Colonial Communications On The Path Of Capitalism Expansion

Colony is a political phenomenon after the birth of capitalism, whose nature is expansion based on traffic and communication technology. Various communication means have been applied on the route of colonial conquering. The study of communication activities provides a new perspective for people to recognize colony, and helps to understand current and future capitalism expansion practices.Starting with the definition of colonial communication, this dissertation explains its connotations, denotations and boundaries, and traces its origins. The thought of free flow of opinions laid an early philosophical basis for the capitalism expansion.This dissertation begins with research of the evolution of communication as colonial power, and attaches importance to new changes of colonial communication in the post-colony era, which covers five dimensions including informatization economic globalization, routine life, space and world communication order. In particular, the new strategic trends of colonial communication in the post-colony context deserve our attention. Political economy research method is mainly employed to study this subject, with economy as the logic beginning and technology as the material foundation for capitalism expansion.Capitalism colony generally spreads in both temporal and space dimensions. With the advantage of technology, hot weapons such as guns are exploited to explore early geographical expansion. Religion, school and press are taken as auxiliary pioneering tools at the early conquering stage. However, as nation states go independent, and advanced electronic media technology is adopted in communication, new form of colony tends to focus on temporal continuity. In the age of industrialization, the bodies of workers are limited within factories instead of prisons, and televisions invade family space. Fashion created by TV guides people to materials over-pursuit, as a result, they are trapped into fetishism.In the post-colony context, colony shifts from hard power conquering to soft power control, and mass media become the major forces. Colony aims at controlling minds instead of bodies, and the new form of colony is not only invisible but more effective as well. With hard power material resources used to be directly plundered by violence, while soft power control via communication tools indirectly achieves its goal by affecting audiences'minds. Cross-country mass media and internet are actually turned into colonial machines.At present, nation states should encourage the rapid development of mass communication and construct their own national discourse system and national identification in order to occupy citizens' thinking space. In addition, the key of anti-colony worldwide is to gain the power to establish new world communication order.