Global Media Events: Communications Strategies, Social Network Patterns and Propaganda Models - A Complex and Challenging Reconciliation

Résumé En

The Beijing Olympic Games have undoubtedly reinforced the image of China as a global superpower in politics, economics and sport. The Chinese hosting of the Olympics, a complex global event, has demonstrated its ability to compete at all levels with the West. Olympic success, however, impressive as it has been, is not enough to ease the anxieties of the West with its fundamental commitment to the ideals of democracy about China. Chinese soft power politics, brilliantly demonstrated via the Beijing Olympics, have not completely paid off. The West remains ambivalent towards China. The fields of modern information and communication demonstrate all too clearly the difficulty of reconciling propaganda (vertical and controlled communi- cation) with social networking (horizontal and interactive communication). Global media events provide concrete illustrations of the current hybridisation of communication patterns that characterise the network society. They also illustrate the challenges faced by host countries and institutions that have to reconcile the demands of information control with the demands of global social networking. This issue is not to be minimised. The persuasiveness of states and their institutions depends at least in part on successful hybridisation. This essay examines the challenges on the one hand facing the supra-national Olympic Movement and on the other hand China as a geopolitical superpower in reconciling propaganda models and social networking patterns.