Abstract
Editors Aneesh, Hall, and Petro designed the volume Beyond Globalization as a collection of pioneering articles discussing the impact of media, cinema, and arts on an emerging “Global Village” or “One World” system. The monograph covers a diverse set of issues from new media and television to cinema and media arts. It is a noteworthy if not provocative contribution to the growing body of literature on the complex relations between globalization and media. The authors assess complex interactions between media and globalization as a part of emerging global culture and global challenges in the attempt to understand the ideas behind the emerging digital-cultural universe and its impact on social practices, asking, “Are the basic conditions of culture changed, diminished, or supplemented as a result of intensified exchanges across national, ethnic, and territorial borders?” and “Does the fact that a large proportion of global exchanges occur only with the mediation of information machines incite a need to redefine the notion of the other, from that of personhood to that of mechanization?”
The entire team of editors comes from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee (USA), where Aneesh is an associate professor of sociology and global studies, Hall is a professor of English with research interest in digital culture and experimental literature, and Petro is a professor of English and film studies and a former president of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. They envisioned three main research goals for this book. First, they intended to go beyond traditional social constructions that equate the “notion of reality with the making of reality” with the concept of worldmaking in which “the increasing sophistication, multiplication, and dissemination of information . . . changes the experience of all cultures.” Second, they sought to emphasize the “new logic” of cultures where “globalization suggests an interconnected whole” or unity in “multiplicities” along with “the new logics of [cultural] production.” Third, they set out to explore the “global media cultures” where “isomorphism between space and culture” is increasingly replaced by “a global logic of information machines” and “new mediated information and architectural systems.”
In the eleven chapters, the group of mainly American scholars covers the various aspects of the impact of globalization on media, television, arts, and cinema, offering different and often competing views on the ways globalization shapes the media culture. They suggest some theoretical generalizations as well as examining several case studies. The issue of globalization and media has been covered quite intensively in the western academic literature over the past decades. Yet, the authors believe there is room for further studies as some aspects of globalization are “often poorly understood, resulting in misplaced battles over homogeneity versus heterogeneity, as if the functional expansion of market and media could turn the world into irremediable cultural sameness.”
In looking at the changes, the authors in this volume try to assess the often twisted interactions between the worlds of media, cinema, and arts, and the emerging global hybrid on the intersection of these three fields. For example, Mark Poster assesses the global media culture and the emerging global logic of information machines, which determines both the globalization of culture and its social paradigms, and argues, “The event of global culture is then immediately two-sided: first, culture is put into the question by the extent and quality of global exchanges; second, these exchanges require information machines or media.” Fred Turner’s case study analyzes Google as a cultural infrastructure for new media production that creates an affinity between Google, as a corporation, and popular techno-cultural movements. This in turn creates special relations between “bohemian art worlds” and digital manufacturing. Peter Park focuses on fiction, examining the apocalyptic narratives in contemporary comics and films, which very often work around a single most popular theme—the collapse of societies. He notes it as important and revealing that such narratives often entail a collapse of social relations and relations between people and the world of machines rather than a collapse of civilizations or cultures. Thomas Malaby assesses the growth of an imaginary urbanist project—Linden Lab’s Second Life, which brings together millions of inhabitants into a utopian and automated world where people believe they control the process of creating the utopian global culture. Unconventionally, the editors have chosen Eduardo Kac’s article on bio arts as a concluding chapter of the monograph. Eduardo Kac—who actually coined the term bio art—explores “the [changing] boundaries between humans, animals, and robots” and contends that there is a changing and growing interaction between nature (agriculture) and popular culture’s emotional and intellectual reflection of these changes that would turn the “presence of biotechnology” into “a communication, entertainment, and education tool.”
The academic value of Beyond Globalization lies in the ability of the authors to deconstruct the emerging new global media systems and global cultural digital universe both through theoretical generalization and through illustrative case studies of specific components and puzzling pieces of media globalization. Overall, the volume is a valuable contribution to the academic discourse on the nature of globalization of media and arts and emerging cultural trends. These trends not only change the world and its societies in various and often twisted ways, but also create new digital universes and cultures which exist in parallel to our globalizing world. Unfortunately, the work lacks a strong conclusion with strong theoretical generalization of the ideas presented in the book, in the absence of which the monograph appears somewhat incomplete.