The media and American domination
American power over tights, as in other sectors, it is unequaled and rests, since the 1940s, 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 influence capacity that this country has: the ideology of free trade or (neo) liberalism.
Just before the end of World War II (1944), the USA they approved a measure where they committed to favor the freedom of information and communication without restrictions in the world. The Bretton Woods agreements in June 1944 for currency exchanges, also creating the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and, in 1947, the General Agreement on Customs Tariffs and Trade (GATT), laid the (neo) liberal regulatory foundations of free trade 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 (originally embodied in the Constitution of 1791) of freedom of the press. The development of communication infrastructures occurred in parallel to coordinate with the doctrine of influence and, ultimately, of domination. In 1964, the Congressional Foreign Affairs Commission He considered that the primary purpose of the USA was to impose leadership in the world via the voluntary adherence to North American values. So the political objective sought to influence public opinion or the rulers through communication techniques. What in geopolitics can be called softpower.
A doctrine for global information domination
This doctrine, who made information a commodity like another and a medium of American influence on a planetary scale, is considered a tool of Realpolitik[1]. 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 the free competition and the free circulation of American products such as radio or television programs in order to create a framework for influence. Today, the Internet represents the new dimension of this 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 USA. Since the 2000s, a new economy has crystallized under the rise of American companies founded on the activities industrial and new strategic sectors such as online commerce (e-commerce), online financial transactions, etc. Today it can be seen that of the top 10 most visited webssites in the world, 8 of them They are of "Yankee" origin (according to Marketing PGC [2]).
These companies do not appear to present any threat to societies and, therefore, we would not say that they can exert an “evil” influence. We are going to proceed to an approximation.
The dimension of the Snowden Affair
Échelon is an espionage system created as early as 1947 which is part of a treaty between the UK and the USASo later on, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Denmark, Norway, Turkey and Germany. It consisted, initially, of sharing information between the different secret services and information agencies. The most important of the above is the National Security Agency (NSA) whose discovery to the public opinion occurred with the statements of Edward snowden in June 2013. This system is made up of a network of 120 satellites forming a global web of wiretapping, high frequency radio broadcasts, submarine cables, internet... American websites are complicit in access of the NSA within their networks as Facebook, Gmail or Skype.
It is not necessary to put a very long list about the consequences of espionage massive towards society. It would almost suffice for us to do an exercise in imagination. However, we want to mention that this espionage capacity, far from being harmless, articulates an attack, not only against human rights of privacy [3], but also at other levels of human life allowing knowledge about social, economic, governmental behavior... This accumulation of knowledge, called Bigdata, directly interferes with the running of the world and is counted as one more weapon within the framework of the geopolitics global. Although the qualification of hegemonic power is being questioned, USA he remains as a potential candidate to renew his status as the pivot of the world.
Bibliographic references:
[1] Realpolitik is a German concept that designates that foreign policy that is based on power politics: "Power above law."
[2] http://www.marketing-pgc.com/tag/innovation/