Livingston CNN Effect Reconsidered - Again - Problematizing ICT & Global Governance - 2011

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Steven Livingston
governance in the CNN effect research agenda
The CNN effect reconsidered (again): problematizing ICT and global
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The CNN effect reconsidered
(again): problematizing
ICT and global governance
in the CNN effect research
agenda
Steven Livingston
George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA
Abstract
Early CNN effect research considered policy effects associated with cumbersome satellite uplinks
of limited capacity. Today, nearly ubiquitous mobile telephony and highly portable satellite uplinks
enable high-speed data transmission, including voice and video streaming, from most remote
locations. Also, important geopolitical realignments have occurred since the end of the Cold
War. The US is now challenged by new economic and cultural powerhouses, and by the rise of
networked nonstate actors. It is not simply a matter of realignment among nation-states, as the
original CNN effects research noted, but also a realignment between the type, scope and scale
of actors involved in global governance. Rather than confining the argument to a consideration
of media effects on state policy processes, this article argues that important technological and
political developments call for a new research path, one that centers on the relationship between
governance and the nature of a given information environment.
Keywords
CNN effect, complex interdependence, crowdsourcing, event mapping, geographical information
systems (GIS), governance, information regimes, mobile telephony, scale shifting, Ushahidi
CNN effect research focuses on two core questions: first, how might global real-time
television affect state foreign policy processes? Second, how do geopolitical realign-
ments affect the probability and intensity of these potential policy effects?
Livingston 21
Regarding the first question, researchers have considered whether global television
coverage of distant events accelerates decision cycles or alters policy by adding new
objectives or, conversely, by undermining public support or operational security for exist-
ing ones (Livingston, 1997; Livingston and Eachus, 1995). The second question draws
attention to the geopolitical context of potential media effects on foreign policy. The con-
fidence that policy makers have in the soundness of objectives and in the conduct of policy
reflects the conceptual clarity associated with a particular geopolitical context. The end of
the Cold War, for example, created policy uncertainty for the US (Robinson, 2000, 2002).
Although the CNN effect research agenda has proven quite creative and robust over
the years, it has failed to adjust to important changes in technology and politics.
1
We
should call to mind that initial CNN effect case studies were, on the whole, written prior
to the flourishing of the world wide web.
2
Changes involve more than technology.
Equally important geopolitical realignments have occurred since the end of the Cold
War. Although the US remains a dominant military and political power in the world, new
economic and cultural powerhouses are on the rise (Zakaria, 2008). What is more, inter-
national relations scholars point to the growing importance of nonstate actors in global
affairs (Rosenau and Czempiel, 1992; Singh and Rosenau, 2002). It is not simply a mat-
ter of realignment among nation-states, but also realignment between the type, scope and
scale of actors involved in global politics.
Rather than confine ourselves to consideration of media effects on state policy pro-
cesses, important developments call for a new path, one that centers on the relationship
between governance, on the one hand, and information and communication technology
(ICT) on the other. A more intellectually exciting and politically germane research question
is this: How does the nature of an information environment alter the nature of governance?
(Weiss, 2000; Weiss and Thakur, 2010; Wendt, 1992). Governance encompasses the
complex of formal and informal institutions, mechanisms, relationships, and processes between
and among states, markets, citizens and organizations, both inter- and non-governmental,
through which collective interests on the global plane are articulated, rights and obligations are
established, and differences are mediated. (Weiss and Thakur, 2010)
The point of this article is to suggest why this refocusing of research is necessary and impor-
tant for the development of political communication and international relations theory.
My argument comes in two part. First, I argue that theory building must take into
account the evolving nature of the central independent variable in CNN effects research:
the production of content. Significant changes in technology have removed, to a great
extent, the historical encumbrances to live newsgathering in remote locations. A news
managers decision calculus regarding the distribution of newsgathering resources no
longer involves the same extraordinary costs once associated with such a circumstance.
3
Second, I argue that analyses must look at systems-level effects of a given state of
technological development. It is not only a matter of specific technologies advancing in
ways that affect television, but rather how television itself is a part of and at times indis-
tinguishable from other technologies comprising what I shall refer to as an infosystem.
I will begin with a review of specific advances in satellite newsgathering (SNG) and
then take up the argument concerning infosystems and governance.
4
I close with an
assessment of the benefits and costs of my suggested approach.
22 Media, War & Conflict 4(1)
Satellite newsgathering
The 19901 Persian Gulf War was CNNs signature moment. On 17 January 1991, CNN
correspondents John Holliman, Peter Arnett and Bernard Shaw relayed dramatic audio
reports describing the opening hours of the coalition bombing campaign. They did so
using a four-wire circuit running from Baghdad to Amman, Jordan. This relatively
simple technology allowed CNN to offer live audio reports, even after the telephone
lines in Baghdad went dead. In coming days, veteran war correspondent Arnett remained
behind as his colleagues returned to the US. Switching to an Inmarsat-A satellite termi-
nal, he offered riveting and at times controversial reports about the bombing campaign.
Arnetts reporting and the technology he used provides a benchmark for measuring sub-
sequent developments in SNG technology.
Two weeks into the bombing campaign, another technology offered CNN its second
news coup of the war: a live television interview with Saddam Hussein. Unlike the audio-
only Inmarsat-A uplink, this second technology, a C-band flyaway unit, relayed live video.
It was not easy to use, however, as the Washington Posts Tom Shales made clear at the time.
A portable satellite uplink device known as a flyaway had to be taken to Baghdad from
Amman, Jordan, on a flatbed truck, with five more CNN crew members joining Arnett to rig
the device for transmission. Then it became a matter of aiming the portable satellite dish 23,000
miles out into space to the correct transponder of the correct satellite that would beam the image
back to Atlanta for broadcast on CNN. This is, apparently, what took hours and hours to
accomplish. (Shales, 1991)
All of this relied on a growing fleet of communication satellites. Telstar, the first satellite
to relay television transmissions, was launched in 1962. Two years later the first geosta-
tionary satellite, the Syncom 3, was in orbit. In rapid succession, a number of additional
satellites came online. For television news, the launch of Satcom 1 in 1975 was instru-
mental in establishing the technological feasibility of WTBS (in some ways the precur-
sor to CNN), HBO, and the Weather Channel.
5
As important as communication satellites are, the greater breakthrough in SNG may
be in the mobile uplink terminals. Arnetts live uplink in 1991 filled a flatbed truck, while
his Inmarsat-A was the size of a small filing cabinet. During the NATO bombing cam-
paign against targets in Kosovo and Serbia in 1999, television networks offered live
broadcasts from satellite uplink units mounted on the back of trucks similar in size to
those used by express mail delivery services. In Afghanistan in 2001, the rough terrain
meant even smaller uplink units were transported in several hardened containers.
The videophone has enabled television news crews to venture out into the danger
zone in northern Afghanistan, untethered to a customary satellite uplink they need to beat
the other guy on the air with a live shot.

Over rugged mountain routes, crews are able to
tote scaled-down versions of equipment that usually weighs in excess of a ton (Wasserman,
2001).
6

Flyaway satellite uplinks have continued their steady reduction in size, weight, and
expense. Rather than filling cargo holds, flyaway satellite uplinks today fill suitcase-
sized containers. By 2008, Ku-band satellite uplinks came in compact cases and were
found mounted on the rooftop of BMW Mini Coopers (Higgins, 2008). Advances in
Livingston 23
Codex Video compression have also been a key aspect of the greater capacity to transmit
live from remote locations. Compression reduces the amount of digital information
required to transmit and view video streams (Bier, 2006).
Yet the most significant change in satellite uplink capacity is probably found in
Inmarsat terminals. Originally founded in 1979 as a maritime emergency communication
system, the International Maritime Satellite Organization (Inmarsat) became a private
company in 1999 (Inmarsat, 1999). Today, a BGAN X-Stream terminal transmits at
speeds in excess of 384 kbps for live video broadcasting. As a point of comparison, the
Inmarsat-A used by Arnett offered analog FM voice and telex services at 56 or 64 kbps.
The X-Stream also supports Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) at 64 kbps,
allowing it to support email and internet, including the use of Voice Over Internet
Protocol services such as Skype. It can also send large file attachments over a secure
connection at speeds up to 492 kbps. Inmarsat is probably correct in its claim that: As
video quality is vastly improved, news companies can now consider replacing their SNG
trucks with BGAN terminals that use BGAN X-Stream, thus saving money (Inmarsat,
2010). Inmarsat terminals can be carried in a shoulder case, used around the globe with-
out restrictions from satellite frequency regulators, and operated by non-technical per-
sonnel. Set up and satellite connectivity takes minutes.
7
Changes such as these, and many more not taken up in this limited space, have almost
certainly altered the nature of news content and, therefore, possible policy effects
(Livingston and Bennett, 2003; Livingston and Van Belle, 2005). Yet, as important as
these advances in SNG are, they are best understood as a small part of a much greater
revolution in digital technology. The second point of my argument goes beyond a consid-
eration of specific technological effects on policy outcomes. I argue that analyses must
also look at systems-level effects.
Satellite uplinks and other accoutrements of SNG are generally available to wealthy
institutional users, such as news organizations. They allow organizations to temporarily
reach into geographical spaces that are otherwise inaccessible. To use the language of
network theory, an uplink can be thought of as a mobile node that establishes temporary
connections in previously unconnected spaces. Although this is politically important, a
more interesting development involves the use of technologies that help people reach out
of previously inaccessible locations. The greater technological revolution is found in
simple technologies that empower people through the creation of more stable and endur-
ing networks. The extraordinary development of cellular telephony and related technolo-
gies does exactly that. To see the broader contours of the information environment and
its effect on governance, we must spend time outlining these developments.
Cellular telephony and networks
Cellular telephony has been the most rapidly adopted technology in history (International
Telecommunication Union, 2010). By the beginning of 2009, half the global population
paid, in some way, to use a cell phone (see Figure 1). There were an estimated 4.6 billion
mobile phone subscriptions (a number that is growing rapidly), or 6 of every 10 persons on
the planet. This of course underestimates the total population of users, for not all users pay
for the service. Most of the growth in recent years has occurred in the developing world.
Africa, for example, has had the fastest mobile growth rate in recent years. Mobile pene-
tration soared from 2 percent at the turn of the century to 28 percent by the end of 2009.
Growth rates in some sectors have been nothing less than astonishing. With a total national
population of 38.5 million people, Kenya mobile phone subscriptions jumped from just
200,000 in 2000 to 17.5 million in 2009. About half of all Kenyans subscribe to a mobile
service, with many more using phones made available by friends and family (Engeler,
2010). Ghana recorded a mobile penetration rate that exceeded 60 percent by the end of
2009. It stood at just 22 percent three years before (Nonor, 2009).
Mobile phone penetration in Latin America and the Caribbean was approximately 80
percent in early 2009, well above the world average.
8
Jamaica mobile penetration rate
was 115 percent, Argentina 110 percent, Uruguay 109 percent, and Venezuela 101 per-
cent. Bolivia at 48 percent, Costa Rica at 48 percent, Nicaragua at 52 percent, and Cuba
at 2.9 percent trailed behind (Von/Xchange, 2009). In Asia, India and China are in a
league all their own. India recently surpassed China as the fastest-growing cell phone
market in the world, although it still lags behind China in total subscribers. As of early
2010, it had 143 million subscribers, compared with Chinas 449 million (Vardy, 2010).
Market expansion of services by eager businesses explains most of the growth. The
drive was for profit, not political change. But as Sudanese-born billionaire Mo Ibrahim
9

recently observed:
The mobile industry changed Africa. I must admit we were not smart enough to foresee that.
What we saw is a real need for telecommunication in Africa, and that need had not been
fulfilled. For me that was a business project, but also a political project. (BBC, 2009)
Of greatest interest here are the efforts to expand the reach of cellular telephony to
regions where market economics do not support service, such as in zones of extreme
poverty and insecurity. NGOs and other international organizations seed mobile sys-
tems to gain the social, economic and political benefits accrued to publics by the forma-
tion of networks.
10
Figure 1. A Decade of ICT growth driven by mobile technologies.
Source: ITU World Telecommunication/ICT Indicators Database.
P
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r

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i
n
h
a
b
i
t
a
n
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s
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*Estimates
'99 '00 '01 '02 '03 '04 '05 '06 '07 '08 '09*
7.1
9.5
17.8
25.9
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80
70
60
50
40
30
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10
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Mobile cellular telephone subscriptions
Fixed broadband subscribers
Mobile broadband subscriptions
Internet users
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An estimated 4.6 bn
subscriptions globally
by the end of 2009
Livingston 25
Mobiles are not just for making telephone calls (Ekine, 2009).
11
Data transmissions
are the more important aspect of communicating, and the focus of the networking and
collective action activities described here. For example, the objective of MobileActive is
to assist the effectiveness of NGOs around the world who recognize that the 4.5 billion
mobile phones provide unprecedented opportunities for organizing, communications,
and service and information delivery (About MobileActive.org, 2010). In the language
of the social science literature used to contextualize these developments, MobileActive
recognizes the opportunities presented by mobile telephony in the development of gov-
ernance structures and collective action. Another initiative, Movirtu, expands the use of
mobile communication by the rural poor communities in sub-Sahara Africa and South
Asia (Movirtu, 2010). Similarly, FrontlineSMS (2010) freely distributes a software pro-
gram that enables users to send and receive text messages with large groups of people
through mobile phones. Users determine the specific content. Textuality, another initia-
tive, offers several programs based on cellular telephony applications. For example,
Stop Stock-outs is an SMS program to track medicine inventories at the local level in
many African villages (Turretini, 2009). Text Messages Across Nigeria tracks the dis-
tribution of some 63 million mosquito nets. Pill Check enables members of the com-
munity to visit public hospitals to check the availability of drugs at local clinics and
hospital pharmacies (Turretini, 2010). One of Movirtus services is called MXPay.
Movirtu installs a server in a mobile operators switching center that provides access to
basic mobile banking services for those who do not own a mobile handset, a SIM card,
or do not have a bank account.
12
Users are assigned a number and a password that enables
them to log in to the system by way of any available handset. Those who lend their
phones receive an airtime top-up credit, which is calculated as a percentage of the trans-
action.
13
The system can also be used to distribute funds to recipients by aid agencies.
