Page 9 - Communication Commerce and Power The Political Economy of America and the Direct Broadcast Satellite

viii Preface

economy - the Direct Broadcast Satellite (DBS) - is assessed and
contextualized. Originally, the decision to focus on DBS and its
relationship to the American state was based on my interest in explor-
ing cultural imperialism and the role it plays in more general political-
economic processes. But over time, primary sources - mostly US
government documents and interviews with American state
personnel-compelled me to pursue a somewhat more concentrated
analysis. These also led me to consider some more complex theoretical
issues, particularly those of concern to 'critical' or Gramscian students
of international political economy. Rather than finding an American
state working in imperialistic harmony with private sector mass
media, telecommunications and more general information economy
interests (all perpetuating a US-centered world order based on consent
rather than coercion), innumerable inter-corporate and intra-state
tensions and conflicts generated a still more pressing question: What
is the precise role of the American state in the process of cultural
imperialism? Predictably, this opened the door to other questions
involving American hegemonic capacities in relation to the ascend-
ancy of communication and information activities in the international
political economy.
The direct broadcast satellite, as arguably the most powerful, far-
reaching and culturally intrusive of all new communication technolo-
gies, remained the logical analytical staging post from which to
explore such issues. At this juncture in history - one in which the
vagaries of ~pitalism have become almost universally accepted - a
concerted effort to understand how the 'common sense' of open
markets, free trade and neo-liberal development policies have been
constructed and are being maintained constitutes, I believe, an essen-
tial step in efforts to redress the potential narrowing of the human
imagination. This book aims to inspire more work of this type - work
that recognizes the importance of understanding the complex
dynamics underlying 'what we know' to be a fundamental concern
of the critical social scientist.
What follows is a revised version of my doctoral dissertation com-
pleted for the Department of Political Science at York University in
Toronto. During these years, Martin Hewson, David Leyton-Brown,
Steve Patten, J. Magnus Ryner, Timothy J. Sinclair, Anne Stretch,
Graham Todd and Reg Whitaker all made significant personal and
professional contributions. Financial support from Canada's Social
Science and Humanities Research Council and the Ontario Graduate
Scholarship Programme were essential to its completion. While at