Global Communications Global Selves Global Cities

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Global Communications Global Selves Global
Cities

• Understanding the Connections

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WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED?

• about content context?
• about identity?
• about space place?
• about community?

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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)

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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, )

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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

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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

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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)

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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

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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

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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)

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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?

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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

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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?

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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

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The Air Transportation Network
COLORS show spheres of economic, cultural, and
political integration
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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
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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)

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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

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3 CLASSES of WORLD CITIES(after Beaverstock,
Taylor Smith)
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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
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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/

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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?