Purpose Motive results in “free labor”

During our discussion yesterday Dan Pink’s theory on what drives human beings came to my mind and I wanted to share this awesome source called RSAnimate on youtube. If you watch the full 11 minutes you will not be disappointed because he investigates the science of human motivation and drive. However, you could also skip ahead to minute 7 where he specifically addresses the ideas of “Free Labor” using examples of wikipeda, apache and skype to name a few. Articulating the human desire to be an autonomous master with purpose…

Check it out!

Can’t Escape “Scapes”

What I found most intriguing from this weeks reading of Arjun Appadurai “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy” was his explanation of  these imaginary perspectival “scapes” that we undergo. Honestly, while reading, these various scapes started to become one big dimensional clump that I begin to second guess as even necessary to describe our cultural flow. However after much consideration; imaginary or not, “disjunctured” or not these “scapes” can be beneficial for understanding how one might see the world and those around them. Well depending on how that person sees the world and those around them.

Well of course because I think in media and mass comm., The “scape” that stuck out to me most was mediascapes, which is  basically how television, music, movies, magazines etc. impact the world. Also, technoscapes because we are such a mechanical, informational, technological driven society. Then the rest of those scape-isms became a blur and blended because they seem to be ideological, political and technical and any other “cal” you can think of. Even Appadurai that several of the scapes are closely related. Therefore it helped that Appadurai went on to give an explanation of “disjunctures” that he finds present with the flow of these “scapes.”

There seems to be some disconnection or discrepancies finding the direct relationship of cause and effect within these systems. However, whereas I was first under the impression that these disjunctions that Appadurai spoke of showed weakness or inconsistencies, Appadurai states,

“global flows occur: they occur in and through the growing disjunctures between ethnoscapes, technoscapes, finamcapes, mediascapes and ideoscapes” “…there have been some disjunctures between the flows
of these things, but the sheer speed, scale and volume of each of these flows is now so great that the disjunctures have become central to the politics of global culture”

So while I gave up trying to understand how a disconnection became a connection or how a separation brought these “scapes” from imaginary to reality, there’s one thing I know.  Because of reality television or even reality such as news show on television,I create ideas and thoughts and images in my head of what something is like and have a perceived notion about it. Because of my experiences with having a Dell laptop and having to contact the companies consumer support my assistance comes from individuals from other countries who are more skilled with technology. This allows me to understand Technoscapes.

“while India exports waiters and chauffeurs to Dubai and Sharjah, it also exports software engineers to the United States”

So these scapes are everywhere. Just like many other theories we have learned over the semester. They have been in front of me forever, just didn’t know there were snazzy technical terms for such everyday encounters. But I guess we can’t escape scapes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Globalization and Free labor

Today, Minyoung and I will do the presentation focusing on the reading  Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy” and Tiziana Terranova, “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy”. The reason why we chose them because the first one is a star marked reading and the second one seems more interesting.

At first, we planned to do the presentation like other people did: bringing out the definition, explaining the articles and drawing the connection between different readings, but we couldn’t find really clear connection of the two readings and we don’t know if that is”necessary” to explain the articles to you guys, because after finishing all you guys’ post yesterday I found that I knew nothing about this week’s readings (I am not kidding).

So, we’d like to focus more on sharing our experience as foreigners or I should say “globalized” foreigners and people doing “free labor” all the time with you. However, we still have several questions related to the readings. And because at tomorrow’s  class Jessica is going to talk about the final project, we are afraid we will not have enough time to bring them out. We’d like to post some of our questions here and hope someone could share their answers with us.

First, what is homogeneation and heterogeneation in the globalization context.
Second, what is the internal connection between the five landscapes and the disjuncture.

Third, is immaterial worker, collective intelligence and free labor the same thing?

Chaotic Narcissistic Sex Explosion : Appadurai

Hello Class. I put sex in my title because I wanted you to read my post. You can stop now if your main interest was in that word.

First I will talk about myself. My academic mind was vindicated by ‘Disjuncture and Difference’. During my undergraduate I opted to write a thesis on the cultural identity of Iraq during its nation-state formulation. I never finished, but I was still interesting.

