United States Culture and Communications Policy and the Internet at the End/the Beginning of the "American Century"

Introduction
The Internet has developed into the most imminent (cyber-)space, defined by global economic, cultural, political, and military encounters and competition. A few years ago, President Bill Clinton has called the Internet “the battlefield for the economic world war”, a war the United States is poised to win, and serious estimates presume that within only a few years about half of the jobs in the United States will be in the area of communications. While most Europeans have not even realized that such a “war” is on, the United States has well-positioned itself for the information age and has gained a significant lead. Despite the many problems e-commerce is currently facing, the Internet has a tremendous impact on the way countries produce, market, and trade goods. Access to the Internet and to information will increasingly have more influence on the terms of trade and will be the dividing line between the “Haves” and the “Have Nots” in the 21st century.

The information we receive through the Internet, however, does not only carry just pure data. Embedded in any sufficiently large body of text (here broadly defined not only as words but also as visual representation such as pictures, graphs, ads, etc.) are values that provide a basis for decoding the text. The Internet, in addition to conveying data, is thus a system of cultural exchange that disseminates interpretations of events and causal relations based on a pattern of premises that have been shaped by the historical development of nations, regions, and communities. The Internet will therefore play a immense role in interpreting the world and defining paradigms that shape the future.

In this, the United States enjoys a massive advantage: the World Wide Web is largely a English Wide Web and global only for an elite group able to overcome the language barrier. In most nations, this is the constituency of the political class. Because language is a defining cultural paradigm, the dialectical process that constitutes the exchange of ideas and information has in the past tended to lead to a deterioration of local and regional cultures when a lingua franca was interposed. Recent trends seem to indicate that the Internet – despite its myth of being all-encompassing – might turn out to be not much more than an intra-net of English-speaking countries that has decisive bridgeheads in non-English cultures. Despite English losing some of its overwhelming dominance in absolute numbers during 2001, more than 90 percent of all Internet traffic is still routed via the United States, and nearly all important commercial web content is in English. Increasingly, the dictum seems to become true that what is not being communicated in the Internet does not exist. The virtual disappearance of geographic, temporal, and cultural borders and distances goes hand-in-hand with extensive possibilities for influence and control.  

Background
This continues an increasingly global impact of American popular culture that began in the 1920s and 1930s and has been most obvious after the End of World War II. After the First World War, the global export of American culture was fostered by the American government. President Calvin Coolidge stated succinctly that America’s business was “business,” and his Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover in 1926 established a commission that was to foster the export of American movies. He and his contemporaries realized that a movie was not simply entertainment, did not just sell a story but a whole set of values, products, mannerism, and ways of deciphering the world. They “sold” the “American way of life” on a global scale and what has become the most brilliant public relations campaign of the 20th century.

While products of American popular culture have caught our attention and have been studied by a large number of scholars, the at least equally important impact of the United States in other areas of culture have developed in the shadows of the glitter of the entertainment industry. The creation of shopping centers and cineplexes at the peripheries of our cities mimic American forerunners; technologies and techniques, theories and practical applications are increasingly dominated by the United States, not only in Europe but around the globe. This does include political culture and style, discussions about privatization, the changing role of labor unions, reform of higher education, and pivotal changes in communications. These are areas as culturally relevant as popular entertainment and have an impact on the whole economy, from production to management, from the way we advertize, to how we market and sell our products.

The “Americanization” has been most visible, in the literal sense of that term, in the movie industry. This has not much changed in its core since the 1920s but in terms of quantity and strategies. Profits from movies and terrestrial television have multiplied but they are increasingly being matched by sales in videos, DVDs and other digital media, by satellite and cable televison. The developing infrastructure and high-speed Internet access (German Telecom, for example, recently announced that more than 2 million customers now use the DSL access in Germany) point to a not so distant future where terrestrial and satellite television will be combined with the digital Internet – global news, shows, and movies on demand – in a system of total freedom to choose when and what to see. This is “only” restricted by the supposedly infinite amount of information available on the Internet. Despite an incredible increase in information available on the web every single day, however, the Internet is far away from providing complete access to information – even though to many it may seem omnipresent and almost omnipotent.

