Cosmopolitanism and the Media

Cartographies of Change

M. Christensen, A. Jansson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780230392250
• eBook ISBN: 9780230392267
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: Social Sciences

Cosmopolitanism and the Media explores the diverse implications of today's digital media environments in relation to people's worldviews and social practices. The book presents an empirically grounded account of the relationship between cosmopolitanized lifeworlds and forces of surveillance, control and mobility.

Part I

Mapping the Terrain: Boundaries and Bridges

1

Introduction: Cosmopolitan Vision, Mediatization and Social Change

Over the past decade, there has been a noted increase in publications addressing political and legal cosmopolitanisms. There is clearly a need for (and a gap to be filled by) more examples of critically oriented empirical analyses that intervene in the debate and address the prospects of the “cosmopolitan vision” from a media and communication studies point of view. This book is a humble step in that direction. It is dedicated to the exploration of the increasing significance of everyday mediations and altered dynamics of mediatization in relation to the multivalent process of cosmopolitanization. The “cosmopolitan vision”, in itself a contested and open-ended notion, refers to a desired ethical orientation that may (or may not) arise in response to the demands of a society marked by diversified forms of “complex connectivity” (Tomlinson, 1999) or “multiple interconnectivities” (Christensen, 2013b). It is a self-reflexive ethos that opposes the cultural “othering” of people and places, working as a counter-force to the encapsulating tendencies of political nationalism as well as commercial modes of monitoring and exploitation. Cosmopolitanization, together with mediatization, does not bring an end to such tendencies but rather invokes increasingly contradictory spatial, cultural and moral orders (Jansson, 2009a).

In trying to address how society is reacting under such new conditions, cosmopolitanism is becoming an increasingly common approach and the moral-ethical dimension an evermore relevant take in media and communication studies as well as in other areas of scholarly inquiry. As such, the cosmopolitan vision provides an entry point for reflecting upon the political, economic, legal and cultural aspects of key questions such as transborder mobility and its mediations (pertaining both to actual mobility and to its representations). Several scholars in the field of media and communication studies (Boltanski, 1999; Silverstone, 2006; Morley, 2009; Chouliaraki, 2006, 2013) have been at the forefront of the moral-ethical turn. Chouliaraki’s latest book, The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of Post-Humanitarianism (2013), for instance, builds upon her earlier work on the mediation of distant suffering and takes the stance that solidarity with distant Others has changed significantly over the past four decades parallel to the shifts in the market, media/technology and politics. Solidarity, as she puts it, is no longer based on pity and Other-oriented morality. Rather, it is based on irony and a self-oriented morality, which centres upon doing good to Others based upon “how I feel” (pp. 2–3). If we are to take her diagnosis as correct – we have good reason to do so in the face of the increasingly global forces of the market and the media that co-shape both our consciousness and conduct – such a trend has significant bearings on the morality and moral action that underlie the cosmopolitan vision. The moral, post-humanitarian subject of cosmopolitanism then, emerges as a self-benefiting, narcissistic agent who is first and foremost fulfilling a self-gratifying vision, rather than engaging politically.

If we expand the focus of the cosmopolitan ethos from an empathy for and openness towards distant Others to a consciousness of planetary oneness, it brings to mind other recent phenomena that highlight the significance of considerations related with the moral character of the cosmopolitan agent depicted above. The unprecedented level of Arctic sea-ice decline we have witnessed in 2007 and 2012 (see Christensen, Nilsson and Wormbs, 2013), which has become the bellwether of global climate change, is a stark reminder that we, as a human society, share one planet. This challenges previous perceptions of our planet as being ultimately resilient and impervious to human damage and points to a future where territorial exclusivity is ultimately liquefied in the face of global environmental meltdown. What other change, we might want to ask, can be more materially and morally transformative and constitutive of a need for a cosmopolitan spirit to steer our shared global futures? Yet, action remains limited, far below the level needed to contribute to significant change, and consumption high.

