We live in interesting times. The last two decades of the twentieth century played host to dramatic changes in almost every aspect and walk of life. The world community is in the midst of extremely turbulent and unsettling times. From our own personal experiences, we know that the lives of international studies professionals have not been spared the impact of these changes. Intellectually, we cope with the implications of the end of the Cold War, the globalization of the world political economy, the impact of the Internet, and a plethora of new phenomena that we have only begun to understand and synthesize theoretically, conceptually, and empirically. Academically, we face forces working to transform higher education through the application of business principles of management to a most often decidedly nonbusiness environment. We confront rhetoric and pressure urging us to change our methods of teaching age-old concepts. We must cope with a requirement of greater accountability for the amount and types of work we do in our "privileged" academic environments and the implications various approaches to accountability have on how we pursue our careers in academia~Trow, 1998!. Politically and socially, we are challenged to demonstrate the applicability of our work in relation to the problems in the world around us. Merely thinking great thoughts in our ivory towers is not enough; we must demonstrate our International Studies Perspectives~2000! 1, 1-9.
Late‐Breaking Foreign Policy: The News Media's Influence on Peace Operations By Warren P. Strobel Media and Political Conflict: News from the Middle East By Gadi Wolfsfeld
The intellectual impetus for international communication research has come from a variety of disciplines, notably political science, sociology, psychology, social psychology, linguistics, anthropology, and, of course, communication science and international relations. Although highly diverse in content, international communication scholarship, past and current, falls into distinct research traditions or areas of inquiry. The content and focus of these have changed over time in response to innovations in communication technologies and to the political environment. The development and spread of radio and film in the 1920s and 1930s increased public awareness and scholarly interest in the phenomenon of the mass media and in issues regarding the impact on public opinion. The extensive use of propaganda as an instrument of policy by all sides in World War I, and the participation of social scientists in the development of this instrument, provided an impetus for the development of both mass communication and international communication studies. There was a heavy emphasis on the micro level effects, the process of persuasion. Strategic considerations prior to and during World War II reinforced this emphasis. World War II became an important catalyst for research in mass communication. Analytical tools of communication research were applied to the tasks of mobilizing domestic public support for the war, understanding enemy propaganda, and developing psychological warfare techniques to influence the morale and opinion of allied and enemy populations. During the Cold War, U.S foreign policy goals continued to shape the direction of much research in international communication, notably “winning hearts and minds” of strategically important populations in the context of the East-West conflict. As new states began to emerge from colonial empires, communication became an important component of research on development. “Development research” emphasized the role of the mass media in guiding and accelerating development. This paradigm shaped both national and international development programs throughout the 1960’s. It resurfaced in the 1980s with a focus on telecommunication, and again in the 1990s, in modified form under the comprehensive label “information and communication technologies for development.” Development communication met serious criticism in the 1970s as the more general modernization paradigm was challenged. The emergence of new information and communication technologies in the 1990s inspired a vast literature on their impact on the global economy, foreign policy, the nation state and, more broadly, on their impact on power structures and social change. The beginning of the 21st century marks a transition point as the scholarship begins to respond to multiple new forms of communication and to new directions taken by the technologies that developed and spread in the latter part of the previous century
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