Abstract
In this academic conversation, Professor Dan Schiller, a critical political economy scholar and historian of information and communications, first shares his up-to-date observation and analysis of developments and changes in contemporary digital capitalism. Professor Schiller then turns to his newly published book Crossed Wires: The Conflicted History of US Telecommunications, From The Post Office To The internet (Oxford University Press, 2023) and details his 40-year journey of research and writing on the history of these vital and recurrently contested infrastructures.
Hello, Dan, thanks for agreeing to do this interview with me. As I was preparing for this interview, I realized we had done one like this seven years ago when you shared a lot about your past academic experience and scholarly trajectory (Tang, 2016). It feels very timely that we are doing an update at this moment. I remember one of the main issues we discussed back in 2016 was the idea of “poles of growth,” as a main framework to make sense of the global political economy. So I am wondering how you see this framework changed (or not). What are some of the updated observations you would like to provide to this framework?
The major developments have been a continuation of what I analyzed in my book Digital Depression (Schiller, 2014); however, it’s helpful to begin by looking back to an earlier historical moment: the period of U.S. unipolarity, during which I wrote my book Digital Capitalism (Schiller, 1999). The Soviet Union has collapsed; China had embraced the global market; the Third World political project had lapsed as a result of the global debt crisis and the U.S. management of that crisis in accord with the structural adjustment program of the IMF. The 1990s became the moment of a much-touted US globalization. Under the banner of human rights, a U.S.-led build-out of the internet became one of its foundations. Overall, it encompassed a huge change in the world political economy, whereby China became a global manufacturing platform and there were other seismic changes in the organization of transnational corporate production chains. Digital technology helped enable this, and it became a central profit center—a pole of economic growth—within this wider transformation.
This then continued, but with a new evolving change: even while China became the world’s manufacturing powerhouse, it also developed its own increasingly significant internet industry. Your own research—and research by Hong Shen, Yu Hong, ShinJoung Yeo and some others—has contributed to the understanding of this. It was not Europe or Japan that succeeded in building an internet industry to compete with that of the United States. It was China. By the 2010s, China’s internet companies were making some significant inroads in international markets. They were not yet hugely powerful except in selected areas. So Huawei, for example, in global telecom equipment technology, was becoming a transnational force. And within China, domestic internet companies were dominant owing to Party-state policies—though of course Microsoft, Apple, and a couple of other US tech suppliers were also important in China. In my book Digital Depression (Schiller, 2014), I suggested that there would be growing conflicts between the United States and China over the principal growth pole in the contemporary capitalist political economy, which was digital technology, encompassing the internet and whole range of information and communications.
Indeed that has come to pass. China has continued to enlarge its capabilities in this realm, while the United States also has advanced. So today, we see an increasingly ferocious and general conflict over the control of this key pole of growth. Who will take primacy in setting the terms of development of the political economy that centers on digital technology? Right now, some of the flashpoints include telecommunications infrastructures, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, space satellites, 5G and 6G wireless—as well as advanced microelectronics, which is critical to virtually everything else. We are seeing offensive and defensive measures being taken by the two states, the United States and China, to try to ensure that each of them, respectively, seizes or retains power over each of these areas of innovation. I know more about the US side because I live in the United States and because, unfortunately, I do not possess Chinese language capability. I think what we will see, looking ahead, is intensifying conflict, because these are the most profitable markets (with the possible exception of finance—and finance is heavily interlinked with them).
This is both frightening and unfortunate, but it is also predictable because, over the course of hundreds of years of history, capitalism has always been a conflict-ridden system. There have been recurrent struggles, sometimes leading to wars, to control markets:
Speaking of China, we know that there has been an intensification of geopolitics over information and communication technologies between the United States and China, which has been another major area of your research in the past. How do you make sense of the recent developments on this topic, especially the Biden administration’s series of actions in the chip industry?
There is a strengthening US campaign to prevent China from effectively reorganizing the global political economy of digital capitalism to the advantage of Chinese companies and Chinese state interests. In October, 2022 the Biden Administration imposed export controls to try to cut off access to advanced microelectronics by Chinese companies. I am not certain if they will be able to accomplish this objective. One issue is that, to be more fully effective, the US export controls will need to be accompanied by measures to compel allied countries such as the Netherlands and Japan to stop sending microelectronics manufacturing technologies to China. These measures need to be negotiated. The problem here is that the US is asking the Netherlands’ and Japanese companies to place U.S. strategic interests in front of their own business interests. This may succeed, but it might not. There is also a difference between the Netherlands’ and Japanese companies in terms of their extent of reliance on the Chinese market. Beyond this, the microelectronics supply chain, as you know, is extraordinarily complex with many opaque areas: it is hard to keep track of what, exactly, is being shipped where. Finally, China is also expending enormous sums to develop its own capacity in advanced microelectronics. So it is not clear to me whether the United States will succeed in its efforts to keep China from advancing quickly in the strategic field of microelectronics.
