strategy of advertising is to create desire and to motivate demand for a product, the authors say that designing advertisements, preparing advertisements’ messages, and buying time or space for their exposure are the tasks of advertising. They further observe, “Advertising has been defined as paid-for time or space, except in the case of public service announcements (PSAs) where the time and space are donated to a nonprofit organization” .
Both advertising and public relations-when examined on a global scale-must be comparatively considered within a context that includes historical and evolutionary factors that have influenced their development regionally. Full appreciation must be given for the diverse cultural, governmental/regulatory, economic, geographic, and technological factors that have differently influenced the development of advertising and public relations in various parts of the world, as well as the range of dominant ideological beliefs that have mitigated their development and contemporary practice.
Advertising and public relations are changing rapidly throughout the world, arguably becoming more global in their practice. Such globalism is partly in response to rapidly developing transnational media and global communication systems that are both creating and becoming increasingly dependent upon global markets to sustain them, as well as in response to a corresponding multiculturalism-all of . which have come about because of previously unimaginable technological advances that are changing how and why people communicate.
This chapter provides a brief historical analysis and a prognosis of the continuing development-and role-of advertising and public relations worldwide, together with the implications of this development as well as of the future challenges in the mission, role, and function of both advertising and public relations.
Explain the history of advertising and public relations worldwide.
Incorrectly so, laypeople in the United States oftentimes associate advertising and public relations solely as (1) Western, if not U.S., in origin; and (2) corporate in purpose, that is, representing primarily wealthy and powerful corporations that tell consumer products and services, increasingly to a global market. Too, lay people often associate both advertising and public relations as (3) manipulative in their role. function, and intent. These assumptions not only are simplifications but indeed in themselves constitute gross inaccuracies. However, more credence can be ascribed to the common contentions that both advertising and public relations are democratic in their traditions, and capitalistic in their heritages.
Western in Origin?
Campbell, Martin, and Fabos (2005) note that advertising has existed in the Middle East since 3000 BC, when Babylonian shop owners began hanging signs outside their stores. Early Egyptian merchants hired criers to announce the arrival of ships, and the walls of ancient Pompeii had advertisements painted on them; by 900 A.D., town criers in European cities were directing customers to stores. English booksellers used brochures, bills, and posters to announce new books in the 14705, and advertisements in English newspapers began appearing in 1622.
In public relations, Kruckeberg, Badran, Ayish, and Awad (1994) make compelling arguments that the public relations role and function in the Middle East date at least as far back as Mohammed, and popular U.S. public relations textbooks point to public relations-like activities throughout the world that extend back into antiquity.
Indeed, although public relations in its contemporary sense is frequently regarded as a 20th-century U.S. phenomenon, a German organization had-if not the iirst-at least one of the earliest internal public relations departments. By 1890, Alfred Krupp’s company had a “news bureau” composed of as many as 20 staff members.
However, Mallinson (1991) notes that U.S. public relations was exported to post-World War II Europe primarily through Great Britain, in great part because of the two countries’ historical and linguistic ties but also as an outcome of the U.S.-British military alliance in World War II that had preceded this postwar U.S. overseas investment.
Nevertheless, although no corner of the globe can exclusively claim the origins of public relations, and while sophisticated public relations in its most contemporary sense is being practiced throughout the world, Kruckeberg observes,
The common presumption is that North American public relations is most sophisticated and thereby most deserving of emulation. Not only are North American strategies, tactics and techniques held in global esteem, but base cultural and ideological assumptions of North American public relations are unquestioningly accepted as normative to modern public relations practice, i.e., contemporary public relations practice is assumed to be predicated on specific North American social, political and economic ideologies. Public relations practice in North American society extends from philosophical foundations that hold in particular reverence the right to expression of public opinion and to freedom of the press, as well as a social tradition that is far more individualistic than historically has been that of many indigenous cultures in other parts of the world. Finally, public relations is based on-and inherently assumes-a sophisticated communication infrastructure that has evolved in North America, both politically and technically.
Despite the apparent widespread emulation of US. public relations practice elsewhere in the world, Ovaitt (l 988) argues that public relations may be even more culture-bound than is either marketing or advertising-making it harder to conduct public relations programs based on concepts that extend across interna~ tional boundaries.
For example, Tsetsura (2000a) observed that by 2000, public relations in Russia had existed for little more than 15 years but nevertheless was well on its way to achieving respect in that country. She noted that especially during recent years, many specialized public relations agencies had been established in that country, and internal PR departments also had been created in many Russian companies. Furthermore, Russian scholars were actively examining the theories and practice of public relations, and the author’s research indicated that American public relations theory had had a significant impact on Russian public relations theory.
However, Tsetura’s research found the following:
In general, American textbooks were more theoretically oriented than the Russian textbooks. Russian textbooks, in their turn, were primarily written for practitioners and students who are, most likely, unfamiliar with the public relations phenomenon at all. . . .
Another tendency that should be noticed is a high concentration on political relations and election campaign strategies. Today, for many practitioners and even scholars, public relations is associated only with politics . . . or with integrated communications.
