Band 3, Heft 1

The conference and special issue of The Trajectory of Emerging Media and Technology Companies at the Journal of Transcultural Communication explore how transnational media and technology corporations transform global communication. We leveraged various analytical tools to examine the companies’ structure, the country-specific advantages, regulation methods and development dynamics, media system models, and the transcultural implication for business expansion and product/content/service distribution. We also invited three eminent communication scholars to share their perspectives on the global trajectory and paradox of technology companies.

Indian multinational technology company, Jio Platforms with an active subscriber base of 467.6 million (February 2024, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India data) continues to lead the market in India. Digitisation has transformed India’s governance model as deep penetration of telecom and the internet in India has laid the foundation for a digital economy. This article examines the role of self-regulation mechanisms and censorship in India’s dominant platform company Jio Platforms which contributes significantly to changing the paradigm of digital governance, thereby making services seamless, and easily accessible and improving the ease of living and doing business. Facebook’s investment in Jio for a 9.99 percent stake makes it the largest investment for a minority stake by a tech company anywhere in the world. With Jio Platforms and Facebook parent Meta Platforms rolling out a grocery delivery app using Meta’s WhatsApp messaging service, the transnational ties are deepening and expanding, making it imperative to examine the role of self-regulation and censorship in a market that is open, diverse and the largest in a democratic governance structure. This article will examine the key concerns of data sharing and privacy, especially when the central plank of government policy is digitisation. With stricter government regulations for foreign players in the market, there is a distinct focus of the government on boosting Indian companies to capture and control the market. Data collated by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) show India’s overall internet user base grew to around 936.16 million in 2023. Such a diverse and vibrant open market calls for effective regulations and restrictions on privacy, algorithms, deceptive practices, antitrust, financing, and governance. This article aims to investigate the challenges of regulating dominant platforms. It delves deep into understanding and analysing the challenges and opportunities that evolve in regulating Jio Platforms. The study will also inquire whether favourable government policies and national legislation boost the processes of digitisation and whether there is a need for a new regulatory framework laid by the government for platforms to abide by. India has an open market dominated by US multinational firms, such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Content removal and other online censorship efforts are topics of heated debate, in academia and policy circles. This makes it arduous to ensure that data protection and privacy are safeguarded, particularly by dominant platforms such as Jio Platforms which is almost monopolising the Indian market.

China-US bilateral relations suffer from periodical setbacks and transcultural communication has a positive role to play in improving those relations. As the largest two economies in the world today, both China and the United States draw inspiration from different traditions and cultures, rendering it difficult for the two countries to see eye to eye with each other when it comes to the key concepts of hegemony, democracy, individualism, and collectivism. Etymological roots, historical traditions, and national experiences help explain political realities and theoretical frameworks concerning these key concepts. For hegemony, force is emphasized for its role in US dominance or authority while China condemns hegemonism. For democracy, the means of the normative right to vote is highlighted in the US while the ends of people’s needs and welfare are underscored in China. For individualism and collectivism, it is no longer viable to stand aloof and mind just one’s own business, as the world is shrinking into a global village with intertwined destinies. A transcultural interpretation of key concepts in China-US relations can help enhance mutual understanding and facilitate dialogue through exchange and communication, hence contributing to the improvement of bilateral ties.

This study investigates the portrayal of international technology companies in the media, with a specific focus on Facebook rebranding. Utilizing content analysis and correlational observation, we conducted a comparative analysis of search interests and news frames between Western and African-based news websites following the announcement of Facebook’s rebranding to Meta. Two datasets were examined to assess search interest and sentiment scores based on the positivity, negativity, and neutrality of published stories from selected African and Western countries. The findings reveal the persistence of colonial influences in news coverage, with Western websites demonstrating sympathy and African websites emphasizing conflict-driven narratives. These observations underscore the significance of media diversity and representation in shaping public discourse, particularly in postcolonial contexts characterized by ethnocentrism, poverty, violence, and political instability.

Guided by the cultural game theory, WGTICC and cultural analysis model, this study has found such game intentions and communication strategies as shaming the invited counterpart versus correcting the host calmly, turning a debate into a Q&A versus using the Q&A as a meaningful presentation, and getting ready to listen versus demonstrating courage, sincerity, and cogency have been adopted during the 3 rounds of debate, thus illustrating and expanding the third assumption in the water and game theory from a win-loss to a win-loss-win result. In terms of cultural roots, Fox Business News, as an example of Western media, has been shifting from objective, accurate, and fair journalism ethics to unilateralism, catalyzed by prioritizing the US interests. In contrast, the Chinese media, like CGTN, have been reshaping themselves for survival and performance employing and developing multiple online platforms while converging with social media.

This study uses a phenomenological approach and 25 in-depth interviews to better understand ethnic and host communication by Chinese international students in U.S. higher education and the impact of such communication practices on their cultural identity transformation and transcultural adaptation. The research findings reveal that their ethnic communication reflects their dynamic negotiation of cultural identities and their efforts to integrate their original cultural background and their expectations of others to redefine their own cultural identities and communicative behaviors. It also highlights that Chinese students engage in ethnic communication not only for community building and cultural identity reinforcement but also assertively to express themselves and educate others.

This study explored how government institutions used digital platforms to enhance knowledge and share scientific information regarding the development and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines by drawing samples from official Twitter accounts in five different countries that were front-runners in vaccine manufacturing. Through content analysis, we selected a total of 243 tweets with 4,678 comments from the five Twitter accounts, and data were categorized into two sets for analysis, the first stage being to assign sentiment scores to all the collected comments from tweets to determine their positivity, negativity, and neutrality. Secondly, we analyzed themes derived from comments and established through the themes that geopolitics has exacerbated the anti-intellectualist logic of viewing science as impractical for the control and prevention of the pandemic leading to the domination of irrational thinking towards vaccine efficacy, the origin of COVID-19, and the undermining of the global health governance on COVID-19 control and management.

This paper describes the principles and applications of a teaching/learning/research method of a “Virtual Transcultural Understanding Pedagogy” (VTUP) based on the conditions for prejudice reduction and the principles of Team Learning and Exploratory Practice. The pedagogy was implemented in a Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) project involving Japanese, Malaysian, and Chinese students enrolled in an online graduate seminar course conducted via Zoom at a leading research university in Japan. This seminar aimed to achieve a transcultural understanding of key emic cultural concepts through online interviews and collaborative writing using English as a lingua franca. Reflections on the exchanges that provide evidence for transcultural understanding are presented, thereby supporting the VTUP method. The contributions of the unique teaching/learning/research methodology to transcultural understanding and suggestions for implementing this pedagogy are discussed.