Are these related to what you are working on now? Your research is always informed by what is going on in the contemporary political economy. Like you mentioned, your 2014 book Digital Depression mainly focused on the major capitalist reproduction sites of information technologies. So I wonder how your research focus and interests have evolved in view of these many changing elements in this “frightening world,” to borrow your words.
I am currently working on a presentation to be delivered in May, which is squarely about this set of issues. The presentation is titled “Digital capitalism in the 2020s: Dividing the World.” So yes, I am trying to keep myself freshly informed about these questions. I find it hard to get back into this, in part because the subject has grown even more complex than it was a decade ago; in part because the escalating conflict is fearsome; and in part because my head is elsewhere: I have been focusing for a long time on quite different historical issues.
I want to quickly follow up as you mentioned how the United States is so determined to go into this direction. Do you see changes or differences across the administrations of the U.S. government on this policy framework regarding China in the past years? Or would you say it is more of a bipartisan consensus.
The George Bush administration from 2001 to 2009 committed enormous strategic mistakes, in that it was completely captivated by the Middle East and Afghanistan, and it paid almost no attention to China’s growing internet capabilities. Since then, Obama, then Trump, and now Biden, have refocused US priorities. They have taken roughly the same path, albeit not with the same degree of clarity or commitment. Obama began the so-called “Pivot to Asia” with Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of the State. Trump was more hard-edged and erratic, imposing both a general high-tariff trade policy and specific sanctions against Huawei and ZTE. Biden has been much more systematic; drawing on some of the same people who were active under Obama, his is developing concerted measures across the tech area. But the last three presidents have all targeted China—and you’re correct: it’s been a bipartisan effort. China policy is one of the very few initiatives that gains majority support from both Republicans and Democrats.
It feels like, as you mentioned that, as hundreds of years of capitalist development have been integrated with crisis, that these types of conflicts are almost inevitable with two major powers competing with each other in the current digital landscape.
I wouldn’t say anything is inevitable. But I think it is predictable. We should be deeply concerned because we are talking about serious conflict between two nuclear-armed states. You know, with the United States and Soviet Union, there was an agreement after a certain point that there would be no use of nuclear weapons. That policy has been abandoned. At the same time, the United States and Soviet Union were not economic competitors like the US and China—although it also needs to be said that the US and China are also bound together by massive foreign direct investment, trade, and financial flows. So we have a much more unstable situation today. I think it is very unclear what the outcomes are going to be, particularly since, in addition, there are two flashpoints—Ukraine and Taiwan—one of which is of the most profound and immediate interest to China.
That serves as a reminder of our positionality as critical political economy scholars in these moments of history in making sense of the world. What about your other areas of research then? In addition to an acute and informative observation of the ongoing political economy globally, how have your other areas of intellectual inquiries developed?
It comes as a shock to get back into contemporary issues because I had been really focusing on my book on telecommunications history (Schiller, 2023). It has just been published, about two days ago. I expect to receive author copies in the next couple of weeks. I have been working on this project, as you know, off and on for forty years. I began to think of it as a book about twenty years ago and I fully committed to making it a book about ten years ago. So when you asked what I’ve been doing that’s new or different, I’ve taken advantage of my retirement to put even more history reading into my life. You know I always read a lot of history. But since I retired, you could say that I’ve read enough to earn a Ph.D. in history, principally U.S. history. But also I have made quite a bit of room for world history and transnational history. I integrated a lot of this into my book because there is just so much revelatory recent history. I find it incredibly stimulating and valuable. So my book has very extensive citations. That’s what’s new for me, and I want to continue educating myself in recent historical scholarship. As you can see in this home office of mine, there are lots of books—mostly history books.
To add a tiny anecdote to what you just shared, I remember from our last interview you told me that one of your original plans for your Ph.D. was actually in labor history. So it feels like a circle that you have now gone back to that “Ph.D. in history,” but more focused on the U.S. and telecom history.
