The World-Making Power of New Media

Mere Connection?

Barrie Axford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367425562
• eBook ISBN: 9781317801887
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this new work, Axford seeks to contribute to the development of global theory, particularly where it engages with the contested idea of globality; a concept which musters as consciousness, condition, framework, even system.

By examining emergent globalities through the lens of world-making communicative practices and forms, the author demonstrates their transformative social power and underlines the cultural dynamics of globalization. Taking a critical view of much of the current scholarship on emergent globalities, Axford steps outside the rationalist-territorialist conceptions of association and order and takes issue with those who advise there is a widespread 'myth' of media globalization. The book examines global communicative connectivity, using digital, or "new" media – especially the Internet - as the prime exemplar of global process.

As well as the academic importance of such themes for theory-building, the strategic, "real-world" impacts of communicative connectivity are palpable. Thus, the welter of debate around the influence of the Internet on democracy, democratization, revolt and collective action generally, have real purchase when discussed in relation to the events of the uprisings in MENA, anti-capitalist protests in London and New York and the tribulations of the EU in recent months/years. Using such exemplars the book assesses claims for the existence and robustness of global society, the significance of cosmopolitan communication and the extent of global consciousness.

This work will be of interest to students and scholars of globalization, international relations, and media and cultural studies.

1 Mere connection or mastery without remainder?¹

Introduction

In a New York Times article written in 2012, the cultural observer Sherry Turkle warns, “(w)e live in a technological universe in which we are always communicating. And yet we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection” (see also, Turkle, 2015). I open with this heartfelt, though by no means unusual, lament because it is a staple of critics who deplore what they see as the debilitating effects of digital culture on social intercourse – in Turkle’s case, on the art and joys of conversation – and because it evokes some of the unease felt about the consequences of digital lives more generally² (see also Krotoski, 2012).

In a world that is always connected, or has the technical capacity so to be, “mere connection” by way of messaging, texting, tweets and posts; and let’s not be coy, through the whole panoply of digital address to others, lacks richness and colour; or so she claims. Moreover, it must yield only ersatz intimacy. We look inwards instead of communing and, being myopic and a tad narcissistic, betray a key part of what it is to be human and authentically social.³ Nor have we wrought a benign solitude that is conducive for our personal well-being; still less contributed to a sense of community. On the contrary, we risk social atomization, loneliness or extreme individuation; and all because we practice only instrumental, distanced connection and largely phatic exchanges (see also, Slevin, 2000). It is worth noting that Turkle’s critique of the aesthetics of digital communication pale beside the vision of a completely “datafied” and post-human social landscape now bruited by some journalists, novelists, data-scientists and historians, and glossed with a hint of conspiracy theory when applied to the world of politics, or alarm when the economic and social impact of a roboticized workforce are predicted (see, for example, Harari, 2017; the Economist, September 1, 2016; Morozov, February 19, 2017; Cadwalladr, 2017).⁴

The normative component of these dystopias, as well as even more robust versions, will resurface in subsequent chapters, along with contrary arguments. But, perhaps counter-intuitively, the idea of mere connection and its use to describe (and sometimes decry) the mechanics of globalization, strikes me as a good starting point for a book on global theory that fits today’s world. For all that, I do not mean to endorse Turkle’s jeremiad in anything like its entirety. Rather, I am convinced that to understand the vagaries of global constitution, pace John Urry, we do have to employ a theory of connection; though not of “mere” connection and just catalogued exchange (2003; Featherstone, 2006).

Of axial importance to the ontology of globalization’s current moment – perhaps for all its moments and periods – is communicative connection. All communication, even the phatic variety, carries some content and expresses subjectivity; and because of this agency, if not human agency, is ever-present, something often forgotten in studies of globalization that are over-reliant on structural explanation and material factors (Scott, 2015; Fuchs, 2013).⁵ That said, communication is also a structural feature of what musters as world society and, for the careful observer, a bridge over what still deploys as the analytical chasm between agency and structure (Luhmann, 1982). But even the critique of usual science implied in these statements is problematic when discussing the constitution of digital worlds and of computing power that promises both a change in the basis of knowledge production and in ways of organizing life while addressing, inter-alia, practical social, security and health problems (Latour, 2000). Here we are dealing with an epistemological shift in how the world is understood and an ontological shift when describing its features.

While it is a contentious statement, focusing on the current moment repays attention because of its seminal cast and particular flavor, as these are exemplified by the inscription technologies and affordances of digital – here read Internet – connection, and visible in what Peggy Levitt calls “circulation cultures” (2016, 144).⁶ Such features are typical of Mark Poster’s “second media age” (1995). Of course, there is a whiff here of the presentism much deplored in critiques of global theory; but I can do no other given the recent provenance of the Internet. It may be that the impact of previous moments and periods of innovation in communication technologies has been profound and spatially and socially disruptive; but the Internet is very much a new kid on the block in this regard; its promise and threat scarcely realized. At all events, to deliver any such theory, or something resembling a convincing analytical framework around the interplay of communication and globalization, global scholarship must challenge and even step outside some of the canons of usual social science. Only then will any transformative promise be realized.

