Week 1 - 1.2.2
What is the relationship between globalisation and digital network culture today?
How might we strategise communication knowing the communication environment is global and digital?
1 - Globalisation as the enaction of power, as an instrumentality over time and space (collapsing, bringing into proximity). An opportunity exists (as argued in the article) to harness the capacities of digital networking and communication to bring into engagement ‘us’ and ‘others’ in a way that allows us to grow our own identity as, always, speakers and listeners. And as listeners, those whose attitudes can be shifted by exposure to the other. NOT a homogenisation or ‘flattening’, which does not happen, but a ‘bringing into close proximity’ in time and space people, as embodied in their stories, texts, voices and images, for good or ill. The argument is made for an ethical way of responding to this opportunity.
2 - It seems to me that there needs to be an ongoing and active (interactive) engagement with terms of radical difference. Not in the interests of harmonisation or homogenisation, but as an awareness as a basic condition of that engagement, one that suspends the need or attempt to ‘conclude’ or ‘be definitive’. This is alluded to as the opportunity to ‘make spaces’ for engagement that do not place conditions on similarity or difference, by either affirming sameness or relying on stereotypes of difference.