Theoretically, the World Wide Web is a two-way street. The user gets information from the web and he or she can put information on the web for the use of others. In an atomistical environment this would be the perfect democratic vehicle for an exchange of information, the dream of revolutionary propagandist Thomas Paine of a society based on the free and open discourse of its members as equals, a system in which society, encouraging intercourse, is the true source of happiness.

Reality, however, looks different. Ability to put information on the web depends on access to a server, and here the scale is heavily tilted toward the United States. The overwhelming majority of Internet-servers is still located on American soil, and the dominance of American culture is visible even in the domain names: every nation has a two-letter national suffix (.at for Austria, .de for Germany, etc.) except for the United States; no suffix means the server is located in the US – actually, a national suffix for the United States but that it is hardly used is an additional indication of how much the Internet is considered an American domain. The visual message is obvious: the center needs no definition, the periphery, the appendices need names to distinguish one from the other. It would almost seem as if the United States has landed its greatest coup in its history by lunching the Internet just in time for the Soviet Empire to collapse. For some, the end of history seemed at hand, and Time did not mince words in a survey of the ten years that had passed since the demise of the Soviet Union that in the post-Soviet era, American capitalism and American technology would become the motor of change for the entire world.

(Source: http://www.nua.com/surveys/how_many_online/ world.html; [accessed 15 January 2002])

While the American media industry has indeed become the (real) heavy industry of the 20th century, intelligent and creative use of the Internet by all nations and cultures will decide if the end of the American Century gives birth to a new one. The leverage of non-American Internet users worldwide, it wold seem, has grown staggeringly over the last few years. In Austria, for example, it grew by 49 percent, or 850,000 people, in 2000, according to the Austrian Internet Monitor. According to the study, as many as roughly a third of the population uses the Internet in Austria, putting Internet penetration in Austria well over the EU average. In Germany, the number is closer to 30 percent. Access to the Internet, however, paints a different picture. It is quite concentrated with only 37 Internet service providers (IPSs) in Austria and 123 in Germany as compared to 7,800 ISPs in the United States. Here, more than 60% of the population of 278 million is connected to the Internet.

This is roughly a third of the total of people online globally. This number, estimated at 513 million by mid-2001, has increased dramatically in the last few years and there is no end in sight.

However, this is a growth that has been heavily unbalanced in favor of the United States from the very start. In 1995, users in the US constituted more than two thirds of all Internet users worldwide, a portion that dropped to about 50 percent in January 2000. The differences are still quite pronounced although by now the market in the US seems to be saturated and the gap is slowly becoming somewhat less dramatic. It is obvious, however, that the Internet has become an American medium not only because it was invented in the early Cold War, but also because it was dominated by the United States from the very beginnings in terms of infrastructure, servers, users, and content.

We tend to forget that the Internet was actually devised by the Americans as a weapon in the Cold War arsenal after the “Sputnik shock” in 1957. It was to help the United States to survive a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union with command and control structures for the armed forces intact to facilitate a counter blow against the enemy and to “win” the atomic war. We would not be too far off the mark if we would argue that the development of the computer technology has had a larger impact on the Soviet Union in its ability to fight the Cold War than any other factor – with the possible exception of American popular culture. The number of Internet users in Russia supports this argument: while enormous progress has been made within the short period from two years ago when less than one percent of the Russian population has had access to the Internet, and mid-2000, when little more than 6 percent were online. Actually, Russia has two important prerequisites for the adoption of the Internet: a well educated population and a large expanse of the nation with scarcely populated areas dotted by population centers. We do not have to take the United States as a comparison; in Canada, the number of users has passed the 45 percent mark and in Australia, more than 52 percent of the population is online. Concentrating on heavy industries to win the Cold War, the Soviet Union seems to have lost it on the cyber front.

It has even been surpassed by China in numbers of users (although not in percentage of population with access to the Internet) but, probably more important, in the percentage of women who use the web. The differences in Internet usage between industrialized and less industrialized nations is even more striking when we look at most African countries where the percentage of the population with access to the web is very seldom more than one percent. In urban areas, usage among the well-educated elites is more frequent, but in rural areas the lack of telecommunications infrastructure makes access to the Internet all but impossible.

