Rewriting the History of Global Communication from the Perspective of Media Infrastructure:Telegraph and Transnational News Agencies
This paper explores rewriting the history of global communication by retracing the historical developments of media infrastructure.By examining examples such as trans-oceanic telegraphs and transnational news agencies in continental Europe,North America,and the rest of the world at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,it analyzes the construction,use,and diffusion of global communication infrastructure under the concept of a"trinity"system that intersected empire,communication,and media infrastructure,in the establishment of a comprehensive American-Western-dominated global communication organizational logic and system of rules,i.e.,the cartelization of global communication.This is instructive for the understanding of China's digital silk road initiative to write new globalized mediagraphies,and the participation in and leading a new round of global communication infrastructure construction,and anchoring its role and positioning.
media infrastructureglobal communicationtelegraphnews agencycartelization