The point is, I found Benedict Anderson’s “Imagined Communities” and Partha Chatterjee towards the end of my research and felt that they were talking about what I wanted to study. They were both cited with respect this article.

Now, enough about me. What do you think about me? Appadurai put into words (many different words) what I’ve been coming to understand throughout our readings. The changes to our political, cultural, and economic world is being driven forward by so many media and technologies that it is getting to big to understand.

Something that kept coming up last week was specialization within our modern economies and cultural exchanges. It’s tax season, if you actually made money this year (which I doubt many of us did) then you better get a specialist to take a look. Want to take a company public? You need a whole team. Want your film to be a success in the US, Japan, and India? That’s going to take 3 teams.

Or… bringing democracy to the middle east/ “One man’s imagined community is another man’s political prison.” (6)

What are we to do then. He uses the suffix -scape to break down our cultural exchanges into equally disjointed and varying dimensions (five dimensions 6-7). This is helpful, yes. But you’d still need a team of scholars to study each one in any given circumstance, and by time your paper was published the -scape would have shifted. That’s the world we live in, for better or worse.

The word ‘Schematic’ came up during my keywords assignment, and thats a helpful way for me to understand it. As information passes through these ‘schematics’ it is altered by them. The questions for us is becomes: How was it altered, and how will it be altered when factor x changes?

John Lennon said,

“Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.”

Appaduri said,

“Global flows occur between the cracks and disjunctures of our functioning world” (11)

He didn’t actually say that, but it’s the italicized quote on page 11. He is saying that our cultural flows and information flows happen when while were busy trying to make them happen. There is so much more good stuff in here: commoditization of heretage,  the effect of the dividual on the inmate relationship, which he sites family/male-female dynamics twice on page 13 and 18. However, I want to make one more point.

The ‘dialogue of crisis’ that Baudrillard explained is now being re-written as an essential rhetorical paradigm for Appaduri. He says at the end of his essay that:

In order for the theory of global cultural interactions predicated on disjunctive flows to have any force greater than that of a mechanical metaphor, it will have to move into something like a human version of the theory that some scientists are calling ‘chaos’ theory… we need to start asking them in a way that relies on images of flow and uncertainty, hence ‘chaos’, rather than on older images of order, stability and systematically. (20)

I feel a bit amateurish pointing back to McLuhan again (he didn’t really say all that much), but it would seem that even in our dialogue, as Baudrillard pointed out, the medium is the message. In order to understand the chaos of reproduction, fragmentation, specialization and otherwise complex systems, we must speak with a rhetoric of chaos and chaotic theoretical structures.

Let me begin: EveryTHing is WrOng!

The digital economy: 12 years later

I took an interest to Terranova’s essay “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy” for the fact that I intend on entering this “digital economy” and use the knowledge I gain from this program to a digital landscape. I have always found it quite captivating watching new media transform and become something much grander than even the most knowledgeable can imagine. Thats why I looked at this essay which discussed the process of the free labor seen in on the Internet, and how it transcends into everyday culture. Terranova focuses on several different ideologies to garner support and criticism for what she deems the “digital economy”. “The expansion of the Internet has given ideological and material support to contemporary trends towards increased flexibility of the workforce, continuous reskilling, freelance work and the diffusion of practices such as “supplementing””. This essay was written back in 2000, so the shift towards the digital was in its infancy at this time. Marketing trends, advertising ideas and many common current practices in the media industry were more than unpopular, they were rarely used. This idea of the community that is discussed throughout the essay was nearly 4 years before the inception of Facebook, so therefore you can use this essay as a prelude to what we now associate with the internet, and more specifically social networking.

