ii.
Objectifying Globalisation
Milkbar.com.au has been an attempt to use the new tools offered to an academic researcher to objectify globalisation. The challenges facing a new generation of researchers, activists, artists and policy makers in
terms of understanding the set of ideas that inform globalisation are enormous. The study of globalisation is difficult because the field has progressed so rapidly in the past decade that there has barely been enough time to engage. This is evident through the discourse of ‘manifest
destiny’ that frequently blinds discussions of globalisation. There are complex debates that surround globalisation discourse that need to be articulated in human dimensions and ‘inevitability’ should not be one of them.
Fitzroy, whether imagined, romanticised, or whatever, is alive and well. This is indicated by the eagerness of many of the participants in this study to talk about where they live and evoke some of the core values of the district. I hope that what they have
communicated in this study is far from an idealised view of a community of the past, but a typical inner city community in a developed county representative of a constant flux within larger cultural and economic structures. However, these structures are impacting upon the core community
values of Fitzroy in a largely destructive way which I have indicated in this hypertextual video documentary.
Globalisation is spurred by
global institutions and treaties such as the General Agreement
on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and its bantling the World Trade
Organisation (WTO). Over the past three decades many nations
of the world have developed an economic interconnectedness that
parallels the great free trade movement of the late Nineteenth
and early Twentieth Centuries.
Free trade and the resultant economic globalisation have had mixed results for many countries and communities within countries and has incited a complex, inarticulate and sometimes contradictory debate across all segments of our society. Some groups and
geographical locales have benefited handsomely from the structural changes that we generally understand as globalisation, whilst other groups and geographical regions have become economically marginalised through disconnectedness from global flows of money and goods and services.
Rural and regional Australia, for instance, has experienced a steady decline in recent years and in fact in rural Victoria, a gloomy report from the Bureau of Statistics, suggests that not one new full-time job has been created in more than thirteen years. In other parts of the country, particularly Sydney and Melbourne, things could not seem better; property
values have doubled, unemployment is at record lows and the new middle classes cram the cafés of the gentrified inner-cities. Wages have risen by up to fifty percent in many of Australia’s inner cities during the late 1990s.
Some of these processes of globalisation are objectified in Milkbar.com.au through the voices of everyday people. What electronic scholarship offers us is the capacity to record and represent our world in ways that we could not before. However, all
technologies have both advantages and limitations and I have outlined some of these in this exegetical-thesis. Moreover, many of these advantages and limitations still need to be discovered and articulated. Crude expectations from the more established areas of the academy do not help us
understand or advance this medium. It is a fledgling form of scholarship, especially for post-graduate students; no one project could attempt to address the myriad of pressing questions that the practice of electronic scholarship poses.
The only thing certain about
the future is that some parts of the Internet will flourish
whilst others fall into decay. The parts of the web tied to
the fluctuation of global-market-based-capitalism will either
rise or fall depending on the impulse of the market. Because
of the many contributions from the field of Humanities Computing,
history could last much longer than other parts of the Internet.
What we keep on the Internet and what we discard is a sign of
how civilised we are. more>>
Authored
by Craig Bellamy© 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002
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