Well, it has really been U.S. and global history, with a lot of labor and working-class history thrown in. Yes, it’s true that I did think about pursuing a Ph.D. in labor history. I’ve got to it one way or another in the end.
I know you have always identified yourself primarily as a historian in studying telecommunications history. I have always wondered, but never found a proper opportunity to ask you as your student, what got you interested in telecommunication in the first place. When I first started to study with you as your doctoral student, I did not know much about telecommunication and had these questions in my head: what does telecommunication mean and why is he so interested in this? It was only after a while into my doctoral study that I started to understand how telecommunication infrastructures might serve as a foundation to make sense of the interconnectedness of our whole information and communication system. But I really want to hear from you: what is telecommunication and what makes you interested in telecommunication?
It is a good question and your term “foundation” is a useful one in getting into this. I will first talk about the meaning of it and then will tell you how I got into it.
Basically, telecommunication means communication at a distance. It is kind of an umbrella term. But by convention, it signifies the great, costly, often intricate, infrastructures such as the postal system, or the telegraph, or the telephone, or large computer networks. They are put in place to enable communicative exchanges that are both long distance or local and that, importantly although for most people invisibly, facilitate most of the mass media. Back in the 19th century, for example, many newspapers and news agencies relied on the post office, and then the telegraph when it became available, to secure news from far away. In the 20th century, radio and then television broadcast networks needed specialized telephone circuits to interconnect local stations so they could transmit the same programs and advertisements to people dispersed across the country. Today, cellphones and social media could not exist without telecommunications networks—computer systems—behind them (they’re called the “backend”) to enable connections between people across the country or the world, and to enable access to apps. So, telecommunications are indeed the often-hidden foundation for a whole range of services that people take for granted as parts of the cultural universe.
In terms of how I got into studying telecommunications, it was a mixture of desire and necessity. I had not been prepared for it by graduate school, where I trained to become a historian of newspapers and media. I took no course in telecommunications (there was only one professor who knew anything about this subject). I was not into it. And my first teaching job was at Temple University with the Department of Radio, Television and Film. Like I said, I was a historian of journalism. Because of that, my colleagues at Temple sometimes joked that I was teaching 19th century television. It was meant to suggest that maybe I should be doing something a little more contemporary. Then a graduate course called New Technology and Mass Media became available: nobody was teaching it. I thought it would be a good idea if I asked to teach this course, partly because the subject now drew my interest and partly because it was not going to step on anybody else’s toes. This was around 1980, and it was obvious that there was lots going on with new technologies. In particular, computerization was rapidly taking hold. I wanted to know about that because it was intersecting with and quickly transforming the communication landscape. So I started teaching the course, and within a year I began to be treated as someone who knew a lot about new communication technology!
There was another factor. I was in Philadelphia, which meant that I had relatively easy access to the library at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)—where the primary sources were for studying contemporary electronic communications policy of every kind. So if I wanted to know about things going on and to use archival records, I could just hop on a train and be in Washington (D.C.) in two and a half hours. That appealed to me as a method for teaching myself. I began this process by learning to read the trade press, which was the commercial press that serves any industry. In particular, I subscribed to an extremely expensive weekly publication called Telecommunications Reports. I paid for it myself and they mailed out an issue of about 30 or 40 pages every week. I taught myself what were the hot-button issues in telecommunications. Then I relied on this information to look up the relevant dockets, as they were called, at the FCC library, to deepen my knowledge of the arguments that big companies were using on the current hot policy issues in Washington before the Federal Communications Commission. I did that for a couple years. I went to Washington pretty often and worked in the Federal Communications Commission’s library. I also consulted earlier FCC proceedings, some of which were held by the National Archives. I learned a great deal very quickly. My first presentation of my findings was at a conference in 1981, and my first published article on telecommunications history was in the Journal of Communication in 1982. At my first conference presentation, a member of the audience stood up and said that he had played a major role in one of the most important FCC proceedings I had just discussed—and that he had not understood its significance until he had heard me speak! My first book on telecommunications also appeared in 1982: Telematics and Government (Schiller, 1982). I worked hard and synthesized my approach rapidly.