Terranova discusses the difference between old media (television) and the new media (Internet) and how their roles within the medium are specifically defined. How the use of free labor is rarely seen in television but is prevalent and sometimes necessary for the success of the Internet. “It might be that the Internet has no stabilized yet, but it seems undeniable that the digital economy is the fastest and most visible zone of production within late capitalist societies”.  Later it is discussed how quickly new products or trends can take shape, and I of course think about the latest growth of viral marketing, and how effective it can be. 12 years after this essay was written and are we at the pinnacle of what Terrnaova was trying to explain, is this what was expected or has the digital community grown bigger than she had envisioned. The growth experienced in just over a decade is quite astonishing, and it is always important to look back at just a few years earlier and to see how far new media has come and how much potential it does in fact hold.

there is no center

Appadurai’s piece was very illuminating for me, as I’ve always had an interest in global cultural flows being raised as part of a transnational community.  It’s always been more complicated than traditional narratives of Americanization and the ‘global village’, with various disjunctures occurring among the various mediascapes, ideoscapes, etc.

The South Asian context is one particularly suited for analysis here, as the South Asian diaspora (composed of competing imagined ethnic/national communities) has become widespread and brought with it unique Western-influenced cultural productions. Bollywood and Kariwood (Pakistani) films are well-known for their re-makes of American hits such as “Fight Club”, “Memento”, and even “I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry”. Like Appadurai notes, these represent indigenized representations rather than a homogenization of South Asian Culture; hence, the Bollywood version of “Fight Club” has frequent song and dance interludes.

It’s interesting to note that the Maoist revolutionaries in Nepal made it part of their platform to ban the corrupting influence of Bollywood cinema, along with seemingly more pressing demands such as land reform. The cultural battlefield is indeed of immense significance. The irony here, of course, is that these revolutionaries were simultaneously identifying as Maoists, an ideology that’s also originated elsewhere (and indigenized here for the Nepalese context).

Appadurai’s ideas about imagined nostalgia are also intriguing, pointing to the case of Filipino flipping of American oldies.  His observation that “the United States is no longer the puppeteer of a world system of images, but is only one node of a complex transnational construction of imaginary landscapes” is also apt.  I’m reminded of M.I.A.’s song “Jimmy”, which prominently contains a sample from the Hindi song “Jimmy Jimmy Jimmy Aaja”. The Western audiences for whom the song was released for had no idea about the nostalgia the song is playing on, the inverse of the global cultural flow in Appadurai’s Filipino example.  To add another dimension to the cultural flows that produced it, the original song comes from the Bollywood film “Disco Dancer”, which was obviously inspired in part by the American “Saturday Night Fever”.  And American disco music itself came out of influences from Latin America and the Black Diaspora.  This back-and-forth flow of mediascapes signifies that there can be no identifiable center, only a fluidity that creates disjunctures to Western hegemony’s narratives of cultural dominance and modernization.

MIA – Jimmy: http://vimeo.com/13256990

Disco Dancer – Jimmy Jimmy Jimmy Aaja: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIN_xal0ATM

Gajini (Bollywood remake of Memento): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjVKxXTnYl4&feature=player_embedded

 

Coming Together-Globalization

I was totally fascinated by Aneesh’s “Virtual Migration” piece. When referring to the ” global regime of real time” it speaks to the lining up of the virtually shared experience on this massive global level.  One of the quotes that speak to this concept is on pg. 6o when Aneesh states, “Cyberspace, even in its drastic difference, does connect and integrate physical worlds far apart, linking labor from one world to another.”  The linking of labor is also a direct result of the linking of worlds. We live in a world where real-time scenarios can be shared despite time zone and space restrictions. Even with this integration and fusion of spaces it’s important to remember physical spatial relevance will remain. on pg. 59 Aneesh states “The physical ways performing work are not going to vanish: just as the theater did not disappear after the cinema turned acting bodies into moving pictures, the embodied migration of labor will perhaps never be replaced by virtual labor flows, as some services can be performed only with body..” I couldn’t have said it better. The physical body, space, and presence will always be relevant at some point in the processes of globalization, and the virtual migration process. When Aneesh states, “The reframing of space and time may not always be easy or even successful…”, it speaks to the idea that Globalization and virtual migration is a constant act of trying to reframe space and time and compression of the two to meet productivity goals. There is a whole cultural exchange happening and it appears to be one-sided. As the sourcing agent the agenda is to normalize the contact between workers being sourced in India and American customers /clients attempting to access these services. It’s an indoctrination whose end result is to spend less and generate  more. On pg 94 Aneesh states “Economics and culture merge in capital’s effort to create a world after its own image.”  The  readings provide an opportunity to weigh in on how globalization empowers andcripples the on different ends of the spectrum. It will be interesting to hear the other perspectives in class. Essentially virtual migration and establishment of orders that compress space and time will continue to happen. As long as there is a demand for more and more production there will be a demand for integration and collaboration on global levels.

