Arjun Appadurai speaks of the “Mediascape” as the distribution, production and dissemination of information through the medium of newspapers, television, film, magazines etc. Arjun contends that the Mediascapes supply the world with a “repertoire of images, narratives, and ethnoscapes.” Furthermore, this complex repertoire makes it difficult for the public to decipher between a realistic and a fictional landscape thus one is encouraged to “construct imagined worlds.” There is a distance between what we perceive via the mediascape on the “screen” of information. I suppose what Arjun is implying is that because there is a disjuncture between what is seen and what is actually there in space-time, constructs of assumptions are made. In this sense it is almost like a catch 22 situation, wherein we make constructs in our minds of the world from a distance because that is what we think it is like, but then because we think it we apply it. We perpetuate our imagined world. In effect we impose our imagined world into actual constructs and create what we perceive. Catch 22, we think it therefore we see it, therefore it is. A perfect example of this is how we interpret what we read on the Internet. The other day Judith informed me of an article on the Net that wrote of a man that was bombed by the police in the U.S for appearing suspicious. I have preconceived notions about the justice system and the police force, therefore I found it easy to believe that this was true. The story, fictional or not, perpetuated the imagined construct I have created in my head of the U.S When this occurs as a collective of people I think our constructs become reality.
6 comments:
Larraine I could not agree with you more!!!!!! Additionally I feel we apply ‘mediscape’ onto people.
Framework:
How exactly are we to understand the ‘new global economy’ exactly…are we really suppose to understand it as “a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order…” like Arjun Appaduri states? So he says we should scrap all the other models and move towards this “‘elementary’ framework of exploring” the disjunctions that our current global economy has going on. These current disjunctions take place between: economy, culture, and politics. He suggests as mentioned above to use his framework which consists of exploring the disjunctions through five dimensions of relationships; ethnoscapes, mediscapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, and ideoscapes. The global flow patterns are increasingly non-isomorphic paths, so why would you try to look at these five dimensions of global cultural flow… Is there a point in trying to understand the framework of our ‘new global economy’ or has it already morphed into something new? The imagined worlds created through the process of interaction between actors, agents, and the interpretation of the five dimensions are different for each, so how can a model exists that tries to deal with disjunctions in order to understand the ‘new’? Is this the new type of model that leads the locus to understand one’s one personal constructed landscape as the answer to ‘new global economy’?
Larraine - Catch 22 would be more like 'we think it therefore we see it; we see it therefore we think it.' Regardless, I also agree with your comment that we perpetuate our imagined (normal) world, but there are people who resist social norms, you know, 'deviants.' I'm not sure of your use of the term 'reality' though. I think that through collective, the beliefs become normal, but reality doesn't imply normalcy, otherwise there would be no deviations. Reality is one of those polydefinition words, though, so perhaps we're talking about the same thing. In terms of construction illusions / assumptions, I think Arjun is implying something other than a catch-22 situation. I think that he is saying that people tend to create culturally-specific fictions based on media presented to them. The media is encoded with messages that speak to cultural knowledge (especially social norms) embedded in the collective consciousness of a particular cultural group, even though that group may no longer be geographically fixed. So, even with globalization, cultural nuances still apply.
Bobbie, perhaps I was unclear, but what I meant but catch 22 is exactly how you worded it. As well, I am not seeing that difference that you seem to be with Arjun's interpretation of the situation and mine. I had understood them to be quite similar. I understood that he was speaking of a distance between a place that is projected to the public and the actual "reality of a place", as an example. We make constructed realities of what, let just say a place like New York, is like based on what the Mediascape exposes. I think we take the assumptions we make about specific cultural, experiential an political "places", which results in a fictive construct, that may or may not be accurate.
OH. So we're in agreement then. Excellent.
I was slightly confused or even upset by the notion of ‘imagined worlds’ in Appaadurai’s writing on the global situation of society. I found it interesting to look at our world on the level of various ‘scapes’ and how each scape (there being five: ethnospace, mediascape, technoscale, finanscape and ideoscape) has networked and layered relationships to the other scapes. What upset me about these ’imagined worlds’ is how easily they can be manipulated by the domination of one scape over another. If we take for granted that each of us has individual and communal ‘imagined worlds’ which constitute our interpretations and dreams for our situations within society and the world, then what does it mean if our dreams become saturated by the ‘mediascape’? What occurs when one scape is given dominance over the others? Also, what governs these scapes?
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