What these examples have in common is the use of networks. Through distributed prob-
lem solving, networks identify problems, monitor conditions, and implement solutions.
Networks and the power of networks involve more than a single technology. In 1999,
a company called Space Imaging launched the worlds first privately owned and oper-
ated high-resolution remote sensing satellite.
14
It offered customers 1-m panchromatic
satellite images and other value-added products (such as a variety of GIS layered maps
and three-dimensional perspectives). Put simply, with the fleet of remote sensing satel-
lites that have been launched since 1999, private organizations, news media, and even
individuals have access to satellite imaging capacity well under 1-m resolution.
15
As a
result, the Iranian nuclear program was revealed in 2003 by an NGO, not the US or any
other country (Aday and Livingston, 2009). The technology removed an old obstacle to
collective action. Previously, nuclear nonproliferation advocates such as the Federal of
America Scientists had to rely on trickles of information from state institutions. This is
an example of costly information. The required information for technical analyses of
potential nuclear sites is now readily available at little to no cost.
There are other examples of networked collective action in low-cost information
environments. Geographic Information Systems (GIS), the geospatial data management
software used to add value to the data collected by remote sensing satellites, has also
advanced in its sophistication and ease of use. Google Earth is probably the most com-
monly seen example of GIS. GIS and remote sensing have been paired with cellular
telephony and geographical positioning satellites (GPS) to create crowdsourcing
solutions to pressing social needs, such as human rights monitoring and disaster
response.
16
Those who are involved in the use of cellular telephony and GIS are often
referred to as crisis mappers.
Ushahidi testimony in Swahili is a crisis-mapping website developed by Kenyans
to track violence following the flawed 2007 elections (BBC, 2008). Using reports sub-
mitted via the web and mobile phone 45,000 in all, a GIS map was created to visualize
patterns of violence. The service has since grown to a worldwide movement of volun-
teers and users. For example, in South Africa it was used to track xenophobic violence.
A more advanced version of the software was deployed to monitor violence in the eastern
Congo in 2009, while Al Jazeera used it during the Israeli invasion of Gaza in 2009.
Other GIS crowdsourcing services exist, including MapBox. It uses a program called
TileMill (Mapbox, 2009) to create maps using any geographic data set. As with
Ushahidi, the maps are dynamic presentation spaces that update events as often as the
reports come in from mass distributed nodes (cell phones). Voix des Kivus provides a
technology to populations in South Kivu in the eastern Congo that allows them to post
accounts of events, such as outbreaks of disease, crop conditions, and violence (Columbia
Center for the Study of Development of Strategies, 2010).
How can we think about 4.5 billion nodes, along with the other means by which mas-
sively distributed connections create a global chain of connectivity? I take that question
up in the next section.
Information environments and technology
In this section, I argue that the key variable to our analysis is not found in a specific
technology, such as global television, cellular telephony, GIS, GPS, or any other stand-
alone ICT. Rather, it involves an awareness of the characteristics of an information envi-
ronment created by the totality of technologies in a given era, as adapted to particular
economic, cultural and social needs, and in alignment with the social and political insti-
tutions present in that environment (Livingston and Klinkforth, forthcoming). When
speaking to this point, parallel research literatures in sociology, network theory and inter-
national affairs refer to information ecologies, information regimes, digital formations,
and the space of flows (respectively, Levy, 2001; Bimber, 2003; Latham and Sassen,
2005; Castells, 1996). All have to do with the obstacles and opportunities for collective
action, that is to say the nature of organizations and institutions associated with a given
array of technologies.
Castells (1996), for example, argues that information networks redefine and recast the
structure of society. By social structure, he means the social and organizational relation-
ships in production and consumption, experience, and power that provide the contours of
human experience. Put less abstractly, Castells argues that all human relationships are
now global in scale (though significant populations are left off the grid and out of the
global market of goods, services, and ideas) and facilitated by the flow of information
made possible by technology.
Similarly, Latham and Sassen (2005) argue that information and communication tech-
nologies enable new forms of political organization and action, what they call digital
Livingston 27
formations: The distinctiveness of digital formations can contribute to the rise of social
relations and domains that would otherwise be absent (p. 6, emphases in original). The
flow of digital information and the social structures they create contribute to the rise of
new social relations.
Bimber (2003) refers to information regimes when speaking of a particular moment
of technology and information that facilitates the formation of new associations and
actions. The dominant properties of information determine the nature of an information
regime. An information regime also reflects a set of opportunities and constraints on the
management of information created by these properties; and, finally, the appearance of
characteristic political organizations and structures adapted to those opportunities and
constraints (p. 18). In short, the nature of collective action and governance changes in
accordance with the nature of the information regime.
The key independent variable is not technology, per se, but the nature of social and
political organization and qualities of collective action specific to the contours of oppor-
tunities and constraints emerging from dominant technologies. Bimber notes, for exam-
ple, that in the anti-WTO protests in Seattle in 1999, peripheral organizations and ad hoc
groups used information technology to undertake the kind of political advocacy that
traditionally has been the province of organizations with far greater resources and a more
central position in the political system (p. 2).
