Free Expression, Globalism, and the New Strategic Communication

Vast changes in technologies and geopolitics have produced a wholesale shift in the way states and other powerful entities think about the production and retention of popular loyalties. Strategic communication has embraced these changes as stakes increase and the techniques of information management become more pervasive. These shifts in strategic communications impact free speech as major players, in a global context, rhetorically embrace a world of transparency, all the while increasing surveillance and modes of control, turning altered media technologies and traditional media doctrines to their advantage. Building on examples drawn from the Arab Spring, the shaping of the Internet in China, Iran's perception of foreign broadcasting, and Russia's media interventions, this book exposes the anxieties of loss of control, on the one hand, and the missed opportunities for greater freedom, on the other. “New” strategic communication arises from the vast torrents of information that cross borders and uproot old forms of regulation. Not only states but also corporations, nongovernmental organizations, religious institutions, and others have become part of this new constellation of speakers and audiences.

Monroe E. Price is the author and editor of numerous publications, including Media and Sovereignty: The Global Information Revolution and its Challenge to State Power (2002), Owning the Olympics: Narratives of the New China (2008, edited with Daniel Dayan), the Routledge Handbook of Media Law (2013, edited with Stefaan Verhulst and Libby Morgan), and Objects of Remembrance: A Memoir of American Opportunities and Viennese Dreams (2009). Professor Price directs the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Global Communication Studies at the Annenberg School for Communication, where he works with a wide transnational network of regulators, scholars and practitioners in Europe, Africa, Latin America and Asia, as well as in the United States. He also heads the Howard Squadron Program in Law, Media and Society at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City where he was dean and is now senior research associate at Oxford's Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy.