KA SID, posting 8/27/07

This week I read Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic landscapes and Cultural Boundaries by David Morley and Kevin Robins. I did a concept map but I think it is too big to upload (it's not letting me do this after many tries and rebooting). So instead, here is my outline and I will show you the map on the conf. call.

What is Global and What is Local?

I. Globalism as Identity Crisis

A. Broadcasting

1. In the past

a. Served the nation

b. Provided Cultural identification

2. Now

a. respond to consumer demand

b. Maximize consumer choice

c. 'driven more by market opportunity than by national identity', Steven Ross.

(1) controlled by small number of global players

(a) Time Warner, Sony, Matsushita, News Corporation, Walt Disney

(b) BSkyB, CNN, MTV, Cartoon Network

(2) New services, new delivery systems, new forms of payment

(3) Vertical integration

(a) programming

(b) distribution

(c) transmission systems

d. Characterized by America Domination

(1) Fordism

(a) regime of accumulation, Billaudo and Gauron, Boyer, Lipietz

i) mass production

ii) mass consumption

e. global markets

f. world assembly line

g. 'war of images' and 'image superpowers' Freches

(1) 'television without frontiers' Commission of the European Communities, 1984

h. New media technologies are creating 'seeming face-to-face relationship' D. Horton and R. Wohl

(1) armchair imperialists

(2) generalised elsewhere and non-local people

(3) media images become the totality of our knowledge

(4) create a sense of reality of events

(a) creation of a Frankenstein monster in Iraq

(b) watching violence while remaining safe

(c) mediated reality becomes real

i. New supra-national regulatory environment meant to eliminate barriers to the buying and selling of programmes and their transmission and reception in the european community

B. Globalisation

1. organisation of production and the exploitation of markets on a world scale

C. Cultural Differences, Localisation

1. What is a community?

a. Electronic global village

(1) cultural tribalism

(2) flexible specialisation

(3) cultural industrial districts

b. to connect family and the nation

c. 'development of national broadcasting systems which provided the people of different regions and provinces with a first daily experience of the nation' Martin-barbero

2. Disorienting experience of global image space

a. 'obscene delirium of communication' and ' ecstasy of communication' Baudrillard

3. Difference as identity

a. Language

(1) 'identity is as much about exclusion as it is about inclusion' Schlesinger

b. Fear

(1) nationalism, racism, superiority of one group over another

(2) unity against an alien culture

(a) 'Islamic threat'

(3)

c. Natives

(1) homogeneous, authentic, indigenous culture

d. Can a community acknowledge difference (and simply diversity)?

4. Politics

a. objective of politicians and bureaucrats

(1) project public service broadcasting onto a European level to project an integrated, homogenizing force

b. a new global system of authority where transnational communications companies now bypass traditional forms of national political authority

c. transnational corporate culture becomes a central force - who has control of the sources of information?

5. Europe

a. How has Europe changed over time?

b. Europe vs. others

(1) Cultural paranoia: Japan and the orient

(2) Post modernism could be defined as a 'set of responses to the decentring of Europe - of living in a world that no longer rests upon European hegemony which began in 1492' Cornell West.

(3) Identity crisis

(a) failed to develop an adequate political culture for 'european citizenship'

(b) geography

i) new global network and matrix of unevenly developed regions, cities and localities across space and time

ii) international restructuring of capitalist economies

iii) emergence of a new global-local nexus

(1) 'placeless' geography of image and simulation

(2) world of instantaneity and depthlessness

(3) space of lows, an electronic space with permeable boundaries

(4) flexible specialisation

(c) ethnicity

i) Differences

(1) disavowed?

(2) repressed?

(3) accepted?

(d) religion

(e) Change is seen as problematic

i) cultural erosion and even extinction

ii) state of "homelessness"

iii) struggle for place

(f) Diversity of climate, countryside, architecture, language, beliefs, artistic style

i) must be protected not diluted

(g) Culture is being transformed

i) Mass immigration

ii) Displaced persons, refugees

iii) migrant and immigrant workers

(4) imagined communities of nationalism

(a) a common market

(b) citizens Europe

(c) Europe of Culture

c. BBC vs. Dallas

(1) American products

(a) streamlined

(b) plastic

(c) glamorous

(d) fake

(2) BBC was forced to look at its marketplace and adapt

d. The end of history

(1) was a community of nations characterized by inherited civilisation

(a) Judaeo-Christion relgion

(b) Hellenistic ideas o givernment, philosopy, arts and science

(c) Roman view concerning law

(2) incoherence of the contemporary world

(a) the past is the fiction of the present, Certeau

i) Same questions about cultural imperialism

ii) who has the right or the power to tell the story of contemporary events?

6. Japan Fear

a. Exotic culture

(1) Zen, kabuki, tea-ceremonies, geishas

(2) dehumanised martial culture

(a) kamikaze, ninjutsu, samurai

b. Technological superiority

(1) technology has become "japanised"

(2) cold, impersonal, and machine-like

c. the "future"

d. Seen as ethnic purity and homogeneity

(1) consensus and conformist

e. Takeover of Hollywood

f. Occidentalism, R. Robertson

(1) racial purity

g. Fear

(1) american resent the ambiguous nature of Japanese culture

(2) Japan is the "other" to the American "us"

I also listened to an audiobook entitled: Communist Manifesto and Social Contract (Knowledge Products) (Unabridged) by Ralph Raico. Communist Manifesto examines the theory and goals expounded by Karl Marx. Marx argues that history flows inevitably toward a social revolution, which will result in a society without economic classes. The influence on Marx of Hegel, Feuerbach, and other philosophers is examined, as is his friendship and collaboration with Engels. Social Contract, by Rousseau, argues that people secure their liberty by entering into an implied contract with government. Rather than being protected by natural rights, their liberty is secured by the "general will", one of the most famous and troublesome ideas in political theory. This presentation explores Rousseau's concept of social order and its implications for individual freedom and the good of society.

May 5, 1818 – March 14, 1883

I did not realize that Karl Marx was Jewish (his grandfather was a Rabbi) and then converted to Lutheranism. He got his PhD in philosophy in Berlin, and then went to Paris to be with the french revolution philosophers. His greatest work is Das Kapital but the Communist manifesto has been printed more times than Das Kapital. Marx's theories said that capitalism created a wealthy class and a poor class, and thus was not ideal. He also believed that capitalism lead to alienation of human work and a commodity fetish. He did not like the cycles of growth and collapse and he believed that if the proletariat were to seize the means of production, they would encourage a system that would benefit everyone equally, and a system of production less vulnerable to periodic crises.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, (June 28, 1712 – July 2, 1778)

Rousseau believed that a government can only be legitimate if it has been sanctioned by the people, controlled by the "general will" of its populace. Without this input from the people, there can be no legitimate government.