Introduction to international communication

What is Communication?

• The word communication has originated from a Latin word “Communes” which means something common.
• Communication is a process of exchanging information, ideas, thoughts, feeling and emotions through speech signals, writing or behavior.
• In communication process, a sender encodes a message and then using a medium and send it to appropriate feedback using a medium.
• Communication is a process of sending and receiving information between two or more people.

What is International Communication?
International Communication means “beyond the borders communication.”
It is a branch of communication studies, concerned with the scope of government-to- government, business-to-business and people-to-people interaction at global level.
The phenomenon of global communication as we know it today is essentially the result of technological advancements. It probably started with the development of advanced transport technology such as the steam engine and the internal combustion engine. Currently it is primarily driven by the worldwide proliferation of advanced information and communication technologies (ICTs)
Tools of International Communication:
The most common platforms of Mass media are newspapers, magazines, radio, television and internet. Due to mass media the information reaches large numbers of general people in a very short time. Cultural communication is a form of communication that aims to share information across different cultural. It provides information about cultural norms, values and traditions. Student or teacher exchange program is the example of cultural communication.
News agencies operate globally and supply more than half of the international news to the media. When any development brings any part of the world into global spotlight, it is these news agencies that report first. The major news agencies are as follow:
• The Associated Press of America (APA) from USA.
• Agency France Press (AFP) from France
• The United Press International (UPI) from USA.
• Reuters from (UK)
Elements of International Communication:
The elements of international communication are as follow:
Actors: Actors or non-state actors are involved in this part. Actors means Government and non-state actors like NGO, religious and business organization.
Technology: Use of Available Infrastructure. It is necessary for international communication that use of technology for peaceful purposes.
Mode of Production: The method of producing the necessities of life is called mode of production. This term became from Economy. Economy reflects the International Communication.
Policy: It is very important element. It became for other states or nation. Due to policy states can’t violence of other states.
Scope of International Communication:

• In international level it became a big factor in resolving global conflicts.
• International communication promotes mutual understanding among the nations.
• International communication has included Political, Social, Economic cultural and Military concerns.
• It is not considered a separate academic discipline. It has a significant role in all human societies.
• It is influencing the policies of other nations by appeals to its citizens through the means of public communication.
• The acceleration of international conferences; the international expansion of educational institutions, congresses and seminars; the exchange of students between countries; the popularization of international travel; and the expansion of international sport furthermore increased contact and communication between the peoples of the world.
• In this competitive world with its revolving economic and communication giants, the globe has been transformed into a global electronic village and information has emerged as a primary commodity and resource.

Effects of Global Communication

• The borders of nation-states have become porous as the globalisation of technology has made it virtually impossible for governments to regulate and control the transborder flow of information and communication.
• Global media systems have furthermore introduced propaganda and public diplomacy as important factors in international relations.
• Global communication is radically redefining the nature of both hard and soft power in international relations.
• Socially, integrated global communication networks has to a certain extent resulted in the realisation of McLuhan’s (1964) notion of the global village with the emergence of, among others, global interconnectedness, global consciousness and global co-operation between NGOs in widely different areas such as human rights, women’s rights and environmental protection.
• Social relations are no longer restricted to a particular space or locality, but are dispersed globally and spatially as ICTs create and maintain social relations irrespective of time and space.
• However, one of the most important consequences is probably the blurring of the boundaries between technological, economic, political, social and cultural domains.
• Both traditional media (eg print, photography, film, radio, television and videos) as well as the fast-developing new information and communication technologies (ICTs) (eg telephone and telegraphy, satellites and computers) that have initially developed fairly independently, are merging into a global digital telecommunications network.

Communication and Empire:

• Communication and empire Communication have always been critical to the establishment and maintenance of power over distance.
• From the Persian, Greek and Roman empires to the British, efficient networks of communication were essential for the imposition of imperial authority, as well as for the international trade and commerce on which they were based
• The Greek historian, Diodorus Cronus (4th century BC) recounts how the Persian king, Darius I (522-486 BC), who extended the Persian Empire from the Danube to the Indus, could send news from the capital to the provinces by means of a line of shouting men positioned on heights. This kind of transmission was 30 times faster than using runners.
• In De Bello Gallico, Julius Caesar (10044 BC) reports that the Gauls, using the human voice, could call all their warriors to war in just three days. Using fire at night and smoke or mirrors during the day is mentioned in ancient texts, from the Old Testament to Homer.
• While many rulers, including the Greek polis, used inscription for public information, writing became a more flexible and efficient means of conveying information over long distances.
• 'Rome, Persia and the Great Khan of China all utilised writing in systems of information-gathering and dispersal, creating wide-ranging official postal and dispatch systems'.
• It is said that the Acta Diurna, founded by Julius Caesar and one of the forerunners of modern news media, was distributed across most of the Roman Empire.
• The Indian Emperor Ashoka's edicts, inscribed on rock in the third century BC, are found across South Asia, from Afghanistan to Sri Lanka and writ writers had a prominent place in the royal household.
• During the Mughal period in Indian history, the vaqi'a-nawis (newswriters) were employed by the kings to appraise them of the progress in the empire. Both horsemen and despatch runners transmitted news and reports.
• In China, the T'ang Dynasty (618-907) created a formal hand written publication, the ti pao or 'official newspaper' which disseminated information to the elite and in the Ching Period (1644-1911) private news bureaux sprang up which composed and circulated official news in the printed form known as the Ch'ingpao.
• The medium of communication developed from the clay tablet of Mesopotamia, the papyrus roll in ancient Egypt and in ancient Greece, to parchment codex in the Roman empire.
• By the eighth century, paper introduced from China began to replace parchment in the Islamic world and spread to medieval Europe.
• Also from China, printing slowly diffused to Europe, aided by the Moors' occupation of Spain, but it was not until the fifteenth century, with the movable type printing press developed by Johann Gutenberg, a goldsmith in Mainz in Germany, that the means of communication were transformed.
• By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the printing presses were turning out thousands of copies of books in all the major European languages. For the first time the Scriptures were available in a language other than Latin, undermining the authority of priests, scribes and political and cultural elites.
• As a consequence, 'the unified Latin culture of Europe was finally dissolved by the rise of the vernacular languages which was consolidated by the printing press'. Coupled with vernacular translations of the Bible by John Wycliffe in England and Martin Luther in Germany, the printing revolution helped to lay the basis for the Reformation and the foundations of nation-state and of modern capitalism.
• The new languages, especially Portuguese, Spanish, English and French, became the main vehicle of communication for the European colonial powers in many parts of the world. The Portuguese Empire was one of the first to grasp the importance of the medium for colonial consolidation, with the kings of Portugal sending books in the cargoes of ships carrying explorers.
• They opened printing presses in the territories they occupied – the first printing press was opened in Goa in 1557 and in Macao in 1588. Other European powers also used the new technology and the printed book played an important role in the colonization of Asia.
• European languages – especially Portuguese, Spanish, English and French - became the main vehicle of communication for the colonial powers in many parts of the world. This transplantation of communication systems around the globe created a new hierarchy of language and culture in the conquered territories.
• The Industrial Revolution in Western Europe, founded on the profits of the growing international commerce encouraged by colonization, gave a huge stimulus to the internationalization of communication. Britain's domination of the sea routes of international commerce was to a large extent due to the pre-eminence of its navy and merchant fleet, a result of pioneering work in the mapping out of naval charts by the great eighteenth-century explorers, such as James Cook, enabled also by the determination of longitude based on the Greenwich Meridian.
• Technological advances such the development of the iron ship, the steam engine and the electric telegraph all helped to keep Britain ahead of its rivals. The growth of international trade and investment required a constant source of reliable data about international trade and economic affairs, while the Empire required a constant supply of information essential for maintaining political alliances and military security.
• Waves of emigration as a result of industrialization and empire helped to create a popular demand for news from relatives at home and abroad, and a general climate of international awareness.
• The postal reform in England in 1840, initiated by the well-known author, Anthony Trollope as Post-Master General, with the adoption of a single-rate, one penny postage stamp (the Penny Black), irrespective of distance, revolutionized postal systems.
• With the innovations in transport of railways and steamships, international links were being established that accelerated the growth of European trade and consolidated colonial empires.
• The Growth of the Telegraph
•  The second half of the nineteenth century saw an expanding system of imperial communications made possible by the electric telegraph. Invented by Samuel Morse in 1837, the telegraph enabled the rapid transmission of information, as well as ensuring secrecy and code protection. The business community was first to make use of this new technology. The speed and reliability of telegraphy were seen to offer opportunities for profit and international expansion.