Fundamental shifts in available technologies alter information regimes. Bimber calls
these shifts information revolutions: An information revolution disrupts a prior infor-
mation regime by creating new opportunities for political communication and the orga-
nization of collective action (p. 18). He adds: These changes create advantages for
some forms of organization and structure and disadvantages for others, leading to adap-
tations and change in the world of political organizations and intermediaries (p. 18).
17
Bimber is interested in the evolution of information regimes in a single location the
US. From this perspective, regimes come in a linear progression, with change precipi-
tated by information revolutions. Our more comparative perspective benefits from a
change in metaphors, one that captures the interplay among different information envi-
ronments accorded different obstacles and opportunities for collective action. Different
information environments sit astride one another, influencing one another, and infiltrat-
ing one another.
18
As we saw in our review of NGO projects intended to expand the
availability and use of cellular telephony, technologically underdeveloped locations are
seeded by other more advanced information regimes, with NGOs, commercial compa-
nies, and international organizations as change agents.
Rather than regimes, Levy (1999) speaks of communications ecologies. From this
perspective, we might think of the interaction and adaptations of ecosystems as a meta-
phor for talking about change and adaptation in infosystems. An ecosystem is an area
within the natural environment in which abiotic factors, such as rocks and soil interact
with the biotic, such as plants and animals, within a habitat to create a stable system. In
a similar way, myriad factors that are analogous to abiotic elements of an ecosystem,
such as literacy rates, urbanization, availability of electricity, roads, cellular networks, to
name just a few, affect the biotic qualities of an infosystem the nature of collective
action and organizational structures. To understand tree growth one must factor in soil
type, moisture content, slope of the land, forest canopy closure, and other local
site variables, as well as complex global factors such as climate change. Likewise, to
understand an infosystem requires consideration of local factors and global systems.
New technologies push or are pushed into bordering infosystems.
Technologies are expressed and adopted in different ways and put to different pur-
poses according the needs of local users. There is an indeterminate quality to technolo-
gies that challenges our attempts to offer universal declarations of cause and effect.
Possibilities are opened up with technologies, though whether those possibilities are
realized is the consequence of other factors:
Gutenbergs press did not determine the crisis of the Reformation, the development of modern
European science, or the rise of Enlightenment idealism and the growing power of public
opinion in the eighteenth century; it only conditioned them. It remained an essential element of
the global environment in which these cultural forms arose. (p. 7)
In this regard, infosystems are fluid and adapted to the needs and circumstances of com-
munities embedded in their own unique realities. Mobile telephony in the West is used to
make deals, stay in touch with loved ones, serve as a mobile access point for social
media, and as a gaming platform. In the eastern Congo, cellular networks are used for
basic banking needs, to report rapes and other forms of violence, and even establish a
basic form of identity.
19
Yet despite these alternative expressions of digital capabilities, all are a part of a
global network that looks and behaves as a complex adaptive system (Miller and Page,
2007). Adaptability sometimes comes in the form of organizational structures that reflect
opportunities for collective action, as Bimber and others have noted. Another character-
istic has been referred to by sociologist Sidney Tarrow (2005: 120140) as scale shift-
ing. Scale shifting opens up the possibility that state institutions will be bypassed
altogether in networked flows of images, words, and other symbols. As state structures
are bypassed, traditional media institutions are as well. This possibility goes beyond
consideration of the CNN effect, at least as traditionally understood. Rather, it means that
significant communicative acts with political and social effects bypass states and tradi-
tional media alike. Examples of scale shifting include the use of Facebook, YouTube and
Twitter to bypass Iranian state authorities when transmitting images and accounts of
political protests in 2009 (Livingston and Asmolov, 2010).
Even in the eastern Congo, something like scale shifts occur. There, the problem does
not relate to blocking state authorities, and the shifts do not usually come in the form of
YouTube posting. Instead, Western reporters tell of collecting hundreds, even thousands
of cell phone numbers from people living in villages found miles from the nearest road
(Fessy, 2010; Gettleman, 2010; Zajtman, 2010). Ive gotten a telephone call from a par-
ish priest out in the bush saying, Im hiding under my bed. Were under attack
(Zajtman, 2010).
Discussion
Several immediate benefits emerge when the CNN effect research agenda is recast
in this way. First, it allows us to tap into intellectual currents shared by several social
Livingston 29
science disciplines, including sociology, political science, behavioral economics, network
theory, theories of contentious politics, geography, and international relations. Even
technical fields such as engineering, computer science, and software development come
into play.
Second, it helps us resolve complex definitional problems about media delivery sys-
tems and content that have arisen since the early stages of CNN effects research. We can
no longer speak of television as a sui generis medium, as we once did when discussing
the CNN effect. Television, YouTube, Twitter, Hulu, and Facebook, to name but a few
options, straddle the blurred borders of digital content.
