Zhang Hai: To fight a public opinion war, the communication network must be in its own hands

Source: Global Times

Recently, western media have frequently set agendas and launched public opinion offensives against China. In this so-called "post-truth era", how should we win the right to speak internationally and change the current public opinion situation in which the international public opinion field is strong and the west is weak?

Behind the international discourse power competition is the dispute over global communication networks. Armand Matera, a pioneer in global communication studies, pointed out that the construction of cultural and communication networks accompanied the establishment of imperial hegemony. From the 19th century until World War II, Britain dominated the world's communications system. Since then, the United States has become a super center of global communication networks, building a worldwide cultural communication system through less than 10 multinational media giants.

According to the geopolitical point of view, the hegemonic political effect on a global scale depends on the contest of delivery capabilities to conquer long-distance space, the efficiency of transportation networks defines military transmission capabilities, and the efficiency of communication networks defines the ability to transmit values and soft power. The global communication network currently built by Western countries makes the global information flow highly unbalanced, mainly from north to south, from west to east. This is a composite ideological communication system with the Internet as the main body, which is composed of fast communication media (network communication ecosystem composed of the Internet and mobile Internet) and slow communication media such as NGOs, think tanks, and research institutions.

Capital controls ideology through the media and promotes neoliberal philosophical ideas. The new media and communication industries first provide the infrastructure for media globalization or media imperialism, and provide the material basis for global dissemination through such as land and submarine cables, satellite transmission systems, etc. Based on this network, International Capital operates internationally in the form of a large multimedia group, providing commodity advertising to other countries, triggering a demonstration effect through the presentation of media content and lifestyle, stimulating the audience's continuous demand for goods and services, thereby serving the global financial and commercial order.

Representative views of global communication studies include Inis's "imperial communication" theory. It points to the hidden logic behind the transformation of the world's cultural order: whenever a new empire rises, it is accompanied by the occupation of territory, and there is the occupation of literary and cultural space. At the same time, the rise of new media has also shaped and consolidated the empire by building a communication network composed of transportation, radio and television, and the Internet, which can summarize the covered area into a national space with the same information and time, and shape a highly homogeneous ideology under the ecological environment of this media.

Schiller's theory of "cultural imperialism". It describes how imperialism has carried out cultural colonization by constructing a global hierarchy of values of "center-semi-periphery-periphery". Citing the computer satellite and communication electronics industry as an example, he proposed that communication technology is the core of global management in the United States, which uses the global communication network in its hands to include all countries and thus shape a social system that is compatible with the dominant values and social structure.

Castor's theory of "global network society" argues that decisive social networks around the world have been networked to form a global network society. The concept of sovereign state has been replaced by a single power system, the world has become a kind of interconnected material, energy and information network, multimedia business groups have become the core of the global communication network, and the communication power is composed of network access, network regulation, network control and network construction. Profound changes have taken place in the global governance system and the mechanism of intrinsic dynamics.

The global communication network has a life cycle and is constantly evolving iteratively. In the current era of artificial intelligence, the public opinion war based on the global network society began to shift from the airwave war to the algorithm war, and its landmark event is that the global participation center of data-driven decision-making has become the core decision-making body of the US political war and public opinion war. Part of the U.S. Department of State, formerly known as the Center for Global Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, this agency is tasked with serving as a data-driven decision-making body that leads U.S. agencies in responding to attempts by foreign adversaries to use disinformation and propaganda to undermine U.S. interests. Global engagement centers are based on big data analytics and enable rapid data-driven decision-making. Its core idea is that anything important and noteworthy appears on Twitter for the first time, so Twitter can be seen as a direct representation of the vast real world. The center extracts 500 million to 1 billion public tweets every day, detects the real-time dynamics of the world on a Twitter basis for decision-making, and coordinates the targeted information release of U.S. security, intelligence and media agencies around the world through the adjustment of algorithms such as edge rank, page rank and graph rank, so as to effectively control the global public opinion situation.

The dominance of the global communication network is the crisis of politics, news and opinion and ideology itself. Although the focus of the current global strategic confrontation of the United States is gradually shifting to China, the focus of its network public opinion warfare work is still global deployment and multi-line operations, and at the same time coincides with a new round of cyclical iteration of global data infrastructure.

In the future, the main countermeasures for China's participation and leadership in the global communication network can include the following three points. First of all, in the current era, the world's data center is no less than the world shipping center and financial center in the past, and the construction of 5G networks, data centers and new infrastructure including communication networks, emerging information technology, and computing hubs should be further strengthened. Second, systematically study the experience of cultural order change in the rise of Western powers and the deep logic of global communication networks, build strategic toolboxes and strategic research discipline groups, realize real-time situational awareness of global public opinion fields, and provide agile decision-making advice. Third, based on the dual cycle pattern of China's economy inside and outside, we will build a core node for the strategic supply of culture and promote the rebalancing of the global media cultural order. (The writer is a professor at the School of Media Science, Tohoku Normal University, and a visiting professor at Osaka University, Japan)