Globalization

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Globalization

• CMN 2168

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• Presentations
• Recap technology and globalization
• Lecture globalization, space and knowledge
• Chomsky

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Recap - Technology and globalization

• According to many, contemporary society is no
  longer organized on the basis of material goods.
• Everything is supposedly organized on the basis
  of information and knowledge.
• This is the global information society, also
  called post-industrial or service society.

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• Central claims about the information society
• A social revolution
• Transformation of economic relations
• Transformation of political practices and
  communities involved
• Decline of the state

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Recap - Technology, informationalism and space /
time

• The development of new technologies has led to
  the reduction of the effects of space and time on
  everyday life and on trade.
• The speed of transmission, and the mobility of
  capital, mean that both space and time seem to
  have been collapsed entirely (46).

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• As for globalization, there have different ways
  of understanding the place and the effects of
  technology on contemporary society.
• For Jean-François Lyotard, the ideology of
  communication transparency and the roles /
  responsabilities / functions of the state are
  bound to clash.

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• For Jacques Ellul, technologies have a powerful
  impact on social relations, the latter being
  mostly reduced to the interactions provided by
  the technologies in question.
• Beware of technological determinism!

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Globalizing technologies

• Digitalization is probably the most important
  technological advance in the area of
  communications. The term refers to the process
  whereby information is produced as a universal
  binary code, and is thus able to circulate more
  freely and at greater speed across communication
  technologies, and not just within them (59).

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• Digitalization brings together different media
  (telephone, television, computers) and texts
  (pictures, sounds, words).
• Greater flexibility.
• Greater speed.

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• According to Manuel Castells, these technological
  developments have changed society and part of the
  everyday life.
• But whose everyday life?
• Only a small number of people have access to new
  technologies.

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• the inequities of worldwide access to
  computers, the internet and cyberspace are
  culturally racially, demographically, class- and
  gender-specific (60).
• See Eisensteins quotes p.60-1.

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• However, Castells argues that technological
  innovations have changed the nature of everyday
  life.
• New technologies have a powerful and irreversible
  impact on our ways of perceiving time and space
  (and by extension the main spheres of human
  activities).

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• what Castells and other analysts see as primary
  issues are the ways in which the speed and mass
  of information flows, tied in with computerized
  regimes of investment in say, world currency
  markets, can have unforeseen, chaotic and
  devastating effects across the world
  culturally, politically and socially (62).

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• Information and other technology exerts a
  considerable influence, at least potentially,
  over the everyday activities and lives of people
  around the globe, regardless of whether or not
  they are in affluent or developing countries, or
  have access to that technology (63).

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• The relationship between the place of technology
  in our lives and its supposedly progressive
  dimension needs to be discussed in terms of the
  actual effects of these technologies and global
  convergence.
• Global convergence the tendency facilitated by
  communication technologies, to bring together
  different communities, institutions, media (217).

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• Castells argues that corporations both
  participate into and are dependent on information
  networks.
• As virtually all corporations are connected to
  and reliant on information networks, they cannot
  place themselves or think outside these networks
  (partly because of the general interdependence on
  such communication systems).
• See example p.64-5.

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• Information technologies show that we use
  information in specific ways.
• Information on its own is useless or worse
• Not all information is equal (66).

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• The exclusion of this kind of information in
  analysis is part of a much wider tendency which
  Bourdieu refers to as the editing out of the
  human.
• Mathematization of human behaviours
  (scientific authority associated with
  statistically and mathematically based
  information. 66-7).

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• Some such as Maurice Blanchot have argued that
  knowledge itself derives from specific social,
  historical contexts. It is not neutral.
• Different objects of knowledge appear and then
  disappear again as social, cultural and political
  forces are transformed by economics, politics and
  even fashion (68).

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Space and time

• Informationalism changes the way we understand
  and experience time and space.
• Wrong or right?

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• Because of global communication networks,
  geographical borders are less relevant nowadays
  than they used to be.
• This has lead to the disappearance of space.
  Consequently, a new immediacy has emerged
  everything is now (68).

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• However, it is suggested that communication
  networks can increase the gap between the western
  world and emerging countries (the latter being
  attached to time/space-based factors, they cannot
  transcend their geographical locations).
• Moreover, not everybody within the same country
  has or wants to have access to information
  technologies.

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• According to Virilio, information networks
  contribute to the development of endocolonialism
  (as opposed to exocolonialism).
• Endocolonialism Paul Virilios term for the new
  form of colonialism where social and economic
  inequalities are not exported to the colonies
  but are accentuated within colonialist states
  such as the United States and the United Kingdom
  (216).

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• There is now a network of flows across the globe.
  The old imperial centre / periphery has
  disappeared into a confusing system of power
  relations and connections. What appear to be free
  and interactive trade relations are in fact an
  utterly constricting set of obligations,
  tendencies and imperatives (70).