I need to tell you a little more about this, because there is a revealing intellectual tension here. Back in graduate school and as I continued as an Assistant Professor, I was committed to what was called history from below: the emerging approach to writing history in terms of the experience and consciousness of working people, women, minorities and, some years later, LGBTQ communities. History from below was committed to the idea that peoples’ positions in society and their understanding of their positions have to be given fundamental attention to see what the overall society looks like and means. New sources were being used to document all this, such as census records, diaries, newspapers, and other previously untapped types of records. In stark contrast, what little telecommunications history existed at that time was exclusively written from above. You did not see a trace of anything having to do with the experience or consciousness of telecommunications workers. In fact, the very idea seemed extravagant, even nonsensical. I have to admit in all honestly, that when I wrote my first papers and my first book on telecommunications, I did not really think myself that this might be a subject for history from below. The discourse of US telecommunications was and to a considerable extent still is written from above, that is to say from the perspective of engineers, accountants, lawyers, economists, government bureaucrats and executives.
In Telematics and Government (Schiller, 1982), however, I did accomplish what I take to be a very significant revision of the accepted narrative in telecommunications—one that still today is neither understood nor accepted in the dominant view of US telecommunications history. Telecommunications history is written overwhelmingly in terms of the supposed dominance of the suppliers—the giant “monopolies”—that provide telecommunications services. When I went to the FCC in 1980 and 1981, however, what I found was that it was not the carriers that were in fact dominant but the giant business users from every sector of the economy, such as large banks, energy companies, retailers, automobile manufacturers, and so on who went before the FCC and eventually also before the Justice Department to make the case that the leading supplier—at that time, the integrated monopoly AT&T—was not providing them the equipment and services that they wanted at prices they deemed acceptable. What I found was that starting in the late 1950s all the way into the early 1980s, these business users prevailed in one proceeding after the next. It was business users, not AT&T, who were setting—and dramatically changing—US telecommunications policy. They were the ones that forced forward what was called liberalization and deregulation, over the protests of AT&T. This was the process that I documented in my early work.
However, I did not make room for the US working class in this narrative, except to show that it was a victim of the policy-making process. But after I had written the book, I decided that I would make some attempts to understand the longer history of US telecommunications—and I also decided that, this time, I would try somehow to bring history from below into my research. This would require me to spend time learning how to make workers more central. This was the task that I set myself. It has carried me through the next 40 years:
Was there a particular reason or factor that drove you toward this revised direction?
Well I have always been interested in and committed to learning about the working class and working people. I had done so in my first book on 19th century journalism (Schiller, 1981). But I had not figured out a way to do it with telecommunications—where I was working very much against the grain. With the book I did on the process of liberalization, which as I said was enacted very much “from above,” it didn’t seem that there was a way to put working people into that. So when I set about doing new work, I did not at first think of writing another book. I just started to work on individual research studies. I began by going back to the turn of the 20th century. I knew that working people had a very active role in reshaping the U.S. political economy at that time, and I was going to see if they had taken any role in telecommunications. I wanted to see if I could find evidence of working people playing a role in telecommunications system development within the larger political economy of the United States around the turn of the 20th century. There was already a standard account of how US telecommunications had developed between the 1890s and the end of World War I. My new research showed, however, that it needed to be fundamentally revised, because workers had played an important and hitherto undetected role. I documented this by visiting the AT&T archive and the National Archives.
If you allow me, I would like to talk a bit about archives. Archives are wonderful places and they also can be very frustrating. They are full of joy and challenge. You find tantalizing fragments. Sometimes archival practices prevent you from finding things that you know are there. For example, practices of classification by the federal government remove documents that arbitrarily prevent you from discovering things. I have had a lot of experiences with that at some of the presidential libraries, which are parts of the National Archives system.
However, if you are willing to spend time, a process of serendipity sometimes occurs which affords magnificent stumbles. Doors open that you had no idea existed. Then you find yourself in a whole new room of understanding. That is just wonderful. Your research moves, completely unexpectedly, around a corner. You also need to take time with documents after you’ve visited an archive. When you are in the archive you are often just grabbing stuff. After you come home, you need to sift through it, think about it, see what is there and then maybe go back. The process of working in the archive also depends on working with an archivist. The archivist is crucial to what you are able to discern. To this extent it’s kind of a subjective process of discovery. It is not just this dry, bare bones thing. It is full of delight and full of hardship. It is arduous and wearisome but also energizing and delightful.
