媒介基础设施视角下全球传播史的再书写——以跨洋电报与跨国通讯社为例

Rewriting the History of Global Communication from the Perspective ofMedia Infrastructure: Telegraph and Transnational News Agencies

回溯媒介基础设施的历史发展,可以探索重新书写全球传播史的路径。以19世纪、20世纪之交欧陆、北美和世界其他地区的跨洋电报和跨国通讯社为案例,在帝国、传播与媒介基础设施互构的“三位一体”系统观念下,可审视全球传播基础设施的建造、使用和扩散,最终建立了以美西方为主导的整全性的全球传播组织逻辑和规则制度,即全球传播的“卡特尔化”。中国“数智丝路”写就新的全球化媒介地方志需要超越这一霸权逻辑,重新锚定自身的角色与定位,参与、引领新一轮全球传播基础设施建设。

This paper explores rewriting the history of global communication by retracing the historical developments of media infrastructure.By examining examples such as trans-oceanic telegraphs and transnational news agencies in continental Europe,North America,and the rest of the world at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,it analyzes the construction,use,and diffusion of global communication infrastructure under the concept of a“trinity”system that intersected empire,communication,and media infrastructure,in the establishment of a comprehensive American-Western-dominated global communication organizational logic and system of rules,i.e.,the cartelization of global communication.This is instructive for the understanding of China s digital silk road initiative to write new globalized mediagraphies,and the participation in and leading a new round of global communication infrastructure construction,and anchoring its role and positioning.