Globalization

1. Globalization CMN 2168

2. Presentations… • Recap: technology and globalization • Lecture: globalization, space and knowledge • Chomsky

3. 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.

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

5. 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).

6. 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.

7. 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!

8. 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).

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

10. 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.

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

12. 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).

13. ‘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).

14. ‘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).

15. 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).

16. 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.

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

18. 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).

19. 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).

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

21. 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).

22. 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.

23. According to Virilio, information networks contribute to the development of endocolonialism (as opposed to exocolonialism). • Endocolonialism: Paul Virilio’s 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).

24. 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).