social psychology and personal relationships

The media and the North American domination of the world

April 25, 2024

American power over the socks , as in other sectors, it is unequaled and rests, since the 40s, on different central foundations that make up its doctrine of domination. One of these central foundations makes the media an extremely useful tool for the capacity of influence that this country has: the ideology of free trade or (neo) liberalism .

Just a little before the end of World War II (1944), the U.S They approved a measure where they committed themselves to favor the freedom of information and communication without restrictions in the world. The Bretton Woods agreements in June 1944 for monetary exchanges, also creating the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and, in 1947, the General Agreement on Customs Tariffs and Trade (GATT), laid down the (neo) liberal regulatory bases of free-exchange to defend the doctrine of American influence. The multilateral agreements designed by these organizations applied the free dissemination of information and communication, forming an important pillar for the fight against communism .

This doctrine, which dominated the cold war years, and after it, materialized an American vision (reflected in its origin in the Constitution of 1791) of press freedom. The development of communicative infrastructures occurred in parallel to coordinate with the doctrine of influence and, ultimately, of domination. In 1964, the Congress Foreign Affairs Committee he considered that the primary purpose of the USA was to impose leadership on the world through the voluntary adhesion of North American values. So the political objective sought to influence public opinion or the rulers through the media of communication techniques. What in geopolitics can be called softpower .

A doctrine for the domination of global information

This doctrine, who made information a commodity like another and a means of American influence on a planetary scale, is considered as a tool of Realpolitik [one]. The doctrine tends to tear down all the "walls" for the creation of a commercial space within the entire dimension of the globe, thus ensuring free competition and the free circulation of American products such as radio or television programs in order to create a framework of influence. Today, the Internet represents the new dimension of that doctrine geopolitics of the Cold War no matter how hard it is to understand, since Internet It has many positive dimensions, for example for the rapid exchange of information.

So information and communication technologies are considered as one of the foundations of the governance of the world for U.S. Since the 2000s, a new economy is crystallized under the rise of American companies based on industrial activities and on new strategic sectors such as online commerce (e-commerce), online financial transactions, etc. Nowadays it can be verified that of the 10 most visited webssites of the world, 8 of them They are of "Yankee" origin (according to Marketing PGC [2]).

Apparently these companies do not present any threat to societies and, therefore, we would not say that they can exert a "malignant" influence. Let's proceed to an approximation.

The dimension of the Snowden Case

Échelon is an espionage system created in 1947 which is part of a treaty between UK and the USA , so, later, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Denmark, Norway, Turkey and Germany. It consisted, initially, in sharing information between the different secret services and the information agencies. The most important of the above is the National Security Agency (NSA) whose discovery face public opinion occurred with the statements of Edward Snowden in June 2013. This system is constituted by a network of 120 satellites forming a global web of wiretapping, high frequency radio broadcasts, submarine cables, internet ... American websites are complicit in the access of the NSA within their networks as Facebook, Gmail or Skype .

There is no need to put a very long list about the consequences of espionage massive towards society. It would almost be enough to perform an exercise in imagination. However, we want to mention that this capacity for espionage, far from being harmless, articulates an attack, not only to the human rights of intimacy [3], but also to other levels of human life allowing knowledge about social, economic, governmental behavior ... This accumulation of knowledge, called Bigdata , directly interferes with the march of the world and counts as another weapon within the framework of the geopolitics global. Although the qualification of hegemonic power is being questioned, USA remains as a potential candidate to renew its status as the pivot of the world.