Significantly, Tsetsura’s research found that Russian public relations textbook authors either were not familiar with—or chose to ignore-some major theoretical concepts of contemporary American theory. They tended to focus more on practice than on theory and on suggestions for practical suggestions, tactics, and practical tips rather than on theoretical explanations. Tsetsura (2000b) further suggests that misleading explanations of the goals of public relations in the past, which had been promulgated in the early 19905 by Russian scholars who were not educated in public relations, had contributed to a negative image of public relations in Russia.
Al-Enad sees a difference between Western practice of public relations and what is appropriate practice in less-developed countries (LDCs). He contends that public relations practice in Third World nations might also apply to Europe’s less-developed former Eastern Bloc countries. Al-Enad observes that whereas Western public relations literature places public relations between an institution and its publics or environment, public relations in developing nations is located between material and nonmaterial aspects of the culture.
Regardless of diverse regions’ historical or contemporary influence, Kruckeberg concludes, Suffice it to say, there is growing appreciation for public relations professional practice worldwide. Countries previously unfazed-or at least unmoved - by negative public opinion are becoming cognizant of the benefits of good public relations to fulfil increasingly obvious needs. Aggressively, a range of public and private organizations and institutions are seeking both the knowledge and the means to enable these countries’ total infrastructures to practice “good public relations.”
Advertising, if not “global” in its commonality of strategies and tactics and in the availability of like media worldwide, most certainly is used extensively throughout the world. However, it is often tailored to indigenous-rather than global-tastes and perspectives; indeed, some advertising would be questionable, if not disastrous, if used elsewhere. For example, Vietnamese television viewers who were watching the Euro 2000 soccer matches saw a commercial for Binh Tien Consumer Goods Company’s shoes, an advertisement produced by Chicago advertising agency Leo Burnett Company that contrasted the footwear of Vietnamese soldiers in the “American War”-that is, sandals made of tires-with the latest athletic shoes made by the Vietnamese manufacturer.
Burnett’s headquarters says its partnership with a Vietnamese advertising agency was not trying to exploit a painful chapter in the history of Vietnam and the United States; it was just trying to sell shoes using images familiar to Vietnamese. “Anyone who has seen the ad realizes it does not exploit the war,” said a Burnett representative. “Rather, it employs historical achievements that have meaning to the Vietnamese people”. Although the advertisement was well-received in Vietnam, its use in the United States would have been unthinkable.
One campaign of Swedish furniture company Ikea in the United Kingdom featured “hapless Ikea employees who are forced to sniff a colleague’s armpit.” Another commercial employed tattooed thighs to help sell the company’s furniture. A British advertising agency caused an uproar by using Holocaust images to promote an Imperial War Museum exhibit, with one poster reading, “Come and see what man can achieve when he really puts his mind to it”. In 2004, Coca-Cola was pleased to learn that its “Buddies” TV ad had scored higher among teenagers for brand awareness, persuasion, and likeability than had any other Coke ad during the past decade. In the commercial, which was designed to air during the National Collegiate Athletic Association basketball tournament, a friend holds a refiigerated Coke can next to several parts of his body, including his armpit, to cool himself down after a game of hoops. He then gives the can to his friend, who does not know where his Coke had been. Reportedly, some company executives complained that the ad was “lowbrow” and was certainly not suitable for an older audience, such as those viewing a golf tournament. In 2000, the same soft drink company had run a commercial in Germany showing a woman donning a pair of frozen panties, although Coca-Cola had pulled another German ad that depicted a couple groping one another.
The importance of understanding international strategies and tactics and of appreciating indigenous sensitivities becomes quickly evident to advertising agencies whose clients themselves have obtained their resources globally, including tapping into a worldwide labor pool. Such clients want an advertising agency that can provide services worldwide and that is sensitive to the nuances of regional markets throughout the world.
Effective advertising today must operate in a multicultural world that is unforgiving of marketers’ cultural insensitivity to and lack of understanding of cultures other than their own. For example, John Hancock Financial Services aired a television spot in July 2000 that featured two Caucasian women at an airport holding an Asian baby. Although viewers could not positively identify the baby’s ethnicity 30m this advertisement, adoption agencies nevertheless protested-fearing that Chinese government officials would assume that the child was from China and that the implied homosexuality of the two female parents was being tolerated by American adoption officials, an attitude the Chinese government did not share concerning prospective adepting parents.
Nike pulled a magazine advertisement for a running shoe after disabilities rights groups objected to the advertisement’s reference to people having such challenges as being “drooling and misshapen” (Grimes, 2000)-a characterization that one might hope would be a faux pas in any culture. The 2000 Super Bowl commercial that showed a walking Christopher Reeve brought derision for its perceived exploitation of a celebrity tragedy , although this advertisement’s perceived tastelessness was certainly eclipsed by Janet Jackson’s halftime wardrobe malfunction during the 2004 Super Bowl that offended millions of Americans while perhaps not being remarkable to those in other parts of the world.
Wives from perhaps all or most of the world could nevertheless sympathize with a German wife, who accused her husband of unfaithfulness when a postcard arrived at their home 50m “Your Sweetie” that thanked her husband for the flowers; days later, a second postcard revealed that the mailing was an advertising campaign from the German flower industry (Aalund, 2000). A Study by a global advertising agency found that many Europeans were put off by a proliferation of technical advertisements designed to encourage consumers to purchase these products; instead of enticing Europeans to enter this market, however, new product announcements were persuading them to wait until the onslaught of technology development had slowed to a manageable pace.
Families of murder victims objected to Benetton’s 2000 “We, on Death Row” advertising supplement that featured pinups and in-depth interviews with inmates awaiting execution. The advertising campaign was designed to raise consciousness about the death penalty as well as awareness about the Benetton label of fashion clothing. Kraidy and Goeddertz, however, concluded that discourse by the U.S. prestige press about the Benetton campaign instead demonstrated a lost opportunity for meaningful global dialogue about capital punishment, leaving unfulfilled any civic potential of advertising because of the US. media’s hostile coverage that the authors said exposed the instability of hegemonic ideologies in mass-mediated public discourse.
Some companies, for example, Nokia, are attempting a global advertising campaign to create a more-unified identity worldwide; however, while creating a standardized message, the company is nevertheless relying primarily on visual images and is designing different ads for different regions to include actors and settings consistent with the regions where the ads are being placed.
In sum, it is highly naive to think of advertising and public relations as Western phenomena, either in their evolution and development or especially in their effectiveness in a global but nevertheless highly multicultural world.
Explain if global advertising and PR is corporate in purpose.
Some companies, for example, Nokia, are attempting a global advertising campaign to create a more-unified identity worldwide; however, while creating a standardized message, the company is nevertheless relying primarily on visual images and is designing different ads for different regions to include actors and settings consistent with the regions where the ads are being placed.
In sum, it is highly naive to think of advertising and public relations as Western phenomena, either in their evolution and development or especially in their effectiveness in a global but nevertheless highly multicultural world.
Corporate in Purpose?
Seemingly compelling evidence suggests that advertising has been strongly-if not overwhehningly-corporate in purpose, that is, accompanying the growth of large corporations as national and global institutions and enjoying the steady growth of consumerism as a worldwide social and economic phenomenon. Major clients of advertising agencies disproportionately include large corporations that sell goods and services, not only within the borders of their own countries but increasingly also to international markets. Although many corporations have marketed their products and services globally throughout most of their histories, others are now looking more closely to find opportune niches in international sites. For example, Unilever PLC launched a skin lotion for black women in Brazil, a nation that North Americans might be surprised to learn has the world’s largest black population next to Nigeria, although members of this population do not .necessarily identify themselves as being black. Procter and Gamble sends out 4.5 million copies of its promotional magazine Avanzando Con Tu Pamilia (Getting Ahead with Your Family) to Hispanic families in the United States. Advertising figures from 2003 showed that ad spending in Hispanic magazines had grown 24 percent over the previous year, while advertising spending in general during that time had grown only 8.6 percent.
Public relations has not been restricted to primarily supporting corporations that sell products and services. Popular US. textbooks point to governmental and nongovernmental organizations’ social programs that were promoted in the 20th century through public relations. Nevertheless, Heath (2000) observes that “from its birth, public relations has been seen as a tool used largely by corporate managements to get their way”.
Indeed, while both advertising and public relations historically have been widely used by corporations, U.S. governmental and nongovernmental organizations have also long used advertising, as well as public relations. Historically, patriotic World War 11 posters from the US. government come readily to mind, as do the various “poster” causes of charities and other nongovernmental organizations.
Of course, political campaigning and agendas throughout the world, both in democratic and totalitarian countries, have included both advertising and public relations techniques. For example, consider the propaganda of wartime Germany under propaganda head Paul Joseph Goebbels. Furthermore, scholars today contend that professional public relations practice in particular should be available for all publics.
Contemporary scholars see historic inequities that can be corrected through the use of public relations. Grunig, for example, argues that a set of principles must be developed to overcome the problem of a possible imbalance in power between clients of public relations practitioners and the publics with whom they communicate. Further, considerable attention today is being paid to public relations for activist groups. Indeed, Holtzhausen (2000) contends,
The fact that public relations as activism receives so little attention supports the theory that public relations has become part and parcel of the maintenance of metanarratives and domination in society. In fact, activists are often portrayed as the enemy of organizations and government, although they are actually the real voices of democracy.
The advertising industry in recent years has paid increasing attention to the concept of “relationship marketing,” which has much potential, not only for corporations’ relationships with customers and other publics but also for a variety of governmental, nongovernmental, and charitable organizations. As an example, Hollywood has responded to charges that the entertainment industry is marketing violence to children by airing, on network television, public service announcements against youth violence (Bravin, 2000). KFC has had to respond to charges of cruelty to its chickens, not only in the United States but in such distant locations as Taiwan.