When we talk about the World Wide Web, we are thus actually speaking about a net that has enormous holes and is densest in the so called developed nations and in urban areas. There are more computers in the United States than in the rest of the world, and in 1997 there were more servers for Bulgaria than for all nations south of the Sahara. What makes the differences even more striking is that all these servers were actually located in the United States. Wherever we look, the Internet as much divides national populations as it brings people together on a global scale, well-educated from less-educated (60 percent of the Chinese users have a university degree), men from women (see, for example, the numbers for Russia above), the wealthy from the less well-to-do (in Bangladesh, the price of a computer equals 8 times the average annual salary of a worker – compared with a price of roughly 50 percent of an average monthly income in Austria), young from old (Internet user tend to be younger than 35). Globally, the average Internet user is male, has a university degree and a high income, lives in a city and speaks English.

English continues to be the predominant lingua franca on the web although it is the native language of only about ten percent of the global population.

The advent of the Internet represents the most important turning-point in the area of global communication. Despite the immense power of US entertainment industry after World War II, most media systems were predominantly national in character until the 1980s. The development of a truly global commercial media and information market has to have some quite important consequences not only economically but also in the areas of politics and culture.

With the beginning of the 21st century, we witness unprecedented competition about the control of e-commerce, television and cable, digital telephone and satellite technology. Multinational media, software, telephone, and utilities companies are the global players. Fierce global competition in the video, movie, and television sector and in the Internet will let not stone unturned in a struggle for the control of the data highways and, ultimately, its

              

 Source: http://cyberatlas.internet.com/big_picture/demographics/ article/0,,5901_408521,00.html, [accessed 16. January 2002].

content – no matter if this is political information, money, goods, or culture. Serious estimates conclude that spending by teenagers, one of the most important costumer sector in e-commerce, will increase dramatically. Young people in the United States and Europe spent $483 million in 2000 through the net, an amount that has almost tripled within a year to reach $1.3 billion in 2001. By 2005 this number will increase more than twenty-fold to $10.6 billion.

 The globalization of the American way of life was immensely supported by the tremendous economic and military power of the United States and nurtured by the attractiveness of the American popular culture to the youth on all continents. And it was guided since the end of World War I by global American media politics. After the end of the Cold War, the American model of a media market controlled by private interests has gained global acceptance as the archetypical organization. For many years, American administrations have supported privately structured, open, neo-liberal economies and non-governmental, market-supported media systems. In this, Hollywood has found allies in foreign government officials responsible for telecommunications policy. “Since the 1980s,” Harvey Feigenbaum wrote in early January 2002, “an international wave of privatizations has seen countries that had known only public service broadcasters, or a handful of independent channels, accommodate dozens of private companies offering television shows.” Such private enterprises have to be financed by advertizing which, with a proliferation of television broadcasts while the number of viewers stays relatively fixed, companies pay more attention to the cost of programming than before. “In a world of fragmented markets and shrinking advertising revenues, Feigenbaum writes,

the U.S. has a clear advantage. While American films and television programs have much higher production (and marketing) costs than those of their foreign competitors, the licensing fees are actually cheaper. ... America not only has a huge domestic primary market; it also has a broad secondary domestic market. Television shows are sold once to networks and a second time to local channels as reruns. Finally, both films and television shows are sold to a substantial international market. The only companies that can today readily distribute to the entire world market (and not just regions) are American.

In addition, they have invested considerable energy to destabilize systems that attempted to harness the forces of the free markets. The most important pillars of this policy were the comfortable hegemony of the American entertainment industry, the unchallenged advantages in all areas of communications, and the attraction of all product of American infotainment. On this background, American administrations insisted on unlimited access to communication markets, on global liberalization and privatization.

This let to increasing concentration by horizontal and vertical integration that reaches from studios to movie theater chains, cable and tv networks, publishing houses, and Internet service to public relations companies, marketing organizations, theme parks, and promotion of sports events, from movies and books to toys and shopping bags. The impact penetrates all areas and transcends culture, politics, and technology.

