Preface

Monroe E. Price

I happily accepted the invitation of the editors - Profs. Loreto Corredoira, Ignacio Bel, and Rodrigo Cetina - to introduce this important work. The very occasion of our meeting resonates with the ambition of this book. I met the editors in 2019 at the annual conference of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR), an organization long committed to exploring ways to enrich the flow of ideas of communication and society across cultures, across systems, across theoretical approaches. This book is emblematic of what might be called the exploratory spirit of the IAMCR. The collection is designed to underscore communication rights as that idea has flourished within the traditions of the editors and in conversation with competing and complementary ideas developed in other traditions.

The book is timely for many reasons. There is an imperative resulting from the massive transformations in media technology and in the tsunami of change that goes under the name of social media. The world is, and has been for recent decades, a jurisdictional and cultural experimental zone for testing or imposing policy, with the force of circumstances driving governments, civil society, political parties, nongovernmental organizations, and others in conflicting directions, confronting issues of power, impact, and conformity to norms.

Dramatic shifts - in geopolitics, in technology, and in institutions, create a demand for rethinking the relationship between media technologies and freedom. Recourse to first principles and review of historic traditions can, in such a context, lead to new insights. That is the significant effort of this book.

In my own work,1 I have tried to think about alternate ways of characterizing large-scale efforts to shape systems of information flow. "Communication rights" in this approach are nestled in and products of other expansive themes or tendencies. These overall themes are sometimes posed as foundational rights (prescribed, one could find, in the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights) or constructed through observation of what societies actually do. Examples, from my work, include these actions of major forces in the information space: the shaping of strategic infrastructures for channeling, encouraging, or restricting media flows or the invention and uses of forceful narratives (call them strategic narratives) to affect public behaviors and institutional choices. All this occurs under an umbrella of complex operations that I have described under the term "Markets for Loyalties." How these ideas relate to communications rights or how communications rights flourish under technological and political pressures - this becomes the ongoing challenge.

Strategic Infrastructures

Everywhere about us, we see the material remnants of historic approaches to governing speech and society, and this volume - in its array of authorial backgrounds - manifests a variety of experiences with regulating freedom of expression and communication from different countries around the world. These distributed studies yield a catalogue of techniques used to mobilize, affect, or otherwise regulate and control societies. Technologies change: fax machines in dissident Eastern Europe, audiotapes in revolutionary Iran, flash drives in Cuba, smartphones in Egypt, sophisticated apps in Hong Kong. We aspire to explain how these technical interventions become effective tools for furthering freedoms but sometime become hijacked, melded with surveillance in ways subversive of an original goal. We recognize that it is not the technology alone, but the system design advanced by major communicators that is telling in these instances. Powerful communicators, and those who seek power, advance an infrastructure of information flow that will further their strategic objectives. We have paid too little attention to these broad efforts at global, regional, national, and community structures for information flow and too easily resort to familiar formulae of words to describe them.

Who, one might ask, are the architects of strategic infrastructures? Who sees themselves as empowered to articulate, demand, implement, or force the adoption of particular information infrastructures (or resist them)? These include those who seek a flow of images that reinforces sovereignty; those who wish to ration the import of potentially destabilizing advocacy; those who consider their state to be vulnerable to communal violence. But infrastructure design is also significant for those who advocate a full and free independent marketplace of ideas. Each of the authors in this volume brings to the table, at least, an implicit architecture, an implicit conception of infrastructure.

Those who design satellite systems or cable television systems, who recommend the loci of undersea cable, or transponder regulation are all engaged with strategic infrastructure. Just to reinforce the point, it is not the hardware alone that defines a strategic infrastructure and its freedom-related or control-related potential. Cell-phone towers, surveillance cameras, satellite dishes, and flickering television sets, do not fully tell the story. One needs to know the legal and policy setting. "Freedom" is the combination of the technologies, themselves and the institutions that surround them. And that is true of communications rights generally.

A few examples of information infrastructure that help explain the complex relation to freedom are: the satellite and cable system of Singapore, which permits large-scale access to information necessary for a modern business society, combined with an explicit set of norms and the machinery to enforce them; the now-obsolete Dutch system of allocation of broadcast time to ensure that pluralist values in the society are recognized and performed; and in more modern times, concerns with Internet shut-down capabilities (as in Ethiopia, Cameroon, and Kenya). Ithiel de Sola Pool wrote brilliantly about technologies of freedom,2 but the burden of this approach is that no technology is intrinsically an instrument of freedom. Indeed, some technologies of freedom have had Trojan-horse effects; by design, they have been engines of surveillance and betrayal.

Strategic Narratives

I turn now to what I call strategic narratives, which are increasingly in the tool kit of states and movements as strategic communicators. Strategic narratives include stories a society tells about itself or stories that those outside seek to impose. Strategic narratives are of the same family as propaganda and include how a society is made to think about itself, fully understanding that how a society perceives itself influences what policies it adopts. And "narratives" are a theater in which these positions are honed. Narratives of fear and destabilization, for example, lay the groundwork for more cautious and restrictive regulatory outcomes. Narratives of freedom generally embolden participation and encourage entry.

Who are the manufactures of strategic narratives? On what might be called the positive side, the Freedom Online Coalition is a consortium of states that recognizes the need for a narrative to foster adherence to a relatively strict regime of non intervention in the regulation of social media. They further a narrative of freedom that supports, as it were, a strategic infrastructure. Some powerful states insist on an open social media structure (the strategic infrastructure) and they advance a global narrative that reinforces it. The EU invests in a bedrock narrative that supports its internal strengthening and its capacity to advocate for freedom throughout the member-states and beyond. As is true both for the EU and the Freedom Online Coalition, the capacity to maintain a strategic narrative is itself a matter contested. A final example: Ukraine, in the information conflict with Russia, developed a strategic narrative for domestic and global, as did Russia. These strategic narratives were used to justify uses of law and uses of force to further some voices and restrict others.

The contributions in this volume imply an important point about the political economy of strategic narratives and their relationship to freedom that is worth examining. We must study not only the operation of a single strategic narrative (such as the narrative of the need for free and independent media) but the mix of narratives, their interaction and changing patterns in their production, what might be called, as these techniques become more potent, the cauldron of narratives.

For example, it has been a difficult time for narratives of freedom. In Europe, the idea of "illiberal democracy" has grown, often at the cost of institutions that were constructed precisely to advance pluralism, the rule of law, and independence - basic aspects of freedom. This is mirrored elsewhere, including for example Myanmar, where promising narratives have dimmed. We can see how, the impact of narratives turns, partly on geopolitical trends. China and its Belt and Road Initiative gains a significant narrative focal point, much like the Marshall Plan of the late 1940s and 1950s as it sought to further ideas of democracy and freedom in post war Europe

There has also been a concerted attack on the very engines of narrative that are most supportive of freedom. In the United States, the press - or major elements of it - are characterized as "enemies of the people." In Russia and elsewhere, non local NGOs, often the backbone of civil society and the instruments of freedom, are outlawed and harassed. Similarly, we are...