That promise turns on two considerations. The first surmises a transformation in the conduct of affairs in the world and thus in the manner of its constitution. The second envisages and encourages a consequent transformation in social-scientific knowledge about the world and in how such knowledge is garnered and used (Axford, 2013a, 2016a). As Fritz the Cat once said, albeit of rather different matters, these claims make for “heavy traffic” (1973)⁷ mainly because they challenge the taken-for-granted status of disciplinary divides, the ontological certainty of foundational concepts such as territoriality, along with the idea of space as a timeless, static container of social action (Lefebvre, 1974; Brenner and Eldon, 2009), and because they question the sheer obduracy of received wisdom about signifiers like individuality, identity, society, culture, community and intimacy. That said, the task is to acknowledge and assess the contribution of new inscription technologies to social change of global scope and yet remain skeptical, or agnostic, about the complete shock of the new, or the necessary socially disjunctive power of communication media. If this is, as Manuel Castells opines, the “internet age” (2012), a claim that keeps on giving when judged by the volume of literature written in both support and critique, it is one still reliant on, or glossed by, a host of other factors that influence social constitution.

Leaving aside Turkle’s normative cri de coeur and aesthetic fastidiousness, “mere connection” does not pass muster as an adequate definition of globalization or the complex ontologies of the global. A key theme running through this book is the need to examine globalization as process alongside globality as condition; charting the intertwinings – the imbrications – of connectivity, consciousness and institutionalization in global constitution. Globalization seen as connectivity is a very inclusive concept, but connection and exchange, while necessary, are not sufficient indicators of globality. The latter resides in both practices and consciousness, while the very idea of institutionalization points to those cultural and organizational features of social ontology that frame action and consciousness.

The same strictures apply to my call to locate globalization, and to construe globality, in a theory of communicative connection. The world now stands somewhere between a realist set and a space of flows; while global studies still fights to shake free of the trammels of disciplinary scholarship and methodological nationalism.⁸ Here my argument is foregrounded in earlier published work (1996, 2007, 2011, 2013a, 2016a) that tried to elaborate a social science of globality to disparage mechanistic accounts of global connection and the sense that globalization is a reified structure, with actors similarly reified as more-or-less powerful agents always in tension or accommodation with the overarching frame. In that dualism each possesses immanent and immutable qualities. The scholarship of globality that appears in this book develops a number of components that challenge these simple assumptions and convenient dualisms.⁹

First, the idea of transformation is precocious, but too easily abandoned in work that either dismisses globalization, or tries to normalize it under one or another rubric of usual science. For my purposes, the charge in transformative accounts of a growing, possibly modal, globality is that they see no theoretically debilitating contradiction in pointing to the systematic oneness of the world, possibly in matters of communication and consciousness, and recognizing that reflexive agents experience these things in different ways to enact them differently and with diverse consequences.

Second, the idea of globality opens up, or should open up, scholarship to new ways of thinking about the limits of disciplinarity, about the sanctity of discrete levels of analysis and the worth of simplistic dualisms; including the venerable antinomy of agency and structure.

Third, is recognition that increasing facets of social life are identifiable and explainable only through reference to global affordances – notably communicative affordances – consciousness and the enactment of global relations; in other words, to globality.

Fourth, is that any “order” in the global system so construed is not evidence of an organic unity, or the result of a functional fit between parts of a system, with each enshrined in the dogma that social, biological and physical systems have to be ordered. Rather, I depict a negotiated and contingent condition arising from the articulation of situated and mobile subjects and structures with more encompassing global ones. The growing density and extensiveness of these articulations and connections carry the possibility of systemic dis-order – and certainly of turbulence – as much as they conform to the requirements of a functional order. Obviously, this is a matter of consciousness as well as of connection. Processes of globalization not only make it more difficult for local and societal systems and networks of actors to effect closure, but they actually open up new imaginaries, “new practices and new institutions” (Friedman, 1993, 217).

Fifth, critical studies of globality must demonstrate a concern with reflexivity. This, as James Mittelman notes (2004, 24), is “an awareness of the relationship between knowledge and specific material and political conditions”. To be reflexive in global scholarship is to take note of the historicity of globalization in its different moments and periods. As a result, both presentism – the sin of treating globalization as completely de novo –and seeing it as a teleological process played throughout world history are avoided. Reflexivity also refers to the interplay between acting in the world and awareness that actions have effects on the world, as well as on knowledge about it. This insight has purchase in debate about whether globalization is the cause or consequence of social change and cautions that, while researchers need to be clear about what version of causality they are investigating, there is no simple model of cause and effect at work.

