Communication and Peace. The Empirical and Theoretical Relation between Two Categories in Social Sciences

If mass-media reception as well as production are at once expression and motor of structural violence; if communications technology can be understood, historically, only as an integral part of the emerging military industrial complex; if the access to and the power over the mass media are unequal and unbalanced; if, indeed, the 'law of universal violence' (Adorno and Horkheimer) obtains, then the mass media can fulfill their original hoped for function as 'peace-bringers' under rare and exceptional circumstances. The representation of violence in the mass media, then, is part and parcel of the universal violence of the media themselves. Only when the mass media open up to a process to democratization on all levels - to the so-called New International Information Order - will the mass media fulfill their function as contributors to a peaceful society.