Lecture Notes 9: Globalisation, Sustainability & the Media

• Globalisation by Socialist:
  The process of transformation of local or regional phenomena into global ones. It can be described as a process by which the people of the world are unified into a single society and function together. This process is a combination of economic, technological, sociocultural and political forces.
• Globalisation by Capitalist:
  The elimination of state-enforced restrictions on exchanges across borders and the increasingly integrated and complex global system of production and exchange that has emerged as a result.
• "American sociologist George Ritzer coined the term "McDonaldization" to describe the wide-ranging sociocultural processes by which the principles of the fast-food restaurant are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society as well as the rest of the world." ~ Manfred B. Steger, Globalisation: A very Short Introduction, Page 71
• "Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned." ~ Marshall McLuhan, (1964: p.3)
• Rapidity of Communication echoes the sense.
• We can experience instantly the effects of our actions on a global scale
• "the globe is no more than a village. Electric speed at bringing all social and political functions together in a sudden implosion has heightened human awareness of responsibility to an intense degree" ~ Global Village Thesis, (1964: p.5)
• We live mythically and integrally in the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate... in the consequence of our every action. (1964: p.4)
• "Electric technology would seem to render individualism obsolete and corporate interdependence mandatory" (1962: p.1)
• The electronic age has sealed the entire human family into a single global tribe (1962: p.8)
• Three problems of globalisation:
  Sovereignty - Challenges to the idea of the nation-state
  Accountability - Transnational forces and organisations: Who controls them?
  Identity - Who are we? Nation, group, community?
• If the 'global village' is run with a certain set of values then it would not be so much an integrated community as an assimilated one.
• News corporations divides the world into territories of descending 'market important'.
• Chomsky and Herman's Propaganda Model - 5 Basic Filters
  . Ownership
  . Funding
  . Sourcing
  . Flak
  . Ideology (Eg, Anti-Islam)
• Sustainable development, sustainable growth, and sustainable use have been used interchangeably, as if their meanings were the same. They are not. Sustainable growth is a contradiction in terms: nothing physical can grow indefinitely. Sustainable use, is only applicable to renewable resources. Sustainable development is used in this context to mean: improving the quality of human life whilst living within the carrying capacity of the ecosystems.
• "Most things are not designed for the needs of the people but for the needs of the manufacturers to sell to people." ~ Papanek. V, 1983, p46