The United Nations Organization warned in July 1999 that this increase in inequality also affects education and knowledge – the most important resources for the 21st century – on a large scale. At the end of the second millennium, the development of artificial intelligence, software, and the deciphering of the genetic code have replaced gold, conquest of land, and power over machines as the most important prerequisite for power, and the important competitions of the 21st century will take place in the areas of knowledge and education. The large infotainment companies expect an increase in the fields as distance learning and digital education of 30 to 40 percent. This will be on the agenda of the next GATT round and will undoubtedly lead to frictions between the United States and other nations, particularly the European countries, and the Internet will be at the center of most probably highly controversial negotiations; the stakes in the transatlantic relations, between the United States and its European partners, have increased considerably.

US Agencies and Actors and the Promotion of the Internet
The first computer may have been developed in the 1930s in Germany, and the World Wide Web invented only 13 years ago at CERN in Geneva, but the Internet has acquired a distinct American aura. Ideology and mythology of the web have been developed in the United States. Its basic values – organized dissent (along the lines of underground rock and pop culture), individualism, opposition by hackers, and internationalism – use metaphors and slang borrowed from pop culture and are thus attractive to the urban young around the globe. Nonetheless, access to the web is provided, guided, and controlled by the large multinational media and telecommunications companies. The Internet can serve as a harbinger of globalization that may threaten previously closed off and protected cultures. To be connected, Armin Medosch has argued, does not only mean to have access but also to be accessed.

The Internet is the fastest growing means of communication in the history of mankind, based on the genuine American values of open access to information, liberalization, and privatization. Its probable impact on regional and national cultures and societies, political systems and values can only be assessed when we have a better understanding about the forces that guide its growth. The proposed project will thus analyze the development and direction of American foreign cultural policy, particularly in the area of communications and Internet. A definition of American cultural policy in this context is not confined to direct and stated foreign policy of the United States government but will have to pay particular attention to non-governmental organizations and actors such as foundations, business, research institutions, and think tanks active in this field.

The American State Department, however, assumes a leading role through its Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs and particularly the unit for International Communications and Information Policy (EB/CIP), setting the guidelines and expressing demands from other sectors of society. Alan Larson, under secretary of state for economic, business, and agricultural affairs, made clear what the current administration regards as a pivotal policy that: „participation in the global information economy first and foremost [makes] deregulation in telecommunications“ necessary.

The Internet cannot reach a large number of the global population as long as the costs for participating in the global communications community are prohibitive for most. Larson does not refer to the high costs for creating an infrastructure for communication, may it be terrestrial or by satellite. His remarks are directed at the variable costs that telecommunications industry charges users for making use of the telephone lines, and the costs that occur when using a private Internet service provider who is charging customers by the number of minutes they are online. These costs have to be cut dramatically, he proclaims, to allow more users to stay online longer.

That this idea of a communications culture does not only touch on economic issues but rather has a strong impact on traditional culture, is not lost on the members of the State Department. In an address on 5 December 2000 at the Japan International Transport Institute in Washington, D.C., Under Secretary Larson tried to calm anxieties that the use of the Internet would threaten national and local cultures in Japan, a topic that is being heatedly discussed in that country. For a positive view of the impact of the Internet on a local culture, he offered a Native American example as alternative to the perceived threat. The Navajo Nation, he told his audience, is located in a remote area of the United States, in New Mexico and Arizona. The Internet has provided the Navajo with an opportunity to sell its traditional products, such as pottery, jewelry, and blankets, through the Internet. This gives them access to a large market and liberates them from having to rely on customers that travel to the American Southwest. The Internet for them is an opportunity to live their customary lives, create traditional artwork, and to be able to make a living while keeping a distance to the dominant Anglo society, Larson claimed in his speech. Their culture, Larson asserted, would not only not be challenged but strengthened through the Internet. From this point of view, the Internet does not bring the world into every office and study but rather keeps it off your doormat. Japan, Larson, concluded, should take what he claims is the Navajo’s experience as an example and as an incentive to deregulate telecommunications to ease Internet access: it would help preserve Japanese traditions and customs.

While in highly industrialized countries with a developed telecommunications infrastructure, American foreign policy officials advise their partners to liberalize and privatize and let the market allocate the resources, in the less industrialized nations communications/Internet-bridgeheads have assumed the role of harbinger of the new information age. Here, a mixed private/communal area introduces the web to potential users: libraries, schools, offices, and Internet cafés who serve as a prolific and important multiplier. That this affects pivotal centers of national and ethnic culture need not be elaborated upon.

