Page 37 - Communication Commerce and Power The Political Economy of America and the Direct Broadcast Satellite

US Foreign Communication Policy 25

When compared to Schiller, this approach directs us toward a more
accurate conceptualization of the role of culture in the global political
economy. However, a precise elaboration of culture, as an essential
subject of inquiry, remains underdeveloped. To explain this, it is
helpful to introduce the term 'cultural power' as an organizational
concept. I will use this term in order to pull together the complexities
involved in examining both culture and hegemony. Specifically, cul-
tural power refers to the capacity to shape the intellectual tools that
all human beings use in constructing realities - what will be referred to
as 'conceptual systems.' The rapid growth of information as commod-
itized products and services (facilitated by new communication tech-
nologies) suggests that this concern with the cultural-power
implications of DBS, for example, must go well beyond an analysis
of where information is produced and where it flows. Because the
production and distribution of information-based commodities
implies the capacity to modify human perceptions and habits (as
multi-billion-dollar international marketing and advertising activities,
for example, indicate), their social penetration and consumption by
individuals tend to modify cultural environments most cogently
through their impacts on conceptual systems.
References to culture in this book reflect the recognition that
human beings are neither the passive recipients of information nor
innately capable of processing information in necessarily rational,
critical or creative ways. 20 One's culture directly influences the capa-
city of the individual and the collectivity to process and make use of
information. 21 Information, by itself, is largely meaningless without
the presence of conceptual systems that facilitate particular under-
standings and applications. As such, the capacity of some individuals
or groups to shape directly how such conceptual systems are formed
and used by others is an issue of fundamental importance. As Ian
Parker puts it,

changing social-economic conditions and the changes in structures
of power that accompany them alter social definitions of reality
and unreality .... The boundaries of reality are inextricably linked
to the capacity to exclude the irrational, as defined principally by
those with the power to enforce their definition. 22

Fundamental in the construction of such realities is the capacity to
manipulate conceptual systems and hence knowledge through com-
munication media. Beyond the growing importance of international