At the end of October, Professor Emeritus Dan Schiller delivered a series of lectures in China focusing on the theme, "Networks and Age of Nixon." Schiller was invited to talk as part of Peking University's Global Fellowship Program. Prior lecturers in the Global Fellowship Program include Fredric Jameson and Francis Fukuyama and, going back to its earliest years, John Dewey. His hosts at Peking University were the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences and the National Institute for Strategic Communication, which identifies and addresses governance initiatives and communication strategies in China and beyond.
"In my lecture, 'The Geopolitics of Information in the Era of Digital Capitalism,' I offered a world tour of contemporary digital capitalism and reviewed the state of international competition for the coveted sources of profitable growth around digital networks. The US remains the leading global actor in this strategic field, but challenges to its dominance are growing. This rivalry is accentuated because digitization has not permitted a transcendence of capitalism’s deep-seated crisis tendencies," Schiller said.
A historian of information and communications, Schiller is an expert in the areas of telecommunications history, information policy, and the cultural production and political economy of capitalism. He has taught courses on these topics at the undergraduate and graduate levels. He is the author of half a dozen books and many research articles, and he has written extensively on the development and current structure of digital capitalism—the system of market relationships that is predicated increasingly on networks.