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Global Communications Global Selves Global Cities

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different relationships between sender(s) and receiver(s) (Fiske & Hartley) ... still, most people acted in-place most of the time ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: Global Communications Global Selves Global Cities


1
Global Communications Global Selves Global
Cities
  • Understanding the Connections

2
WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED?
  • about content context?
  • about identity?
  • about space place?
  • about community?

3
CONTENT
  • language is not a reflection of reality but a
    model of reality
  • signs, symbols and signals are different ways of
    constructing space and time and structuring
    perception (Adams)
  • signal you, here, now
  • sign complex organization of time-space (meaning
    depends mechanically on grammar)
  • symbol sets up vague and powerful links between
    here there, now then (Sontag)

4
HOW TO STUDY MEDIA
  • Media do not drive social change
  • Media are adopted within particular cultural
    contexts and places and adapted to the needs of
    particular people (Graham Marvin)
  • Media like all technologies provide a means of
    understanding what it is to be a human we
    imagine ourselves as complicated computers, (just
    as looking back in history we saw ourselves as
    automatons, animals, clay, )

5
CONTEXT
  • Meaning is affected by
  • different physical environments (Adams)
  • different media (communication technologies)
    (McLuhan)
  • different relationships between sender(s) and
    receiver(s) (Fiske Hartley)
  • different social structures

6
EMBODIMENT
  • Traditionally, we interacted with others as
    embodied selves most of the time
  • writing and printing started to break down this
    association
  • the telegraph drove the wedge in further
  • still, most people acted in-place most of the
    time
  • Our daily routines now involve substantial
    amounts of disembodied interaction

7
EMBODIMENT
  • Disembodiment leads to greater fluidity of
    identity (chat room experience)
  • If identity is understood to be a sign or symbol
    like any other, then
  • social authority becomes more questionable
  • the meaning of public and private changes
  • social order is temporarily up for grabs
  • sense of anarchy
  • opportunities for traditionally disempowered
    groups individuals
  • changing forms of intimacy
  • changing ideas about oppositions such as
    male-female, human-nature, here-there, etc.
    (Haraway)

8
DESTRUCTION OF PUBLIC LIFE?
  • Poster says communication through sign sequences
    (books) is overdetermined
  • writers try to convince people
  • they make statements with some definable
    relationship to the truth (even in realist
    fiction)
  • the textual individual is expected to be
    rational, critical, autonomous
  • yet he or she must accept a framework of
    interpretation to make sense of texts ideologies
    (including the ideology of fixed and stable
    subjects) overdetermines meanings

9
DESTRUCTION OF PUBLIC LIFE?
  • Poster says communication through images (TV,
    film, Internet) is underdetermined
  • many-to-many communications, indeterminate
    locations, leaky borders, instantaneity, and
    dependence on technology all presuppose different
    kind of reading subject
  • mode of reading is participatory
  • everything can be captured and altered
  • master narratives are absent
  • bottom-up structuring of social situations
  • anonymity and active engagement loosens ones
    place in the social hierarchy

10
DESTRUCTION OF PUBLIC LIFE?
  • Hénaff Strong argue
  • democracy depends on access to information
  • public space serves various functions
  • deliberation
  • debate
  • mutual encounter
  • seduction/persuasion
  • voting is only a small part of the democratic
    process (not the most important part)

11
DESTRUCTION OF PUBLIC LIFE?
  • Hénaff Strong ask
  • Is the virtual public space an acceptable
    substitute for physical public space?
  • Since old public spaces were often
  • centralized
  • impersonal
  • awe-inspiring
  • full of monumental architecture
  • designed to elicit a sense of nostalgia
  • what is gained by leaving these authoritarian
    qualities behind?

12
DESTRUCTION OF PUBLIC LIFE?
  • Hénaff Strong propose
  • virtual public space needs new modes of political
    representation (direct democracy is a chimera)
  • virtual public space needs new rules and
    procedures for making decisions (anarchy is
    interesting but not particularly effective)
  • each node (invisible community) in the
    information network must be seen as center of
    information

13
WHERE ARE WE HEADED?
  • We live in an Information Society
  • The Information Society has a geography
  • The structure of that geography centers on key
    urban centers
  • Where are these centers and how can we understand
    them?
  • Whenever there are centers there are also
    peripheries
  • Where are these peripheries and how can we
    understand them?

14
WORLD CITIES
  • The collective geography of the Information
    Society depends on certain key locations
  • These are the centers that drive the expansion of
    the Information Society
  • These are the places that benefit most from the
    development of an Information Society

15
The Air Transportation Network
COLORS show spheres of economic, cultural, and
political integration
16
ROSTER OF WORLD CITIES(after Beaverstock, Taylor
Smith)
  • Two ways of looking at the urban hierarchy
  • demography ? megacities
  • urban system ? world cities
  • Most world city theorists agree on 3 cities at
    the top of the hierarchy
  • New York
  • London
  • Tokyo

New York
Tokyo
London
17
ROSTER OF WORLD CITIES(after Beaverstock, Taylor
Smith)
  • Theorists have not agreed on a way to rank world
    cities below the top, however. There are several
    alternatives
  • cosmopolitanism hard to define or quantify
    (1960s work of Peter Hall)
  • role in international division of labor MNCs a
    bit clearer (1980s work of John Friedmann)
  • predominance of producer services easy to
    measure, serves as a good proxy for what we are
    looking for (1990s work of Saskia Sassen)
  • scale of financial sphere of involvement (1990s
    work of Howard Reed)

18
ROSTER OF WORLD CITIES(after Beaverstock, Taylor
Smith)
  • Alpha, Beta, and Gamma World Cities
  • measure and compare the global dominance of
    cities in regard to
  • accounting
  • advertising
  • banking
  • law
  • These are examples of producer services

19
3 CLASSES of WORLD CITIES(after Beaverstock,
Taylor Smith)
20
LINKAGES OF WORLD CITIES
World City Network A New Metageography? by
J.V. Beaverstock, R.G. Smith and P.J.
Taylor http//www.lboro.ac.uk/gawc/rb/rb11.html
21
GROWTH POLE PROJECT
  • Pick one of the cities in the two preceding
    diagrams (at any level of the hierarchy) and
    study its
  • history prospects (1 webpage with maps
    images, interlinked carefully to all 3 of the
    others)
  • economic situation (1 webpage)
  • political situation (1 webpage)
  • cultural situation (1 webpage)
  • For economic info see the Globalization and World
    Cities Study Group and Network
    http//www.lboro.ac.uk/gawc/

22
CONCLUSION QUESTION
  • Some measures of centrality in the Information
    Society reflect directly on our daily life
    (cosmopolitanism)
  • Other measures of centrality require us to
    consider
  • What lies hidden by the Information Society?
  • What makes the Information Society possible?
  • The answer to both is the global economic system.
  • Why?
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