Third, as with all television programming in the 1990s and before, CNN directed
content at audiences. Today, digital media are interactive and the distinction between
producer and consumer is blurred. As a result, content is often caught up in a recursive
process of saliency reinforcement by both new media, such as Twitter and YouTube, and
traditional media, such as CNN. Traditional media alert audiences to the existence of
new media content online, while new media content feeds traditional media. Recasting
research as I suggest here helps researchers account for these changes.
Fourth, a recasting of the research question also encourages consideration of the tem-
poral complexities of contemporary digital media, complexities that had not emerged
during the early years of CNN effects research. Although the immediacy of real-time
television coverage of events around the world was a key element of televisions pre-
sumed effects on policy processes, newer twists in the experience of time had not
emerged. This has changed, as Castells (2000) notes:
The mixing of times in the media, within the same channel of communication and at the choice
of the viewer/interactor, creates a temporal collage, where not only genres are mixed, but their
timing becomes synchronous in a flat horizon, with no beginning, no end, no sequence. The
timelessness of multimedias hypertext is a decisive feature of our culture, shaping the minds
and memories of children educated in the new cultural context. (p. 492)
The real-time element of global media is but one temporal phase, and perhaps not even
the most important one.
Fifth, the nature of publics is altered by global information flows and scale shifting,
or what Rosenau calls distant proximities. The shared norms, values and affective
attachments emerging from common socialization experiences in what Benedict
Anderson calls imagined communities, the nation-states that rose in the 18th century
with the development of print capitalism and the vernacular press, are no doubt still cen-
tral to identity. People are most centrally members of a public defined by the accident of
birth and geographical proximity. Identities are still mostly rooted in a common language
and shared physical place. Yet the depth of these attachments has weakened. The blend-
ing of local and global experience through global networks is that:
coherence and boundaries of cultures, like those of states, have become porous and often frayed
as other norms and practices intrude through the circulation of ideas and pictures from abroad,
the mobility upheaval, the organizational explosion, (and) the diverse products of a global
economy. (Rosenau, 2003)
Bennett (2004) speaks to a similar point about the changing nature of publics when
discussing the emergence of transnational social movements:
Loose activist networks adopting self-organizing communication technologies and advocating
multiple issues, multiple goals, and flexible identities not only challenge previous organizational
forms of transnational activism. These networks also challenge social movement theories that
focus on brokered coalitions, ideological framing, and collective movement identities fashioned
around national politics. (p. 213)
Publics, in short, are constructed around shared norms and values but without the pre-
viously necessary supposition of geographical proximity. This opens new fields of
public opinion and information (media) research, though conceived of in almost
entirely new ways.
These are a few of the possible benefits to a recasting of the research questions asked
about media. Yet what about the second half of the CNN effects research agenda: policy?
What are some of the possible benefits to our consideration of policy processes?
First, redirecting the CNN effects research along the path I have suggested encour-
ages consideration of governance, a concept that, while inclusive of state policy dynam-
ics, opens up consideration of other important actors.
20
The locus of authority for global
governance is more diffuse than before. States are not going to disappear anytime soon,
if they ever do, but they are no longer alone in addressing global challenges. Tarrow
speaks of complex internationalism and OBrien of complex multilateralism (OBrien
et al., 2000). International institutions have emerged at the core of an increasingly com-
plex international society around which NGOs, social movements, religious groups,
trade unions, and business groups cluster (Tarrow, 2005: 27).
As originally conceptualized, governance was closely linked to the effectiveness of
governments. In 1992, Rosenau and Czempiel pointed to new forms of governance
without government. Global problem solving and coordination of collective action
included a greater array of non-state actors than many had previously recognized. In the
eastern region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, far from the poorly functioning
capital Kinshasa, governance, thin in places as it is, comes from UN agencies and logisti-
cal structures, and from a host of NGOs operating in the area (The International Rescue
Committee, 2010; see also http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/missions/monuc/,
accessed May 2010). As Rosenau remarks in Distant Proximities (2003), his magisterial
treatment of politics in a networked world:
A broad conception of governance also requires breaking out of the conceptual jails in which
we have long been ensconced. To do so it is useful to start at the beginning and treat politics and
governance as social processes that transcend state and societal boundaries so thoroughly as to
necessitate the invention of new (conceptual) wheels. (p. 394)
Though rarely recognized by establishment international relations theorists, the CNN
effect research agenda concerns questions about the nature of the international system of
governance. The reformulation I offer here presents a necessary corrective to an uncriti-
cal acceptance of a single strain of international relations theory structuralism, or what
is most commonly called neorealism. Neorealists underplay human agency, values,
Livingston 31
norms of behavior and conduct. In their view, the international system is populated by
formally equal sovereign states situated in a system of anarchy. States therefore act
according to the logic of self-help; they must not subordinate their own interest to the
interest of others (Mearsheimer, 2003; Waltz, 1979). Survival, often by military means,
is the paramount imperative of states. In this respect, the CNN effect can be understood
as a hypothesis concerning noise in a system of power balancing among nation states.