Other recent examples that stare us in the face and have relevance here are the national, regional and global uprisings – many of which are the result of economic and political unrest common across borders – of the past five years. Iranian national elections of 2009, The Occupy Movement and the Arab Spring, taken together, have opened up a cosmopolitan space of global debates through popular communication networks. Slavoj Žižek labelled 2011 “The Year of Dreaming Dangerously” (2012) and suggested we have entered an era of new political reality. Alain Badiou, in The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings (2012), drew parallels between the Arab Spring and the European revolutions of 1848, pointing to the return of emancipatory universalism. Castells in Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age (2012) emphasized the role of technology in social change. The accuracy of these diagnoses can be and has been debated. The fact remains that the opening of such a cosmopolitan space of public deliberation can be attributed to the coexistence of a number of key factors (see Christensen, 2013a, 2013b; Burkart and Christensen, 2013). The role of technology and citizen journalism, for one, has been significant (if not determining) during these events, serving (at least momentarily) as cosmopolitanizing forces by way of foregrounding the human factor and human suffering and reinforcing global solidarity (self- or Other-oriented as it may be in different spacetimes). Such social transformation processes, which materialize as a result of meta-change in our spatial, environmental, politico-economic and media realms, have the potential to recalibrate our moral compass. They harbour the internal contradictions of cosmopolitanization – the intertwining of emancipatory and protectionist impulses – and thus call for research perspectives that move beyond “methodological nationalism” (Beck, 2002, 2007).

Mapping the terrain

As these and similar debates around conceptions and theories of cosmopolitanism have intensified recently, doing justice to the volume of intellectual production in a single book is next to impossible. As Held (op cit) notes, since 1945 we have moved towards establishing the grounds for a more effective and accountable global politics where, in principle, the recognition of universal values concerning the equal dignity and worth of all human beings took a foothold. In sum, and as we noted above, the contemporary return to cosmopolitanism (see also Vertovec, 2009; Held, 2010; Brown and Held, 2011), both in cultural studies and political science, has to do with a variety of new/renewed developments and phenomena from multiculturalism and positionings of marginal communities to the recent waves of financial meltdown to global social movements and environmental crisis to the contingencies created due to multiple interconnectivities (Christensen, 2013a, 2013b) underlined, at least potentially, by a globally uniting sense of shared planetary and social futures.

The many dimensions of these developments have been accounted for in a number of significant works in media and communication studies and sistering disciplines. Chouliaraki’s (2013) work, as we noted above, is significant and unique in the sense that she offers a historically grounded discussion and theorization of ethics and morality and places mediation and technologization of communication centre-stage unlike many other accounts of humanitarianism, ethics and citizenship. The Cosmopolitanism Reader (Brown and Held, 2011) is a different but noteworthy example bringing together both classical and contemporary essays addressing political, economic, moral and cultural questions under the broad rubric of cosmopolitanism. Altogether, the essays address global interconnectedness and overlapping communities of fate and respond to global questions by engaging with cosmopolitan thought within a normative, multivalent, framework. Yet, while cultural aspects of cosmopolitanism are explored within the part entitled “Cosmopolitanism, Nationality, States and Culture”, media and mediation are primarily discussed in relation to their role as representing reality and allowing for imaginative travel.

Held’s (2010) Cosmopolitanism: Ideals, Realities and Deficits has made a notable contribution to this field by way of bringing together “the philosophical” and “the practical” by presenting case studies. He discusses global politics and how the basic principles of cosmopolitanism have been applied so far (particularly in relation to issues of human rights and international law). The global institutional and legal structures are critiqued for creating a cosmopolitan deficit. The way forward is identified as “cosmopolitanism as the new realism”. Robertson’s (2010) Mediated Cosmopolitanism is directly engages with the role of the media, of news, in bringing home the distant Others. Based on empirical analysis, the book addresses the linkages between cultural globalization, television news, imagination and the mediation of cosmopolitan sentiments.

Discussions of cosmopolitanism inevitably imply questions of responsibilities and duties, rights, citizenship and culture (and cultural citizenship). And, it goes without saying that thinking of social, political life and everyday reality without considering the role of mediation, at this point in history, is simply impossible. Yet, generally speaking, the incorporation of media-related aspects into the cosmopolitan debate has so far been at a somewhat limited level, where the media are considered primarily as vehicles for bringing the global to the local and for facilitating (or not) imaginative travel. A significant portion of such accounts has focused on a specific medium (e.g. television) and a specific genre (e.g. news). Halsall (2006) notes, for example, in his critique of less critical approaches to “mediated cosmopolitanism”, in the formation of a “world interior” space through the consumption of global media

far from this leading to an unambiguous expansion of horizons of the individual, as the claims of “mediated cosmopolitanism” would lead us to expect, an opposite process is observable, in which the formation of the “world interior” leads to the disappearance of the exterior and to a process of “immunization” of the media consumer against this exterior.

