Week 2 - 17th July, 2012
I found that it is so hard to define ‘globalisation’, neither scholarly nor
unscholarly. Indeed, every scholar has their own recognition and interpretation
of globalisation, which makes it harder to unify a definition and usually those
definitions have something missing as time goes by.
Albrow (1990: 45) defined
globalisation as ‘all those processes by which the people of the world are
incorporated into a single world society, global society’.
Albrow’s definition might be
good at the time of 1990 but it is an out-date definition after 22 years later.
In my opinion, there are two ambiguous
parts.
First, it
undefined the processes of globalisation. I don’t get a chance to read the words
before and after that definition, maybe it well defined the processes of
globalisation on Albrow’s book. But if it reads independently, I wouldn’t
understand what those processes are and how those processes make a single world
society. It should be mentioned in the definition, that the processes of
globalisation have occasioned a mixing of worldwide economic, political (e.g. a
destabilizing of nationalist positions), cultural (e.g. the rise of hybrid cultures)
and social relation (e.g. the study of postmodernism and post-colonialism).
Besides, the key role of mediation in the process of globalisation should be
also mentioned. It is important to look at the ways media and communications
are present in politics, economic and culture, directly and indirectly
(Rantanen, 2005, pp.5).
Second, in
what ways the world becomes a single world society, a global society? It surely
doesn’t mean there is no nationality, no race. It involves the flows of globalisation
and mediation. For instant, it is a compression of time and space (Bauman,
1999), the movement of news and information from telegraph to radio and print,
and to Facebook and Youtube.
Reference: Rantanen, T 2005, ‘Theorizing media globalization’, The media and globalization, Sage, London, pp. 1–18.