Global media create pressures that are said to skew calculations of national interest
(Miller, 2007). In short, media content was a distraction from the pursuit of national
interest that is essential for survival in a power system situated in anarchy.
Other theoretical constructs see the world and medias role in it differently.
Keohane and Nye (1989[1977]), for example, offer a complex interdependence model
of international affairs, what is more often called neoliberalism. Various, complex
transnational connections (interdependencies) between states and nonstate actors are
rooted in at least semi-cooperative relations governed by norms and regimes. Military
capabilities play a diminished role in such a system, at least insofar as states find a basis
for cooperation. Second, international relations constructivist theory places an even
greater value on the creation and propagation of norms and values (Biersteker and Weber,
1996; Finnemore, 1996; Wendt, 1992). Just as political communication research would
benefit from a greater awareness of its fit with the various streams of international rela-
tions thought, both neoliberalism and constructivism would benefit from a richer theo-
retical understanding of media (or ICT). This presents an underdeveloped opportunity
for cross-disciplinary research and collaboration.
I have argued that changes in ICT and, consequently, the nature of global governance
call for a recasting of the core research questions of CNN effects research. It seems quite
clear that one possible cost associated with the adoption of my call for a new research
paradigm is the discontinuity with past research findings. We seem not to be talking
about the same research. One might also fear a loss of parsimony. There is, to be sure,
parsimony in past theoretical constructs. Is there evidence that content X, presented as it
was, led to policy outcome Y? Speaking of infosystems and governance structures dimin-
ishes this elegance. Two responses come to mind, though neither can be explored in
depth in the space available.
First, there is nothing in what I have said that calls for a wholesale abandonment
of key elements of past research design. Scholars can still untangle discrete policy
decisions, though hopefully with an awareness that policy now is the product of com-
plex internationalism or complex multilateralism (OBrien et al., 2000). We can
still focus on television, though with an awareness that television comes in several
forms and with different temporal and spatial qualities that complicate a singular
focus on immediacy. But turning attention to information environments and gover-
nance allows scholars to embrace important questions about nonstate actors and new
technologies.
Finally, I would say that instead of thinking of my suggestions as a call to recast the
CNN effects paradigm, it might be thought of as a recognition that CNN effect research-
ers have been at the forefront of a prescient examination of the effects of ICT (early SNG
systems) on forms of global governance. Complex internationalism and the rise of net-
worked systems of governance created by ICTs conditioning of new opportunity and
constraints emerged at the dawn of what Castells has called the microelectronic revolution
in the 1980s and 90s. Understood in this way, the CNN effects research agenda captured
the shift in structures of global governance. It was a move away from hierarchical insti-
tutional structure characteristic of what Bimber calls the third information regime, to the
fourth information regime. In the former, information is costly, scarce and organized and
maintained by hierarchical organized structures, such as the formal institutions of nation
states. This is the neorealist system of global governance. But in the fourth information
regime, what Bimber (2003) calls post-bureaucratic politics, information is relatively
abundant, low-cost, and distributed fluidly among horizontally organized networks
(p. 104). This is, it seems, what George Kennan and other realists residing in the halls of
institutional power sensed in 1993. A new system of global governance was emerging.
My call, therefore, is to continue the prescient, groundbreaking research that has
always characterized the field. To do anything else would be to turn our backs on our
own accomplishments.
Notes
1. For a wonderful exegesis of the literature, see Gilboa (2005).
2. Computer scientist Tim Berners Lee wrote a proposal in March 1989 for what would even-
tually become the world wide web. The web however, did not begin to grow until Mosaic
became available in early 1993.
3. In more technical and regulatory terms for which there is no space for further discussion in
this article, new instruments of newsgathering are not subject to the same regulatory encum-
brances experienced by the satellite uplinks used in the 1990s. Therefore, ease of use and lack
of regulation would also be counted among the factors altering the calculus to cover or not
cover a remote event or circumstance.
4. For much of my understanding of SNG, I am indebted to Jonathan Higgins for his personal
communication and many publications (see Higgins, 2007; see also his newsletter, http://
www.beaconseek.com/los.asp).