Considering, in particular, the rather complex forms mediation has assumed over the past decade, this points to the need for new discussions on media and cosmopolitanism where an emphasis is placed on “communication” and “persons” rather than just the capacity of the medium and journalistic conduct.

In another volume, The Sociology of Cosmopolitanism: Globalization, Identity, Culture and Government (Kendall et al., 2009), akin to Held’s and Robertson’s, the authors approach cosmopolitanism from both a theoretical and practical perspective. Such works are illustrative of how cosmopolitanism could be addressed from an empirically grounded perspective while maintaining theoretical rigor. In line with the contemporary understanding of cosmopolitanism (i.e. taking globalization and interconnectedness as starting points), Kendall et al. address cultural, political and technological aspects. Nikos Papastergiadis (2012), in Cosmopolitanism and Culture, offers an eloquent discussion of social, aesthetic, imaginaries by way of introducing us to the world of contemporary art and artists as reclaimers of hospitality. His original and compelling approach to art and politics opens up a fresh perspective within which to rethink cosmopolitan imaginary today. Such thinking, in a broad sense, taps into earlier discussions around the various practical bases of cosmopolitan imaginary. In Cosmopolitanism in Practice (2009), Nowicka and Rovisco bring together empirically grounded views of cosmopolitan experiences and practices grouped around the three key concepts of mobilities, memories and tensions.

What we briefly account for here provides only a glimpse of the large body of literature that has been produced on cosmopolitanism. Overall, with these and many other volumes on the cosmopolitan question, we are in good company of excellent works (many of which are recent publications on political, legal, moral and, on the whole, theoretical aspects of cosmopolitanism) both to build upon and to critique.

Back to communication

The concept of communication, literally meaning “making something common”, provides us with a stepping stone for thinking about the relationship between media and cosmopolitanism in a processual manner. Communication is more than the transmission or sharing of information. It involves socially negotiated processes of interpretation and re-articulation and is thus infinite. These processes, through which meanings are created, moulded and “made common”, involve persons and their more or less converging/diverging frames of reference. Cosmopolitanism, whether we think of it as a particular set of cultural dispositions or an ethical model for transcultural dialogue, is thus closely related to communication. While cosmopolitanism sustains a particular mode of communicative reflexivity, highly demanded in times of global cultural exchange, any “actually existing cosmopolitanism” (Cheah and Robbins, 1998) pre-supposes communicative subjects and their continuous attempts to understand one another.

The media intervene in and alter the conditions for these sense-making processes in different ways, providing resources for extended and more instantaneous connectivity between people and places, as well as for storage, retrieval and reworking of information. In practice, however, this does not mean that the media necessarily drive communication processes in cosmopolitan directions. As shown by numerous examples of mediated exclusivism, discrimination and outright conflict, the opposite may just as well be the case.

Our overarching concern with processes of communication, which sets this study apart from some other works on media and cosmopolitanism, has several epistemological implications. First, through putting the accent on communication we want to avoid making simplified claims as to the social impact of particular media. Our interest is in the socially negotiated character of media appropriations and uses, which means that our study aims at discerning the different ways in which media practices relate to cosmopolitanism, and, vice versa: how cosmopolitan practices relate to the media. The prospects of cosmopolitanism depend not only on institutionalized forms of meaning transfer, such as news, film or any other mode of mass-mediation, but also on the modes of social enclosure and disclosure sustaining and sustained by ordinary habits of mediated interaction, channelled through, for example, various mobile devices. This is to say that valid accounts of cosmopolitanization, and its various articulations, are to be built upon contextually sensitive and non-media-centric analyses of the mediatization of communication. “Mediatization” here refers to the long-term, socially negotiated “meta-process” (Krotz, 2007) through which the media are made indispensable to social life and to the ways in which people relate to one another and to the world (see also Christensen, 2013b, 2014; Jansson, 2013a).

