Contenu du sommaire : L'internationalisation de la culture, de l'information et de la communication : quels enjeux contemporains ?

Ten years after the entry into force of the Convention on Cultural Diversity: Imbalances in the international market for cultural goods and services, and the digital challengeAlmost a decade after the entry into force of the Convention on the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (Unesco, 2005) is imposed to know to what extent this new international treaty, which calls for a better balance in cultural matters between developed countries and developing countries, it has succeeded in transforming international flows of trade of cultural goods and services. Based on data from public (WTO, UIS) and private sources, this article demonstrates the strong control that cultural industries of developed countries still have nowadays. Finally, the following pages consider the magnitude of one of the great challenges that the Convention must face today: the realization of its principles in the landscape drawn by digital technologies.

This essay describes the new international division of cultural labor used by transnational media corporations (TNMCs) that structurally consolidate and creatively coordinate local and global media production. TNMCs produce culturally and linguistically diverse hybrid media content for television, film, and advertising that complements and contributes to a global consumer culture necessary for neoliberal capitalism. Parallel to this new division of creative labor, a new international culture of consumption popularizes lifestyle identities, culturally proximate images, and stories of individual gratification—underwritten by entertainment media and interlocking transnational advertising firms. The transnational media structure thus plays an instrumental role in creating audiences amenable to mass consumption, individual gratification, and market authority.

Challenges in Creative Industries in India
The cultural and communication industries and activities based on creating such craft, play a very important role in the Indian economy and the continuous construction of Indianness. These activities are structured around two poles, one highly industrialized, the other belonging to the informal economy. Failing to appear explicitly in Indian public debates, the scenarios described by the promoters of creative industries based on linkages between various activities in the creation, on “cross-fertilization” of the whole economy and political and human development through creativity are mostly observe within less industrialized areas. The dynamic force of the main cultural and communication industries explains why they have no need of these solutions.

“International communication” and scientific issues: a state of the art at the birth of information - communication sciences in France What is designated as International Communication does not, in fact, actually exist, neither as a concept, a field, a category, a theory, a school, a discipline, nor a sector. It does not provide any original methodological approach. Its area of utility remains unclear and notably flexible, since the identification attempts to specify it are diachronic in character, as its claims refer to actors that steadily become more numerous and give rise to a variable geometry as well as more and subtle discursive productions. Embodied in publication titles and university courses, mobilized by international organizations for use in classificatory objectives, called upon for terminological clarifiction, it can only disappoint, offering false structural syntheses that fill scientific journals. Driven by a variety of often non-visible politico-cultural interests, its terminological polysemy discourages serious and exhaustive research.However, its discursive manifestation does produce meaning effects and impact on our understanding, and it is now time to put this in perspective. Thus, the only option for illuminating this situation – one that would avoid endless description and inventories – requires the common thread of a discipline, namely the information-communication sciences. From its formal constitution in France at the end of 70's and with its progressive establishment in Humanities and Social sciences, this discipline now provides a significant theoretical corpus and epistemological anchoring. At the same time, it is still possible in provide a reasonable and accessible to initial overview. Moreover, confining ourselves to one country while simultaneously taking into account transnational scientific collaborations and productions – and not least avoiding the pitfalls of mediacentrism – an interrogation of the discipline reveals a formidable toolbox. Its epistemological, theoretical, conceptual and methodological features justify a provisional state of the art, one that stands out in a crowded academic domain, and offers useful alternatives to the problematic character of International Communication.

Media Diversity and Multi-party System in Africa: Symmetry of Deficiencies
The African continent is now characterized by multiplicity of political parties and multiplicity of medias, considered as a double indicator of both the advance of the democratization process and the social and economic development. Observed since 1990th years, this correlation between Medias and politics is here questioned, considering the results which seem limited. This study offers various empiric data for an objective evaluation.

Toward a revison of the Directive on Audiovisual Media Services as a minimum
The European Commission presented May 25, 2016 a proposal to revise the Directive on Audiovisual Media Services, following an intensive consultation and evaluation begun in 2015. The publication of the proposal, which was the subject to a first examination by the Council of Ministers of 31 May 2016 and should be reviewed in the coming months by the European Parliament and transposed into national law by Member States is an important moment in the evolution of regulation European, at a time when service demand offerings have matured and where consumer practices, especially young people, are changing very rapidly. This article provides a critical first reading of this proposal, which contains interesting developments but also marks the limits of ambition and regulatory capacity of the European Union. It also offers some considerations on the impact that could have on Brexit the revision of the Directive and its future implementation.

Questioning the argument of news diversity in the digital era: the case of international news
The rise of the web has been accompanied by the widely held assumption that it would have given shape to a new networked information economy. This is presented as having eliminated some of the main filters that used to limit the production and circulation of news and, as such, as having given rise to an increased diversity of news offer. Based on the study of the literature on international news, this article aims at deconstructing this argument. Considering the different waves of research on this topic, we show that, contrary to what the proponents of the diversity thesis claim, the political economy constraints still play a great role in organizing the production and distribution of international news in the digital era.

This paper identifies key features in the next phase of Internet development by focusing on cloud computing, big data analytics, and the Internet of Things. Together they expand opportunities to centralize control over data, deepen the commercialization of information, and extend the Internet's reach from connecting people to building data-rich networks of things. They also raise significant social policy questions including the concentration of power in a handful of companies closely tied to the military/intelligence world; the environmental consequences of building, powering, and connecting people to a global network of cloud data centers; the privacy and security implications of connecting billions of objects; and the impact of intelligent devices on the future of work. The paper concludes by suggesting that we are at a critical crossroads in Internet development and asks whether it is possible to build the Next Internet without eliminating its foundational values.