With this project, I began with the period between the 1890s and 1920s. By the early 1990s, I had written around 150 pages of manuscript about that period. It was too much for an article and not enough for a book. Then, I wanted to learn more. What had happened to the reform effort that had collapsed after World War I? So I started working on that; and I got more serious about the working class in US history. I took my research forward into the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. I went to a lot of other archives. I found some equally rich material but it was very difficult to assimilate because I was not finding what I expected to find. I wanted to find stuff on the telephone industry but—especially in the 1930s—I found much more on the telegraph industry. That took me a long time to make sense of. Then I went forward again into the 1960s and 1970s. Then I realized that, since telecommunications encompassed all three systems, I had to work on the postal office to carry that part forward—so I returned to look at the post office between the 1920s and the 1970s. Then I felt I had to go back to the 19th century to get more information about the post office and the telegraph in the 19th century. So I took on the subject in bits and pieces. Finally, and a bit paradoxically, I had to go back at the end of the project to do research on the internet, which had been in its nascency when I started my project. However, returning to when I started my course on New Technology and Mass Media in 1980, another thing I did to launch my career was that I went to some commercial conferences on computer communications. I went to the International Conference on Computer Communications in 1980, and I saw some of the leading internet engineers of that time discussing key issues. I reviewed the conference proceedings just a few years ago, as I was rethinking what I thought I knew about the early internet! So the internet system became the final chapter of my book. The role of workers ebbs and flows throughout the decades. Sometimes it has been stronger, sometimes weaker. However, overall, my research shows that it’s invalid to write the story of US telecommunications without attending to the role of working people:
That is so fun. The way you were describing what you discovered in the archive sounded like an adventure game where there are often new maps or areas of maps for the gamers to explore. In looking at this forty-year journey of yours working on this book, it also makes me think about the dialectics of what is old and what is new. Back in when you started that graduate course, the very idea of mass media was associated with the new technological developments. But if we look at our time, for the current generation of young people, all they know or care about is probably the social media, which like you said earlier, has been built upon that hidden telecommunications system which the GenZ would probably deem as very old. But their interconnections and consistencies can only be captured from a longer historical point of view of the entire telecommunication system development.
Also as you shared this process of discovery, I am also getting a sense of the organization of your book. Now I start to understand why James Schwoch (2023) used the word “masterpiece” to describe your book. It does feel like not only a masterpiece, but also a massive piece. It is amazing:
I did the best I could. Crossed Wires does explain why, by 1980 when I began Telematics and Government, the US working class was being pushed out of the picture in telecommunications policy-making.
I very much look forward to reading the book. Are there any particular joyful or surprising findings in the process of researching and writing this book that you would like to share with the readers?
It is hard to pick out just one thing. Important to me was that I discovered a number of forgotten, or in a couple of cases not so forgotten, heroes of US telecommunications history. People whose names we might not know but who played parts in struggles for a different telecommunications than what’s come down to us. There was Julia O’Connor who other historians have written about. She was a young telephone operator who battled not only the chief executives of huge telephone companies but also of the post office; she also had to struggle with the male officials of her own telephone union, because they were condescending and uncooperative towards the women telephone unionists. Yet she led her fellow women telephone workers to victory in a great strike in 1919.
There was Edward Nockels, a leader of the Chicago Federation of Labor, who pursued a working-class vision of telecommunications from around 1907 till he died in the mid-1930s. He is well known for his achievements in radio. But he also had a vision of telecommunications that contravened dominant practices. He wanted ordinary workers to have access to the telephone for local service, and to end corporate patent monopolies. He struggled for 30 years, and when he died, the poet Carl Sandburg eulogized him. Nobody knows Nockels today—nobody remembers him. But I have a photograph of him in my book.
Even before he worked at the FCC, Dallas Smythe, who some communications scholars know, worked with members of an industrial union which represented telegraph workers in the 1930s and through the war: the American Communications Association. He learned a lot of what he knew about communications from a couple of the leaders of ACA, which was a militant left-wing CIO union. So that’s another thing that’s worth knowing.
There are other people too, whose unsung biographies need to be remembered in terms of the larger history of U.S. telecommunications:
That’s great to hear. It reminds me of what we talked about at the beginning today in terms of these various frightening moments in history. Can I say it is these ordinary people’s stories and this people’s history that could give us hope and strength and carry us through these dark moments we confront today?
I think that is a crucial reminder. Because we stand on the shoulders of generations of people who worked for and continue to work for a more just world. If we only think about the fear and the adversity, we may allow ourselves to be beaten down. If we keep our minds on the people who have come before us and who continue to be among us, we can indeed carry hope with us. So you are right.
Thank you. So where are we now? What are some remaining questions you would want to continue in line of this inquiry in view of our current time?
There are many issues that need to be thought about. The overwhelming emphases in the structure and policy of today’s telecommunications are hurtful: These two priorities are profit-making and war. Both of these cut against the needs of at least 90% of the world’s people. So the issue is to try to figure out in which ways have they misdirected and distorted the telecommunications system and the larger domain of technology, and then try to figure out how those domains should be reorganized. In the United States, it is often taken for granted that everybody has access. That is not true. So we can start from there. But access is only the beginning. We need to ask questions about access to what, and access for what purpose. If our access is only to the realm of commodity production, this is not adequate. We need to learn to have a society in which selling and buying are massively reduced. We cannot, on environmental grounds, continue to organize as a society this way—think (as Richard Maxwell has taught us) of the wastage that is systematically produced! This emphasis on selling and buying has not been sustainable for decades—and it keeps getting worse. It is long past time to rethink it, and reorganize the greater communications system, so that it is configured around different purposes and priorities. We need communication systems that help us to learn and to teach and communicate a culture that is not about selling and buying. That is schematic rather than detailed. But we need to have the whole society focused on how to do that.
A second theme is demilitarization. We have an US$850 billion-dollar military budget in the United States. That budget needs to be radically diminished. That budget again is responsible for a significant proportion of the digital technology that we have. The research objectives and the development priorities continue to be organized around military objectives. This needs to change. I also need to emphasize that this needs to change internationally, not just domestically. But the U.S. military budget is a good place to start, because it is by far the largest military budget in the world—China’s comes second. So we need to figure out how concretely militarization affects digital technology. This will be aided by a process of declassification, which can be the beginning of a process of reorganizing our societal priorities.
Those are my two immediate concerns. You need, however, to develop a movement to accomplish this. In my opinion, the single most urgent priority globally right now is a peace movement. The difficulties that stand in the way of a global peace movement are enormous. The existing peace movement has been hit very hard by the current political and military situation. It is going to be difficult to construct a new one. But it is of urgent importance that a peace movement be rekindled. We have some technologies that can help it to circulate ideas of peace. I remember during the Vietnam War, one idea that circulated was that the peoples of the United States and Vietnam did not have anger or animosity toward one another. I think this needs to be brought forward to help the peoples of the United States and China in particular remember that states may fight but peoples should not:
I appreciate that you made a connection to the Vietnam War and the anti-war movement back then. I remember you mentioned in our previous interview that when you went to University of Wisconsin Madison for your undergraduate study it was one of the most active campuses in the student movement during that historical moment. I know you told me that you are probably going to take a break after finishing a book project of such magnitude and maybe you will pause and think about what will be the next one. But do you have any suggestions for us, junior scholars, in terms of studying global political economy and information and communication technologies?
There are so many things that need to be done and there are not enough people to work on them. I have many suggestions. I’d like somebody to work on what are called Status of Force Agreements. When the United States puts a military base in a country, they sign a Status of Force Agreement with that country. I don’t know of anybody who has studied these with an eye to what they mean for use of communications in any given country. What does a Status of Force Agreement in, say, the Philippines or Djibouti or Germany or Japan state in terms of US access to spectrum resources, or building out communication systems in that country, or utilizations of that country’s communication networks. This would make a revealing research study. It might be hard because probably some or even all of it is classified. But even that would be interesting to learn.
It would be valuable and again revealing to have studies on contemporary news management practices in the United States. The extent of news management today probably goes beyond what we’ve seen in my lifetime. It really needs to be analyzed.
Efforts to mobilize the nations of the Global South, for example, through the G77, need to be given renewed attention, and with specific attention to communications and digital technology. There are important theoretical questions about this: how independent, how “non-aligned,” – that is, how anti-imperialist – are these nations? How do domestic class relations figure in their international posture?
The historical use of communications systems and services by social movements and in particular working-class movements need continuing attention, as do the role of communications media of all kinds in the experience and consciousness of workers. We are seeing more work by historians on this, in a variety of historical contexts. Communication scholars need to make themselves aware of this scholarship; and should also contribute to it. There is an inexhaustible amount of research that can and should be done in this area:
What about China and the U.S.-China relations? Any new research directions we could explore on that end?
Critical researchers should be studying anything having to do with China’s Belt and Road activities in communications, or more generally China’s overseas activities in all areas of communications. Certainly, mainstream analysts are doing so—why should we leave this vital field to them?
I could imagine a dozen doctoral dissertations that could be done out of these topics. Thank you very much for sharing and talking with me today.