Second, our broad take on communication implies that we are attentive to the diversified ways in which mediatization unfolds today. As pointed out by Madianou and Miller (2012), contemporary “polymedia” environments enable increasingly dynamic modes of mediated interaction. Whereas a particular device, such as a smartphone, can be used for a plethora of different forms of communication, a particular social need, such as sending a greeting to a friend, can be accomplished through a variety of privatized platforms and devices, depending on emotional and moral judgements as well as situational conditions. In order to discover the different shapes mediatization takes, we have to look closely into the mediated mundane practices of social bridging and bonding, inclusion and exclusion, as they increasingly take place in the interstices of everyday life (see de Certeau, 1984: Ch. 7). The amalgamations of media and spatial practice are clearly one of the most pervasive expressions of mediatization today (Schulz, 2004). This is also the fundamental, practical level at which the communicative moulding of cosmopolitanization, and the prospects of a cosmopolitan vision, should be analysed.

Third, our communicative approach involves a reflexive concern with temporality and the social re-embedding (Giddens, 1985) of cosmopolitanism. Taken as a generalized disposition, cosmopolitanism is often associated with certain individuals and groups without much further problematization of the ways in which various “cosmopolitanisms” (such as political vs. cultural dimensions) may compete within a life biography and levels of articulation may fluctuate depending on structural and situational conditions. During different life stages, for example, individuals may experience different types of nearness and distance, belonging and otherness (Bauman, 1989; Silverstone, 2007), and relate to them in different ways. This is seen through the successive recalibrations of social comfort zones, such as the family, the peer group or a social field. These zones, in a fundamental sense, are created through communication, not merely across space but also in time, that is, through communicative rituals and routines that bring about various forms of “bounded solidarity” (Ling, 2008) also amongst cosmopolitan subjects. It is also seen in the expressions of social trajectories, understood as “constructed biographies” (Bourdieu, 1983, 1984), where the adoption of cosmopolitan dispositions may (or may not) correspond with capital accumulation, depending on where in social space an individual is located (see Chapter 2). Our concern with such communicative processes of change allows for the sociological rethinking of media, by way of their dual significance for social cohesion as well as complex connectivity, as means of social re-embedding.

Our general assertion is thus to regard mediatization as differently nuanced in different social and time-space contexts, negotiated and realized through everyday communication, rather than containing an overdetermining “media logic”. A fundamental question here is one of space, which begs for a critical perspective on the inherently stratified, (dis)ordered, cosmopolitan potential of contemporary glocal media forms. When speaking of “cartographies of change” in the plural (as in the subtitle of this book), we refer precisely to the importance of providing diverse accounts of media and cosmopolitanism, accounts that make visible how cosmopolitanism and its capacities for social change are related to different orders of dominance and contestation. These orders, in turn, pertain to a variety of spatial dynamics, some of which are strongly anchored in the materiality of absolute space (related to, for example, the administration of physical borders and the ownership of spatial property), whereas Others (and probably most) have to be understood in terms of relational spacetimes (including, for example, cultural memories, flows of information and human interactions that make a certain setting meaningful), if we borrow Harvey’s (2009: Ch. 7) terminology. Linking, and thinking, these levels together in a meaningful way is a serious analytical challenge that haunts studies of cosmopolitanism, often charged with being overly abstract and detached from ordinary spaces and their material underpinnings.

The transformations of today’s digital “media spaces” (Couldry and McCarthy, 2004), which involve, at the same time, the intensification of global spaces of flow (Castells, 1998) and the technologization and informationalization of everyday textures, reinforce this need for spatial reflexivity. As Harvey (2009) points out, already the Kantian proclamation of cosmopolitanism, as a universal law of hospitality between strangers, emanated from the alteration of spatial conditions: notably, intensified human mobility and crossings of territorial boundaries between nation-states. However, the Kantian notion of cosmop...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Part I: Mapping the Terrain: Boundaries and Bridges
• Part II: Contextualizing Space, Mobility and Belonging
• Notes
• References
• Index