Sixth, globalization research should aspire to a through-going interdisciplinarity. Social life cannot be partitioned easily or usefully into discrete zones of experience, and nor should its study. The analysis offered here demonstrates that, good intentions or not, this is a hard row to hoe and yet it is essential for a critical understanding of the global. For, as Bill Robinson notes about disciplinary and conceptual bunkers, the “opposition of political economy to cultural analysis … is a false dualism that obscures rather than elucidates the complex reality of global society, insofar as our material existence as humans is always, of necessity, only possible through the construction of a symbolic order and systems of meaning” (2005, 16) – reflexivity again. When examining the place of communication media in global constitution this is a telling caution.

Seventh, is the need for a truly multidimensional approach to globalization – globality; one that does not start from the a priori assumption that one sphere of existence is anterior to or immanently more powerful for explanatory purposes than another. That said, I am drawn to a more culture-sensitive take on global constitution. But even so, it is obvious that treating cultural and economic factors as mutually constitutive, and their relationship as reflexively ordered, will require stepping outside the usual confines of much disciplinary research and normative/ideological world-views, thus risking the jibes of true believers. With this caveat in mind, some key aspects and limitations of scholarship on the relationships between globalization and media are examined in chapter two.

Eighth, the intuitively appealing idea of mutual constitution of structures and agents needs to be given more legs through middle-range empirical studies of the kind undertaken by Richard Giulianotti and Roland Robertson in their study of globalization and football (2007). In the latter parts of this book, I exemplify global constitution through attention to world-making practices involving communicative connection and what is labelled mediatization, in various empirical domains.¹⁰ The burden of this address is to examine the entanglements of what have been described as “indifferent technologies” with subjectivities through a dialectic of mutual constitution (Hird, 2010).

Ninth, much of the above can be entertained and prosecuted through more rigorous attention to what may be the most credible meta-construction of a globalized world; namely the dialectic of identities, borders and networks (or look-alikes for them). A dialectical approach identifies how dimensions of social reality may be analytically separate, yet constitutive of each other as aspects of a more “encompassing process” (Robinson, 2005, 17). In this regard, communication and connectivity inform a raft of scholarship on global themes such as sport, terrorism, commodity chains, financial networks, elite mobility, transnational activism and “virtual” intimacy.

This overall approach has three telling advantages. First of all, it grasps the complex ontologies of a globalized world. There is no attempt to root the argument either in analytically separate methodological nationalisms or in the kind of data used in standard cross-national comparisons, both of which just reproduce usual science applied to the global (Caselli, 2008). Second, the dialectic modifies the language of discrete scales and admits the possibility, indeed the existence, of multi-scalar and a-scalar modalities and identities. At the same time, the glocal nature of at least some of these new modalities – being neither local nor global – further challenges simple analytical dualisms. Because of these advantages, thirdly, it offers some purchase on ways to theorize and to investigate the imbrications of personal and global, long a goal of interdisciplinary theorists and proponents of multidimensional studies of globality.

Finally, globalization as either promise or spectre always carries a powerful normative charge, and the conflation of normative and empirical-analytical approaches to the study of globalization is something of a feature of research in the field. This does not mean that there is, or can be, a neat disjunction between the two. However understood, globalization takes place in the phenomenal world and its trammels shape consciousness; while affect as well as cognition, infuses consciousness and action. Social science must pay due attention to these factors in assessing the promise and threat of new worlds established and sustained through communication.

Communication and mediatization as axial features of globalization

Of course, what constitute the axial features of globalization in this or any other historical moment is a matter for debate and empirical analysis. Attention to such detail is important to produce a more fine-grained account of what might otherwise appear – and has often been presented – as an amorphous, even a monolithic, process of secular integration. Most accounts of globalization as process usually decant into a consideration of its axial features that, in turn, permit examination of types of globalization. George Modelski gives us a glimpse of some of these axial features (Modelski at al., 2008). He describes a multidimensional process involving the expansion of world commerce and capital movements, political globalization ranging over institutional innovations from imperial forms of rule to democratic national and inter/supra national institutions, the rise of transnational social and political movements, world-wide cultural trends and the emergence of a sense of world-wide community and public opinion.

These processes have not played out over the same historical time span, nor do they move along identical trajectories, but together they provide what Modelski calls a “process structure” which is leading, or may lead, to a new “level” of world organization; though “level” is not a happy term in this context. With some variations in the sort of timescales envisaged, the same features are rehearsed in most literature on globalization, so that in principle it should be possible to map historically the eme...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Mere connection or mastery without remainder?
• 2 Media and globalization: myths and counter-myths
• 3 Towards a theory of globalization as a theory of communicative connection
• 4 On world-making communicative forms and practices
• 5 “Cricket Lovely Cricket”: the mediatization of sport as emergent globality
• 6 The mediatization of politics and forms of emergent globality
• 7 The mediatization of everything as emergent globality
• Epilogue
• References
• Index