Globalization Is a Powerful Aspect of the New World System - Essay Example

Globalization Recently, globalization has emerged as a commonly used term and applies to most societies in theworld. It is a powerful real aspect of the new world system and represents one of the most influential forces in determining the future course of the planet. Globalization represents a number of dimensions such as economic, social, cultural, political, environmental and security among others. The paper will therefore focus on the concept of globalization as a process of interconnection and/or disconnection as well as the globalscapes involved. Globalization has led to creation of new social networks and activities that have increasingly overcome traditional cultural, political, economic and geographic boundaries. This has played a critical role in the intensification and acceleration of social exchanges and activities hence increasing human consciousness and interdependence. Steger (23) brings the concepts together and defines globalization as “a multidimensional set of social processes that create, multiply, stretch and intensify worldwide social interdependencies and exchanges while at the same time fostering in people a growing awareness of deepening connections between the local and the distant.” According to Appuradai (1), it only takes the merest acquaintance with the facts of the modern world to note that it is now an interactive system in a sense which is strikingly new. Hughes (34) states that historians and sociologists, especially those concerned with translocal processes and with the world systems associated with capitalism have long been aware that the world has been a congeries of large scale interactions for many centuries. Yet today’s world involves interactions of a new order and intensity. According to Hansen (34), cultural transactions between social groups in the past have generally been restricted, sometimes by the facts of geography and ecology, and at other times by active resistance to interactions with the other. Appuradai (6) has proposed an elementary framework for exploring various disjunctures applied in globalization. The framework looks at five dimensions of global cultural flow which includes: ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes and ideoscapes. The suffix scape points out to the fluid, irregular shapes of the landscapes, shapes which characterize international capital as deeply as they do to international clothing styles. The landscapes are therefore the building blocks of the imagined worlds of persons and groups To start with, ethnoscape refers to the flow of people all over the globe. Appuradai (7), states that ethnoscape implies the landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live. He goes ahead and states that tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers and other moving groups and persons constitute an essential feature of the world and appear to affect the politics of nations to a hitherto unprecedented degree. However, this does not imply that there are no relatively stable communities and networks, of kinship, friendship, work, leisure, birth and residence. Instead it implies that the warp of the stabilities involved is all over shot with the woof of human motion, as more persons and groups deal with the realities of having to move or the fantasies of wanting to move. Both the realities and the fantasies function on larger scales. For instance, men and women from India villages focus not only on moving to Poona or Madras, but of moving to Dubai and Houston. Technoscape refers to the flow of technology; global configuration, also ever fluid, of technology and of the fact that technology, both high and low, both mechanical and informational, now moves at high speeds across various kinds of previously impervious boundaries (Appuradai 8). Many countries are considered the roots of multinational enterprise: a huge steel complex industry in Libya gets its interest from India, China, Japan and Russia which are commonly known for their production of new technological configurations. The odd distribution of technologies raises some peculiarities on the technoscapes and is increasingly driven by increasingly complex relationships between money flows, political possibilities and the availability of both un-skilled and highly skilled labor. For example, while India exports waiters and chauffeurs to Dubai and Sharjah; it also exports software engineers to the United States who later become wealthy residents’ aliens. Steger (37), states that the technological progress of the magnitude seen in the last three decades is a good indicator for the occurrence of social transformations. The disposition of global capital has become a mysterious, rapid and difficult landscape to follow than ever before. This has led to the emergence of finanscape which refers to the flow of finances. Currency markets, nationwide stock exchanges and commodity theories move a lot of monies through national turnstiles at unrealized speed, with immense absolute implications for small differences in percentage points and time units. Steger (37) explains that gigantic flows of capital and technology have stimulated trade in goods and services. Markets have extended their reach around the world, in the process creating new linkages among national economies. Vast transnational corporations, influential international economic institutions, and great regional trading systems have come out as the major building blocs of the 21st century’s global economic order. Mediascapes refer both to the distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information through newspapers, magazines, television station and film production studios. The various forms are currently available to a growing number of private and public interests throughout the world. The images involve many complicated inflections, depending on their mode (documentary or entertainment), their hardware (electronic or pre-electronic), their audiences (local, national or international) and the interests of those who own and control them. The advantage of these mediascapes is that they provide large and complex repertoires of images, narratives and ethnoscapes to viewers throughout the world in which the world of commodities and the world of news and politics are profoundly mixed. In other words, many audiences throughout the world experience the media as a complicated and interconnected repertoire of print, celluloid, electronic screens and bill boards. Mediascapes has been facilitated by broadcasting all over the world on global media network such as Aljazeera and CNN. According to Appuradai (9), ideoscapes are concatenations of images which are often directly political and frequently have to do with the ideologies of states and the counter ideologies of movements explicitly oriented to capturing state power or a piece of it. The ideoscapes are normally composed of worldwide enlightenment, which consists of a concatenation of ideas, terms and images, including freedom, welfare, rights, sovereignty, representation and the master term democracy. The diaspora of these words across the world especially since the nineteenth century has loosened the internal coherence that held the terms and the images together. Instead the ideoscapes have brought about political globalization which has led to the break down of the new conceptual ground in the political realm. (Harvey, 56). To conclude on the globalscapes; the relationship between ethnoscapes, finanscapes and technoscapes appear to be deeply disjunctive and profoundly unpredictable since each of the landscape is subject to its own constraints and incentives, at the same time each acts as a constraint and a parameter for movements in the others. On the other hand, mediascape and ideoscape appear to be closely related due to the landscapes of image involved in both cases. Ethnography research appears to be the most suitable and appropriate method to study the various processes involved in globalization. According to Marcus (95), ethnography is an emergent methodological trend in anthropological research that concerns the adaptations of long standing modes of ethnographic practices to more complex objects of the study. Ethnography moves from its conventional single site location such as the capitalist world system to multiple sites of observation and participation that cross cut dichotomies such as the local and the global, the life world and the system. Zambians are good examples who have promoted globalization through engagement in the various scapes. They have engaged with the larger world beyond the sub-region through overseas higher education, commercial and diplomatic postings, in recent years there has been an increase in the number of suitcase traders who shop far away as New York, Bangkok and Singapore bringing back commodities to resell in Zambia. They encounter the wider world through media exposure and through electronic communications technology. In conclusion, globalization has played an important role in the development of nations all over the world and continues to impact on various aspects such as culture and communication. Work Cited Appadurai, A. Imploding Worlds: Imagination and Disjuncture in the Global Cultural Economy. London: Berg, 2007. Hansen, Karen T. Dealing with used Clothing. New York: North Western University, 2007. Harvey, D. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Hughes, Nancy S. “The Global Traffic in Human Organs.” In Current Anthropology. 41. 2 (2000), 191-224. Marcus, George E. “Ethnography in/of the world system: The emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography.” Annual Review of Anthropology. 24 (1995) 95-117. Steger, Manfred B. Globalization: A very short introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003 Read More