A region that loses its language, the late French President François Mitterand has argued, loses its identity. A nation that ceases to represent itself in images, he stated, ceases to be a nation because a nation that imports its images, values, and imaginations second-hand, would be sentenced to a state of inferiority (and impotence) without creative originality and difference. This is a challenge all nations and ethnic groups increasingly have to face, particularly where communication, as in the case of the Internet, is more akin to a one-way street rather than to a dialogue of equals which we often assume the Internet facilitates. A number of nations have responded to this challenge by restricting or outright barring access to the Internet. While Egypt has announced liberalization in telecommunications, officials in Turkey have insisted on the necessity for censorship of the Internet, raids on cyber cafés in Iran were reported, the People’s Republic of China continues to censor web content, Saudi Arabian authorities have doubled the number of banned web sites, for Cubans and Iraqis access to the net has become more difficult, and in Afghanistan the Internet was prohibited summarily as long as the Taliban were in power.

While the United States counts on liberalization and privatization of the communication infrastructure and urges other nations to lower the entry and variable costs for potential users, other nations try to halt the advance of the Internet through censorship. The similarities with the situation after World War I and particularly after the Second World War are striking when many attempts were made to halt the advance of American popular culture.

Project Phases
Based on a delineation of the American cultural offensive carried out by a large number of governmental and non-governmental actors, the project will attempt to pinpoint those institutions, organizations, and individuals that played a pivotal role in advocating the use of the Internet after the end of the Cold War. The fabric of interrelated governmental and non-governmental institutions will be analyzed, and the ideology will be examined (frequently in the sense of a proverbial special mission of the United States, the “Manifest Destiny”) to create a global “American” system of free exchange of ideas and goods by advocating liberalization and privatization of access to information and communications. Particular attention will be paid to the cultural, political, and economic impact on Austria, Germany, and the EU/United States Relations.

The first phase of the project will concentrate on the American cultural policy in the German language area (particularly Austria, Germany, and Switzerland) during the 20th century. For this part, the project can make use of a large body of secondary literature but particularly of the extensive research experience the project members Professor Dr. Reinhold Wagnleitner, who will head the project, Priv.-Doz. Dr. Michael Wala, and Magister Erwin Giedenbacher have gained in this field.

Based on the findings about actors, strategies, and approaches, the project will focus on the Internet during the second phase of the project. Applying an intra-comparative model, it will locate and analyze differences between the advance and support of American popular culture and that of the Internet; it will pinpoint the driving forces behind its expansion after the collapse of the Soviet Union, its ideology, and aim, and will attempt to provide an indication what trends we may expect in the short- and medium-term future impact for national, regional, and ethnic cultures, transnational relations and political and social systems.

The project will not only research the Internet but it will also use it extensively to publish its findings and to interact with the scholarly community and the larger public throughout the two phases of the project:

–         An “interactive” bibliography will be compiled and will be published on the project’s web page. This bibliography will be open to comments, annotations, and suggestions for additional entries from scholars.

–         The findings of the first part of the project will be published in the form of “traditional papers” on the web.

–         They will serve as a basis for papers on phase two of the project at a number of scholarly conferences in Europe and the United States that will use presentations software and Internet access to create a multi-media text to support the oral presentations and to provide the audience with a better sense of the issues under scrutiny.

 –         The project members will make use of electronic forums such as ORF Science to introduce a larger audience to the issues addressed.

 –         Discussion of these papers and presentations will be moderated through an e-mail discussion list hosted by the project and making use of server space provided by the University of Salzburg. This will make possible a continuous feedback between project members and scholarly community and the interested public, leading to a mutual and ongoing learning process.

 –         The project will invite scholars from other disciplines – political scientists, communications scholars, anthropologists, economists, etc. – to participate in an ongoing scholarly debate that will extend much beyond the end of the project using its findings and trying to engage the larger public to create a sensibility to the important issues presented.

 –         After completion of the project, its members will publish their findings in printed form.