Beyond Trending: What is flow and contra-flow?

What explains this lopsided coverage of Sudan? The concepts of flow and contra-flow will help understand it. 

Post-WWII free flow of information 

Following WWII, the concept of free flow of information became part of the American foreign policy goals, and was seen as rooted in the Cold War ideological confrontations between the US and the Soviet Union. 

But by the 1960s and 1970s, the one-way flow of information from the Global North to the Global South was questioned. Critics underlined the ideological functions of the free flow of discourse, as it not only exported the Western way of life but also gave an “exploitative and distorted view of developing countries to the rest of the world”.

Such concern over the vertical flow of information, also seen as a new form of cultural imperialism, fuelled the debate about a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) in the 1970s. Notably, the term is traced to discussions within the Non-Aligned Movement and its demand for a more equitable New International Economic Order (NIEO). 

UNESCO played a key role in furthering this debate. It set up the MacBride Commission in 1977, which made 82 recommendations for the democratisation of communication.   

Rise of contra-flow

By the 1990s and 2000s, the process of development gathered pace in developing countries like India and China and paved the way for the flow of information back from the Global South to regional and global markets. 

The term contra-flow was coined to “apply to this phenomenon (specifically, in relation to news agencies that gathered news from, about, or for the developing world)” by Oliver Boyd-Barrett and Daya Kishan Thussu.

Contra-flow was largely enabled by the exponential growth of the media outlets worldwide. In the context of the Global South, India’s Bollywood and Qatar’s Al Jazeera played a significant role in diversifying and broadening perspectives. A number of studies underlined Al Jazeera‘s coverage of the 2001 war in Afghanistan and the 2003 war in Iraq as markers for challenging their framing by the US. 

But moving on to this era of Internet induced hyperconnectivity, where social media is said to enable grassroots contra-flow, how should one look at the lopsided coverage of Sudan? 

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