Regarding to Tomlinson’s book “Globalization and culture” , nowadays, Culture is one of the different dimensions that compound the multidimensional concept of Globalization. While in the prior studies about culture this concept were linked to a physical space conception, the complex connectivity and the global unicity have move out the context of study from the local to a more general scenario. The “annihilation of space by time” and the “time-space compression” have altered the course of the traditional concept of a big and widely world, connectivity comes from a increasing global-spacial proximity. Both the improving of physical transport and communications have lead this change. Undoubtedly, this flow of information lead a change in all aspects: economic, politic and cultural aspects. Regarding to Tomlinson point of view, it is a bad way to start that any of this dimension is the master discourse. “A better way would be to identify the specific way of describing the world that is contained within an economic, a political or a cultural discourse” (Tomlinson 1999: 17). For Tomlinson, culture is a concept that refers the order of life in which human beings construct meaning through practices of symbolic representation, “the ways in which people make their lives, individually and collectively, meaningful by communicating with each other”. But, what the author considers important is not to isolate this dimensions people could be acting “the economic” at the same time at “doing the cultural”. As the definition as above said, the traditional consideration of culture linked to the products of art is skewed, despite of this important as product of everyday life of people they don’t define the “cultural dimension”.
Moreover, the author establishes that his conception of culture also refers to the mundane practice that directly contribute to stories through which people interpret our existence. The globalization is, undoubtedly, changing the people´s sense of identity , therefore, the culture and all other dimensions are broadly being affected.
Tomlinson also discussed the importance of media in the enculturization of people. Despite of the debilitation of the concept fostered because the relation that people establishes with media technologies because of the cultural representation that are transmitted. According to the author, mass media and telecommunication are increasingly taking part of our everyday lives but “they are not the only source of a globalized cultural experience” (Tomlinson 1999: 21). Thus any cultural study focused in mass media wouldn’t have a direct relevance in discussion about culture.
Culture has a crucial role in globalization because of being “an intrinsic aspect of the whole process of complex connectivity” as well as a constitutive aspect of it. According to the author culture also “marks out a symbolic terrain of meaning-construction as the arena for global political interventions” and also the processes and practices by which people furnish for themselves meaningful accounts of their social existence ate becoming somehow more closely articulated with the economic sphere. Hence cultural, political and economic sphere interact within the process called globalization.
Culture is, for Tomlinson, a “fundamental” dimension to globalization rather than the simply analysis of the impact of communication technologies.
Modernity is, in the words of Tomlinson, the most powerful of the mediating categories and theories by which we already understand the social and cultural world. These categories lead us to the “complex connectivity” evident everywhere in the world today, an empirical condition referred to Globalization. Therefore, if according to the author Complex Connectivity is peculiar to the “modern period” and Complex Connectivity is a empirical condition of Globalization., Globalization is a consequence of modernity.
Tomlinson addresses the modernity through Giddens research where argues that the peculiar dynamic properties of modernity is to to make possible the technological developments and also the social capacity to handle time and space. Before the modern era communities were in the vast majority small local rural communities where isolation and immobility were the main characteristic of their way of life. Regarding to Tomlinson we have to study modernity regarding to Globalization as a “Consequence of Modernity. It changes and frees social relations from face-to-face interactions in the localities of pre-modern societies and allows the closer system of relation across time and space: The core of Globalization.
Through the book Tomlinson relates the cultural change to the term Deterritorialization, the change of the social relations affects directly to the traditional localities where we live. Deterritorialization links the aspects of a globalized culture to one key assumption, where globalization fundamentally transforms the relationships between the places we inhabit and our cultural practices, experiences and identities, assuming that places are not so important than in the past to define and support our identity. Deterritorialization is a concept used by Tomlinson for describing the loss of the natural relation of culture to geographical and social territories. The existential comforts of localities decrease while the abstract social forces which structure our live increase. The real localities are replaced by Non-Places, places where people make this abstract interactions like airports, supermarkets, service stations, etc... the traditional link between our cultural experience and our location changes as never in the past. This new experience is crucial to understand our way of life in modern societies. The condition of deterritorialization is destructive of real localities.
According to Mosco (2004:92) the myth of Geography’s end starts from the view that computer communication makes space infinitely malleable the logical extension of a process of freeing people from spatial constraint with all its confining social and economic implications. You are no longer defined by where you come because you can construct you own electronic identity The space in cyberspace has no location this is an entire domain where the rules of traditional geography no longer apply. In his work about “geographical imaginations and relational space” Richad Ek (2006) establishes that, in academic research about space and place in late modernity the notion of “placelessness” is often discused. It indicates a growing existential hollowness when it comes to the connection between human individuals and the places they are in contact with. A combination of an established consumer society, increased mobility and a technological development with mass media and information technologies is blamed for a rapidly acceleration of society places. The author uses the example of business streets, terrace house areas, shopping malls, tourist destinations, hotels, airports and theme parks as “non-places”. And the modern economy will be probably based in this kind of spaces, where the time is relative to the activity of people.
REFERENCES:
- Tomlinson, John, (1999).Globalization and Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press
- Lévi-Strauss, Claude ,(1977) [1953]. Antropología estructural. Eudeba. Buenos Aires.
- Mosco, Vincent, (2004). The digital sublime. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT press
- Ek, Richard.(2006) Media Studies. Geographical imaginations and relational space, In Jansson, André & Falkheimer, Jesper, (2006). Geographies of communication. Göteborg: Nordicom
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