ii. Why globalisation?

Perhaps in a small way this project is contributing to one of the processes of globalisation through publishing unusual voices via one of the most important mediums for the international flow of ideas. Although there is an enormous and growing amount of literature about globalisation, few studies actually ground the term within local geographical communities.

 

Whilst numerous book sources are cited in this study, this is clearly not a book about books. Although I attempt a definition of globalisation from a number of significant book sources (and have used this definition in the capture and indexing of the videos) the particular case of globalisation being argued here is embedded within the electronic document itself. A project that has as a major component an electronic document cannot simply rely on a book based bibliographic canon; it must also engage with the potential of the online world.

 

The production of this work was undertaken completely online with the influence of email correspondence from all over the globe. Academic culture is increasingly becoming internationally intertwined, partly through the almost real-time exchange of ideas through ‘list-serv’ email discussion lists. This is another manifestation of the global/local nexus, in that I am a researcher who has engaged with an online, geographically dispersed network of ideas; whilst I am at the same time building a site concerned with the articulation of local knowledge.

 

 Some of the books on globalisation which help situate this work include John Wiseman’s Global Nation. (6a) Wiseman deliberates upon the political economy of globalisation within Australia in terms of which policy decisions have had local and national impact. Also I have utilised Manuel Castells’ impressive The Rise of the Network Society. This work is an empirical study that discusses the global economy centring upon the post-industrialisation of Western economies and the real-time networking of global economic production. [1]

 

Another book alluded to is Richard Falk’s somewhat prescriptive Predatory Globalisation, which makes the distinction between ‘globalisation from above and globalisation from below’. Falk defines the dominant form of globalisation as being corporate and governmental whilst ‘globalisation from below’ frequently emanates from activist communities seeking to build a fairer, global civil society.[2]

 

Other books used include Thomas Frank’s provocative One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism and the End of Economic Democracy. Frank emphasises the limitations of global democracy when the populist right and rationalist-economic-thinking prevail.[3]

 

Another book that has influenced this work is by the great champion of US-led globalisation, the populist Thomas Friedman.  Friedman asserts that the local is something that communities will fight for if threatened by larger homogenising forces (but then proposes the simplistic hypothesis that no two countries with McDonalds stores have ever gone to war).[4]

 

A recurrent theme enunciated by these authors is the call for people everywhere to develop and communicate understandings of globalisation in local and other contexts, or else risk becoming passive recipients. John Wiseman states that we need to:

...develop the skills and the understandings of how to live in a world where information and financial flows are accelerating so that increasingly distant actions do have local effects. That the challenge to understand the links between the local and the national and the global and the challenge of learning the skills to do that…[5] 

He later goes onto claim that: 

There are still too few studies of the implication of globalisation processes grounded in detailed examinations of particular geographical times and places.[6] 

Also Richard Falk writes: 

...what we require minimally are visions of the present and future that can better encompass reality than ‘realism’, as well as proposals and tactics for bridging the normative and ideological gaps between the ascent of economic globalisation and the descent of human well-being in established societies.[7]

 

I have espoused the useful components of the globalisation theories purported by these thinkers firstly as hermeneutic devices whilst undertaking the historical investigation and then later in the four critical essays that are used within the ‘global’ section of the site itself. Milkbar.com.au assists in communicating globalisation trough a critical-local objectification of the concepts of globalisation and thus fills a gap in the literature.

 

The idea of using ‘elementary frameworks’ of analysis (as in the ‘global’ section) has been borrowed from the well known theorist of the global, Arjun Appadurai. Appadurai originally proposed five categories of globalisation (in his famous essay, Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy) however in this study I have created only four.[8] This is because Appadurai’s five categories were neither helpful nor manageable in the context of Fitzroy. The four ‘rudimentary’ categories that I have created are: a) Culture, b) Ideology, c) Ethnicity and, d) Economy. How and why I have used these categories is further explained in Chapter One.

 

The video interviews captured for this study were first recorded with the four categories in mind and then later indexed through the prototype software called SMAFE (Meta Analysis Film Engine), developed at InterMedia at The University of Bergen in Norway (as further discussed in Chapter Two). [9] Analytical categories help to express some of the complex intersections of globalisation and seem particularly well suited for an applied new media study. This is because these categories can generate an ample controlling experience of the video and provide the hypertextual authorship that forms part of the overall argument of the research. more>>>

 

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Authored by Craig Bellamy© 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003

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