5. By the end of 1976, there were 120 satellite transponders available over the US. Each of these
analog transponders was capable of relaying one television channel. With digital video data
compression, several video and audio channels can now travel through a single transpon-
der. By 2010, Europes Eutelsat constellation alone offered 609 transponders in stable orbit,
mostly over Europe, Africa and Asia (see http://www.eutelsat.com/satellites/satellite-fleet.
html, accessed 13 May 2010). Starting in 2008, pioneering Intelsat offered another 2175
transponders with coverage around the globe (see http://www.intelsat.com/_files/investors/
financial/2008/2Q-2008-Fact-Sheet.pdf, accessed 13 May 2010). As of 2010, there are now
approximately 560 satellites operating in earth orbit (see http://www.wisegeek.com/how-
many-satellites-are-orbiting-the-earth.htm, accessed 15 May 2010). As important as satellites
are to the live remote data transmissions found at the heart of CNN effects research, undersea
cable is the more commonly used transmission technology. About 80 percent of global data
transmission uses undersea cables (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1JEuzBkOD8,
accessed 15 May 2010; see also http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-images/Technology/Pix/pic-
tures/2008/02/01/SeaCableHi.jpg, accessed 15 May 2010).
6. In April 2001, CNN producer/correspondent Lisa Rose Weaver used a videophone to trans-
mit live images of the release of the crew members of an American surveillance plane from
Hainan Island. These images were thought to be the first unauthorized live television pictures
ever transmitted from China.
Livingston 33
7. Perhaps the best way to appreciate this technology is to watch a video demonstration (see
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VNDG403axQ&NR=1; http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=Nc2FtBT6lFQ&feature=related; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmTM-
32WydQ&feature=related).
8. The number of rising mobile phone companies operating in Africa, the Middle East, and the
Americas is quite long and impressive (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_net-
work_operators_of_the_Americas; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_network_
operators_of_the_Middle_East_and_Africa, accessed 17 May 2010).
9. Ibrahim founded Mobile Systems International in 1989 and Celtel in 1998.
10. This section of my article reflects several weeks of field research in Senegal, Nigeria, Kenya,
the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, and South Africa. I would like to thank
the Africa Strategic Research Center for its generous support of my work. This section also
reflects experiences in Afghanistan in 2009 and 2010. That work was supported by the Cana-
dian International Development Agency.
11. This is true in the US, too. Calling is no longer the principal function of mobile devices (see
Wortham, 2010).
12. MXPay is similar to other cell phone-based banking services, except for the phone-sharing
feature. The most well-known and widely used is M-Pesa in Kenya (http://www.safaricom.
co.ke/index.php?id=745, accessed 18 May 2010). MTN Mobile Money is another example
(http://www.mtn.com/ProductsServices/MTNMobileMoney, accessed 18 May 2010).
13. See http://movirtu.com/index.html, accessed 18 May 2010. Because they have fixed resi-
dences and lines of credit with a banking service, most Westerners pay their mobile fees at the
end of a billing cycle. People in the developing world use pay-as-you-go plans that involve
the purchase of minutes preloaded on a sim card. This is sometimes referred to as topping
up. Vendors of minutes and sim cards have become ubiquitous in some African, Indian, and
Latin American cities.
14. Space Imaging is now GeoEye Inc. It was formed after Orbital Imaging Corporation (or
ORBIMAGE) acquired Space Imaging in 2006 (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKONOS,
accessed 18 May 2010).
15. For an inventory to 2008, see Stoney (2010).
16. The word crowdsourcing was coined by Howe (2006). Howe stated that because technology
creates the ability to tap into collective intelligence, the gap between experts and amateurs,
qua elements in a collective, has been diminished (Brabham, 2008; see also Shirky, 2008).
17. Bimber (2003) emphasizes that he does not equate new technology per se with information
revolutions. One cannot simply focus on the latest gadget. His approach instead is to ask when
the properties of information and communication have changed abruptly, and then inquiring
how such changes influenced politics (p. 20).
18. Thinking of it in this way allows researchers to find inspiration in the diffusion of innovation
research literature (see Rogers, 1983).
19. People in poor indigenous communities are born and die without the official recognition
afforded most persons in developed communities. They do not possess birth certificates,
graduation diplomas, marriage certificates, or death certificates. One of the benefits associ-
ated with the Movirtu system of cloud telephony described earlier is the creation of a new
form of identity. Movirtu assigns a unique user number to each customer. In this regard it is
analogous to a passport number or a national identity number. This may be the only official
identification ever given to some customers. I wish to thank Jose Pablo Baraybar, Executive
Director of Equipo Peruano de Antropologia Forense (EPAF), for helping me understand this
aspect of life and death for the rural poor. His work as a forensic anthropologist, responsible
for identifying the remains of impoverished victims of war all over the world, is made more
challenging by a common lack of official existence in the first place (interview, Lima, Peru,
12 August 2009).
20. A regime is defined by Krasner (1982) as a set of explicit or implicit principles, norms, rules,
and decision making procedures around which actor expectations converge in a given issue-
area (p. 499). This definition is intentionally broad, and covers human interaction ranging
from formal organizations, such as states and supra-state organizations, to informal groups.
As I emphasize throughout this article, regimes need not be composed of states.
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Biographical note
Steven Livingston is Professor of Media and International Affairs at the George
Washington University where he holds appointments in the School of Media and Public
Affairs and the Elliott School of International Affairs.

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