This article focuses on the different cultural perspectives that scholars have introduced or could introduce to communication/social science research so as to move it away from Occidental biases ...toward universal universalism. It examines the overlapping metatheories--including Orientalism and Eurocentrism--that scholars have formulated to diagnose the afflictions plaguing communication science in the non-Western world. It examines the reasons why the United States and the United Kingdom remain the core nations of social science, with France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands and Italy in the semi-periphery. It explicates the opportunities available to all non-Western scholars, but particularly to Asian scholars, to enrich the scope of communication science (viz, traditions of communication that focus on cybernetic, sociopsychologicol and sociocultural dimensions), where the semantic meaning of science connotes a universal universalism, not a European universalism. Concomitantly, it looks at the limitations, if any. for such efforts to achieve greater heights. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
This article is an attempt to expand the theoretical, methodological, and historical boundaries of communication/journalism studies to suit the beginning phase of the contemporary Digital Era. First, ...this article suggests that communication scholars should consistently use the term ‘globalization’ to describe the current endeavor to apply the horizontally integrative macro-history approach to produce a universally acceptable body of knowledge encompassing communication/journalism studies. Second, it demonstrates the potential of deploying the principles of Buddhist phenomenology, which broadly reflects the major aspects of Eastern philosophy, to ‘globalize’ communication/journalism studies by dismantling the unrealistic separation of science from philosophy, as well as the division of philosophy into epistemology, ontology, axiology, etc. Third, it demonstrates the possibility of identifying global developments in communication as a series of life-spans similar to the Buddhist wheel of becoming (bhavacakra) circling around our perpetual cyclic existence (samsara). It concludes by asserting that because existence is coterminous with communication, tracing communication history will require a global effort that extends the methods of inquiry beyond empiricism to cover quantum mechanics and phenomenology.
This essay argues the case for developing a more acceptable metatheory that scholars could use as a framework to hypothesize the non-linear development of global mediatization, a term that European ...researchers coined at the turn of the century. We can extract the rudiments of such a theory from the Buddhist doctrine of dependent co-arising (Paticca Samuppada), which explicates the bhavacakra (the wheel of becoming) and samsara (cyclic existence) in terms of 12 interdependent, interconnected, and interactive nidanas (underlying links). The Buddhist approach, combined with the Daoist Yijing paradigm and Miller's living systems theory, could help build a metatheory of global mediatization. This paper also suggests that mediatization scholars could collaborate with sociocybernetic scholars, who are working on a new systems approach, which focuses on interaction between living systems and their environment. Sociocybernetic theories no longer generate hypotheses about bivariate distributions. Concurrently, sociologists themselves have been experimenting with artificial societies to study social emergence using multiagent systems.
A macro theory that recognizes the worlds three competing center-clusters and their respective hinterlands o?ers a realistic framework for global communication research. This study has used recent ...data on world trade, computers, Internet hosts, and high-tech exports to map the triadization of the world in the Information Age. The original dependency theory and world-system theory perspectives emphasized the hierarchical linking of national societies to the capitalist world-economy in a center-periphery structure. The proposed global-triadization formulation looks at the center-periphery structure in terms of a capitalist world-economy dominated by three competing center economic clusters, each of which has a dependent hinterland comprising peripheral economic clusters. These clusters may not necessarily be geographically contiguous. Strong-weak relationships may exist within each center-cluster, as well as within each periphery-cluster, with one center-cluster occupying a hegemonic role. The rudimentary Information-Society Power Index, constructed for this study, can guide the researcher to test an abundance of hypotheses on the pattern of global communication and information ?ow with particular attention to source, message, channel, and receiver.
This essay calls for the adoption of the systems view of life as the unifying vision for all disciplines to follow. Newtonian science eclipsed systems thinking for more than 300 years after the ...publication of Newton's magnum corpus, the Principia, in 1687. Subsequent findings have challenged some of the main presumptions of classical science such as the Cartesian view of mind-body duality and the classification of variables into distinct dependent and independent categories. Modern systems view agrees with Eastern philosophy on the interdependence of all systems, which function in patterned networks, as established by organismic biology, new physics, cognitive science, ecology, and other disciplines. Part 2 of the essay examines the Conditioned Genesis paradigm as a conducive framework particularly for the field of communication.