After the Internet: Cloud Computing, Big Data and the Internet of Things
This paper identifies key features in the next phase of Internet development by focusing on cloud computing, big data analytics, and the Internet of Things. Together they expand opportunities to centralize control over data, deepen the commercialization of information, and extend the Internet's reach from connecting people to building data-rich networks of things. They also raise significant social policy questions including the concentration of power in a handful of companies closely tied to the military/intelligence world; the environmental consequences of building, powering, and connecting people to a global network of cloud data centers; the privacy and security implications of connecting billions of objects; and the impact of intelligent devices on the future of work. The paper concludes by suggesting that we are at a critical crossroads in Internet development and asks whether it is possible to build the Next Internet without eliminating its foundational values.

In the West, press freedom is typically understood as self-evident – as part of a pervasive ideology rather than of a rational doctrine. Therefore, while cherishing the idea of freedom, there is a need to deconstruct libertarian myths about press freedom. For instance, the metaphor of a free marketplace of ideas turns out to be something other than the original liberalism proposed by John Milton and John Stuart Mill. The history of ideas does not support a (neo) liberal notion of freedom, but rather a concept of freedom tied to moral values. Hence narrow-minded advocates of Western freedom are just as fundamentalist as those Islamists who are designated as such.

This paper argues that the discourse of the creative economy as it has played out over the last fifteen years or so, is part of a model of ‘globalisation' that is now exhausted. In particular, the absorption of previously progressive cultural policy aims such as increased cultural diversity, an ending of artificial barriers between ‘high' and ‘low' culture and a recognition of the importance of markets in cultural production, into a much narrower focus purely on ‘jobs and growth' has meant that many culture-led developments, and the cultural sectors themselves, across the world simply reproduce social and economic inequality. A more pluralistic model of cultural development that pays attention to inequities in cultural work itself is desperately needed.

History of Science Communications in China: a Political Instrument for Modernization and Economic CompetitivenessAs early as 1949, China adopted a policy geared towards the development of scientific literacy, whereas Western countries will only adopt similar measures in the 1980s at the impetus of the OECD. During the 19th century, in China as in Europe the promotion of scientific literacy became imperious. Chinese understood that if they wished to rival colonial powers, they had to master science and technology. However, the promotion of scientific literacy remained a private initiative. After Mao Zedong took power in China, scientific literacy is subordinated to the Party's development project. And yet, it is only with the Reforms of Deng Xiaoping from 1978 on, that scientific literacy was fully integrated in the economic development plan

This essay considers how policy thinking about culture has been steadily transformed into an overwhelmingly economic subject matter whose central trope is the “creative economy”. The development of current ideas and their background are discussed. Policy ideas first fully developed in the UK have had a global resonance: the illustrative examples of the European Union and the United Nations are discussed. The embedding of creative economy thinking in British cultural institutions such as the BBC and cultural support bodies is illustrated. The impact of current orthodoxy on academic institutions and research is also considered. Countervailing trends are weak. New thinking is now required.

This study will examine how rapidly changing social class structures in Latin America in the last ten years have impacted television viewing. Subscription to cable or pay television has increased enormously in Brazil and Mexico in the last 6-7 years as effects of the substantial growth of the middle class in the last 10-15 years has begun to become very visible in media behavior. Cable television growth in Latin America had trailed far behind most other regions of the world (Reis 1999), where cable and satellite television grew explosively in the 1990s (Balio 1998). Latin America was already covered by well-resourced commercial television stations, which provided a great deal of entertainment, which was closely to tuned to national interests, gaining a great deal of advantage from cultural proximity (Straubhaar 1991). If Latin Americans are now turning to cable or pay television, what has changed?

The unprecedented global expansion of Chinese media and communication networks over the past decade, specifically in Africa, raises important questions about the changing media landscape in what is emerging as one of the major media markets in the world. This paper examines the media race for African by China and India, focusing in particular on the Indian presence on a continent where long established people-to-people connections favour the expansion of Indian political and economic interests. Then the paper suggests that the growing digital connectivity, with the convergence of mobile communications technologies and content via Internet, the Indian presence is likely to deepen. Will this lead to a competition with China or open up possibilities for cooperation, in such areas as development communication?

Towards Knowledge Societies: a social project
The vision articulated in the document presented by UNESCO in Tunis in 2005, resumed and updated in Mansell's and Tremblay's report (2013), outlines the general framework of construction of various knowledge societies, dynamic and based on respect for people, cultures and the environment. The evocation of this horizon is the subject of the first point of this article. The implementation of this project, utopian in many respects, of pluralistic societies respectful of human rights, implies the adoption of various strategies. These strategies should be adapted to various cultures and socio-economic contexts. But everywhere they should be inspired by the same approach fostering the dialogue between different groups of stakeholders. The discussion of this double requirement of uniqueness and diversity is the subject of the second point. However, the knowledge societies draft does not raise the same enthusiasm all over the planet. It is facing ignorance, indifference and sometimes fierce opposition, even violent, from different social, economic and political forces. The presentation of the main obstacles that hinder the development of knowledge societies is the third step of this presentation. A proposal to conclude: knowledge societies are social projects rooted as well in critical thinking as in utopian vision.