• The rapid development of the telegraph was a crucial feature in the unification of the British Empire. With the first commercial telegraph link set up in Britain in 1838, by 1851 a public telegraph service, including a telegraphic money order system, had been introduced.
• By the end of the century, as a result of the cable connections, the telegraph allowed the Colonial Office and the India Office to communicate directly with the Empire within minutes when, previously, it had taken months for post to come via sea. By providing spot prices for commodities like cotton, the telegraph enabled British merchants, exporting cotton from India or Egypt to England, to easily beat their competitors.
• The new technology also had significant military implications. The overhead telegraph, installed in Algeria in 1842, proved a decisive aid to the French during the occupation and colonization of Algeria.
• During the Crimean War (1854-56), the rival imperial powers, Britain and France, trying to prevent Russian westward expansion that threatened overland routes to their colonial territories in Asia, exchanged military intelligence through an underwater cable in the Black Sea laid by the British during the conflict. (The Crimean conflict was notable for the pioneer war reports of Irishman William Howard Russell in The Times of London, who was to become the first 'big name' in international journalism.
• Similarly, during the Civil War in the US (1861-65) over 24000 kilometres of cable was laid to send more than 6.5 million telegrams. The American Civil War was not only one of the earliest conflicts to be extensively reported, but also the first example both of co-operative news gathering among the American and European journalists, and of the use of photo-journalism. 
• The first underwater telegraphic cable which linked Britain and France became operational in 1851 and the first transatlantic cable, connecting Britain and the USA, in 1866. Between 1851 and 1868, underwater networks were laid down across the North Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, and the Persian Gulf. During the 1860s and 1870s, London was linked up by cable to the key areas of the Empire.
•  The first line between Europe and India via Turkey was opened in 1865. Two other cables to India - one overland across Russia and the other undersea via Alexandria and Aden were both started in 1870. India was linked to Hong Kong in 1871 and to Australia in 1872 and Shanghai and Tokyo were linked by 1873. By the 1870s, telegraph lines were operating within most countries in Asia and an international communication network, dominated by Britain, was beginning to emerge.
• The expansion of cable was marked by the rivalry between British and French Empires, which intensified after 1869, with the opening of the Suez Canal. The decade from 1870 to 1880 saw the successive inaugurations of communications links between the English coast and the Dutch East Indies (Batavia), the Caribbean network, the line from the British West Indies to Australia and China, the networks in the China and Japanese seas, the cable from Suez to Aden, communication between Aden and British India, the New Zealand cables, communication between the east and south coasts of Africa, and the cable from Hong Kong to Manila. In South America, the south transatlantic cable, opened in 1874, linked Lisbon with Recife, Brazil, via the Cape Verde Islands and Madeira. Two years later, a network was established along the coast of Chile. The British cable of 1874 was joined in 1879 by a new French cable across the North Atlantic, with a spur to Brazil, and by a new German cable from Emden to the Azores to Morovia on the African coast, and from there to Recife.
• By 1881, a network along the pacific coast from Mexico to Peru was in operation. In the 1880s, France established a series of links along the coast of Indochina and Africa, with networks in Senegal. The British-sponsored Indo-European landline telegraph between India and the Prussian North Sea coast had gone into operation in 1865. The cable had been extended from British shores to Alexandria by 1869, to Bombay in 1870, and other cables had been extended from Madras to Ceylon and from Singapore to Australia and New Zealand by 1873, and also to Hong Kong, Shanghai and the Japanese coast. Connections were made in China in 1896 with a spur of the Great Northern Telegraph Company Danish-owned line across Siberia to Russia and other points in Europe. This made a Tokyo-Shanghai-St Petersburg-London communications link possible.
• Undersea cables required huge capital investment, which was met by colonial authorities and by banks, businessmen and the fast-growing newspaper industry, and the cable networks were largely in the hands of the private sector. Of the total cable distance of 104000 miles, not more than 10 per cent was administered by governments. To regulate the growing internationalization of information, the International Telegraph Union was founded in 1865 with 22 members, all Europeans, except Persia, representing, 'the first international institution of the modern era and the first organization for the international regulation of a technical network'.
• According to the International Telegraph Union, the number of telegraphic transmissions in the world shot from 29 million in 1868 to 329 million in 1900. For the first time in history, colonial metropolis acquired the means to communicate almost instantly with their remotest colonies. The world was more deeply transformed in the nineteenth century than in any previous millennium, and among the transformations few had results as dazzling as the network of communication and transportation that arose to link Europe with the rest of the world. Military operations - such as the Japanese-Russian war of 1904-5, were both assisted and reported by the first transpacific cable which had been completed in 1902, joint property of the governments of Australia, New Zealand, Britain and Canada. It ran from Vancouver to Sydney and Brisbane, by way of Fanning Island, Suva, and Norfolk Island, with a spur from Norfolk Island to Auckland. A connection already existed, established in 1873, linking Tokyo and London, with spurs to Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Colombo, Calcutta, Bombay, and Alexandria, and with cable and telegraphic spurs by way of Singapore and Batavia to Darwin, Sydney and Auckland, where ties were made to the new transpacific cable to Vancouver.
• A second transpacific cable was completed in 1903 by US interests, providing a link between San Francisco and Manila, through Honolulu, to Midway Island and Guam, and from there to the Asian mainland and Japan by existing British cables. All of these landing points were controlled by the United States: the Hawaiin Islands had been a US territory since 1900 and Midway was claimed by it in 1867, while Guam and the Philippines had become US colonies as a result of the 1898 Spanish-American War. Control over cables as well as sea routes was also of enormous strategic importance in an age of imperial rivalry. The cables were, in the words of Headrick, 'an essential part of the new imperialism'. The outcomes of the two imperial wars - the Spanish-American War (1898) and the Boer War (1899-1902) - strengthened the European and US positions in the world and led to a rapid expansion in world trade that demanded immediate and vastly improved communications links, as well as more advanced naval capabilities.
• The new technology of 'wireless' telegraphy (also called radiotelegraphy) promised to meet these needs. In 1901 Guglielmo Marconi harnessed the new discovery of electromagnetism to make the first wireless transatlantic telegraph transmission, with support from naval armament companies and newspaper groups.
• The British Empire had a great technological advantage since the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of Great Britain dominated global telegraph traffic and had a virtual monopoly on international telegraph exchanges, as it refused to communicate with any other system other than its own.
• The operators of a Marconi apparatus were prohibited from responding to radio signals emanating from a non-Marconi transmitter, a policy that had the effect of blocking the exchange of critically important information relating to the safe passage of ships. However, at the Berlin Conference on Wireless Telegraphy in 1906 the first multilateral agreements on radiotelegraphy were signed and the International Radiotelegraph Union was born.
• By 1907 Marconi's monopoly was being challenged by other European countries as well as the United States. The dominance of British cable companies, which lasted until the end of the First World War, was based on direct control through ownership, and indirect control by means of diplomatic censorship, which Britain exercised over the messages travelling through its cables.  Britain had a critical advantage in its control of the copper and gutta-percha markets - the raw materials for the manufacture of cable - since the world rates of these were fixed in London and British mining companies owned copper deposits and mines in Chile, the world's biggest producer. Colonial governments supported the cable companies, either scientifically by research on maps and navigation, or financially by subsidies.
• In 1904, 22 of the 25 companies that managed international networks were affiliates of British firms; Britain deployed 25 ships totalling 70 000 tons, while the six vessels of the French cable-fleet amounted to only 7000 tons.
• As a result, British supremacy over the undersea networks was overwhelming: in 1910, the Empire controlled about half the world total, or 260 000 kilometres. France, which in contrast to the USA and UK, opted for the state administration of cable, controlled no more than 44000 kilometres.  The Anglo-American domination of international communication hardware was well established by the late nineteenth century, with the two countries owning nearly 75 per cent of the world's cables.
• Much of the global cabling was done by private companies, with Britain's Eastern Telegraph Company and the US-based Western Union Telegraph Company dominating the cable industry. By 1923, private companies had nearly 75 per cent of the global cabling share, with British accounting for nearly 43 per cent, followed by the American companies which owned 23 per cent. Within a quarter of a century, the world's cable networks had more than doubled in length. As British companies were losing their share of global cable, the Americans increased their control on international communication channels by leasing cables from British firms. US companies challenged Britain's supremacy in the field of international cables and telegraph traffic, which, they claimed, gave unfair advantage to British trade. The American view was that the pre-war cable system had 'been built in order to connect the old world commercial centres with world business' and that now was the time to develop 'a new system with the United States as a centre'.
•  The cables were the arteries of an international network of information, of intelligence services and of propaganda. Their importance can be gauged from the fact that the day after the First World War broke out, the British cut both German transatlantic cables. After the war, the debates over who should control the cables, which had been taken over early in the war, one by the British and another by the French, dominated discussions at the 1919 peace talks at Versailles and reflected the rivalry between the British cable companies and the growing US radio interests for ownership and control of global communications networks. The USA proposed that the cables be held jointly under international control or trusteeship and that a world congress be convened to consider international aspects of telegraph, cable and radio communication (Luther, 1988). Unlike cables, the Americans dominated the new technology of telephones. Following the patenting of the telephone by the Bell Telephone Company, established by the inventor of telephony Alexander Graham Bell in 1877, telephone production increased in the US.
•  In 1885, American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T), later to become the head office of Bell Systems, was founded and for the next 80 years it succeeded in keeping a near-monopoly over US telecommunications networks. The first international telephone calls were made between Paris and Brussels in 1887. At the end of the nineteenth century, the USA had the largest number of telephones, due largely to the fact that they were manufactured there. International Western Electric, subsidiary of Western Electric, itself owned by AT&T, was the first multinational network of production and sales, setting up branches in most European countries including Britain, Spain, France and Italy as well as in Japan, China and Australia. However, the area covered by telephones was very limited - telephone networks acquired a global dimension only in 1956 when the first telephone cable was laid under the Atlantic.