What Wallerstein described as European universalism dominated media and communication theory until the end of the twentieth century. The three-tier divide of the global economic system (center, ...semi-periphery, and periphery) explicated in world-system analysis was equally applicable to the global academic/scholarship structure. The non-traditional fields of study, such as media and (mass) communication, inherited the full flavor of European universalism because they originated in the academic institutions of the center countries. The turn of the century saw a dramatic reaction to the Euro-American rhetoric of power. Organized groups of scholars have begun to question the presumption of European universalism in media and communication theory, encompassing its axiology, epistemology/methodology, and ontology. Global divides in media and communication studies have emerged with some Asian scholars going back to the philosophical genius of Buddha, Laozi, Confucius, Nagarjuna, and others to derive relevant theoretical frameworks. This article explicates this momentous phenomenon.
What we call systems theory is more a metatheory than a monolithic theory. It has provided a set of common signposts for all systems theorists to follow. This paper, written from the perspective of ...communications scholarship, examines the transition of systems theory from the age of equilibrium to the age of entropy during the middle of the twentieth century, and then to the age of emergence at the end of the century. It distinguishes between the old equilibrium-based systems theory and the entropy-based systems theory, as well as the 'new' emergence-centered social systems theory. It asserts the existence of close similarities between the fundamental concepts of systems theory and Asian philosophies, despite the cynical dismissal of these similarities by a Luhmann disciple. It documents how media sociology has applied chaos theory to justify market-driven journalism and claim the emergence of a global public sphere; and it looks at the potential of network analysis, an offshoot of systems theory.
This article analyses the dynamics of the world order, as well as the nature of public diplomacy conducted through both global and national media of communication, within a theoretical framework ...derived from the fundamental concepts associated with Eastern philosophy, world-systems analysis and the theory of living systems (encompassing the paradigms of cognition, autopoiesis and dissipative structures). First, it explains the clash of classical physics and new physics that has opened the door for new theoretical directions for the social sciences. Second, it explains the theory of living systems, which offers a paradigm shift for the social sciences. Third, it looks at the nature of public diplomacy and the methods used by competing elements in the centre-periphery structure of the world system to influence public opinion. Fourth, it concludes that because all living systems, including the world-system, are predominantly non-linear and thermodynamically far from equilibrium, the clash of antinomic ideologies will never cease. Moreover, because no observer can hope to accurately measure the initial conditions of the coherent superposition of public diplomacy, empirical science cannot predict the boomerang-and-bullet effects of public diplomacy.
Habermas's critical theory of society and modernity, which he developed by reconstructing the concepts of public sphere/civil society and rationality, suffers from some of the same weaknesses ...attributed to the structural-functionalist modernization theory. Both theories lean solely on European historical experience despite their proponents' claim for “universalism.” The theory of communicative action, wherein Habermas has now implanted the public sphere, is the product of merging philosophy of history (or historical hermeneutics) and empirical social science—an attempt “to free historical materialism from its philosophical ballast,” according to Habermas, and “less a promise than a conjecture.” This monograph calls for a revision or “glocalization” of Habermas's theory to remove its lingering traces of “universalism” that promote domination through globalization—a euphemism for Eurocentric hegemony as we move from theory to practice. The aporetic presumptions of Habermasian theory do not necessarily match the ontological, epistemological, and historical reservoir of the non-West. Therefore, the project of provincializing “Europe” is in order.
This article analyzes the concept of deliberative democracy within the democracy-autocracy continuum using an analinear (analog plus linear) theoretical framework derived from the ancient Yijing (I ...Ching) model, which is remarkably congruent, mutatis mutandis, with the major presumptions of the theory of living systems (a composite of Prigogine's model of dissipative structures, and Maturana and Varella's models of autopoiesis and cognition), Eastern philosophy, and world-system analysis. It argues that deliberative democracy will exist in varying forms, both horizontally (across contemporaneous world-system) and vertically (as an evolutionary phenomenon), along the democracy-autocracy continuum of governance. The onto-cosmological principle of the dialectical completion of relative polarities, which Daoism identifies as the interaction of yin and yang, ensures the plurality of governing systems between the two extremes of the continuum. In short, nature, which transcends both the rationale-scientific and intuitive-creative dimensions of human ingenuity, does not permit a singular political system to dominate the entire world-system. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
PDF