Global Culture

Arjun Appadurai does a great job at defining and giving examples of our current global culture economy. We have changed from cultural interactions based solely on warfare and religions of conversation in the past century to colonization and the print capitalism to a media global village. Appadurai explains a concept called “nostalgia for the present” in which a foreign population “looks back to a world they have never lost” (p.3) which resembles American or European cultural history such as music and even fashion styles. He talks about Filipinos and I can recall other Asian and African countries that have turned a blind eye to the facts of their history which involves missionization, democratization, and colonization but dress like American hippies from the 1960s and can mimic country singers from the 1980s. It’s a paradox in that the foreigners rely on American or European culture to reminisce without acknowledging their own history.

VH1's The Mob Wives

To understand the global economy and its disjuncture, Appadurai illustrates five dimensions of global cultural flow: ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, and ideoscapes. In summary, they are defined as moving people, information and mechanical technologies, money, mediated images, and ideas. With regards to mediascapes, they provide “…large and complex repertoires of images, narratives, and ethnoscapes to viewers throughout the world, in which the world of commodities and the world of news and politics are profoundly mixed” (p.9). Audiences throughout the world are able to experience media as intricate and unified range of print, advertisement billboards, celluloid, and screens. He goes on to say that realistic and fictional landscapes lines are blurred so that audiences without metropolitan experience create whimsical worlds. It’s funny because my Mother is from a farm in the South and she grew up watching “Mod Squad” and “Starsky and Hutch”. She had a very obtuse concept of metropolitan life in California and New York solely based on her media experiences. I can only imagine how some audience’s minds are constructing imagined worlds based on reality TV programs like the “Mob Wives” if they have never been to New York and know nothing about the Italian-American Mob.

Is Globalization a Two Way Street?

Thea – this is mostly in response to you but I decided since it was somewhat of a separate point (and a bit too long to be a comment) that I should separate it here.  Appadurai doesn’t address in this way exactly, but I’ve always found it interesting and puzzling that certain things in popular culture from the US can penetrate borders and become nearly as popular in any part of the world, but I don’t always feel that this cultural transaction is two-sided.  Plenty of things – ideas, information, media, religion – have come from other places and I do know this, but let’s pretend for the purpose of my argument that I’m only taking Appadurai’s points and focusing in on just pop culture.  I wouldn’t necessarily attribute this one-way street to other countries not having something equivalent to Britney that Americans would consume, but I find it funny and maybe a little shallow that we may never hear Swedish recording artist Loreen’s #1 single “Euphoria”, and yet right below it on the Swedish Top 40 (for some ridiculous reason) is Train’s “Drive By”. You also don’t see American recording artists taking a song that went #1 in Japan and saying ‘hey, I’d like to record my own version of that and release it here’ as Appadurai mentions that some Filipino artists do. Is that really globalization in the ‘global village’, or adaptation? Were they really influenced in any way and felt a connection to the piece of media from America, or did their labels just assume it was a cash cow?

Some Americans will choose an American film over foreign because ‘they don’t feel like reading the subtitles’.  So are we just lazy and other cultures are more open-minded? Could we benefit from an actual exchange and not just a ‘hey look at how awesome we are – we have Jay Z and Beyonce and Michael Jackson and Justin Bieber’ – what could we stand to gain? Are we really only guilty of participating in the ‘bad’ parts of an exchange (war, drugs, human trafficking, advertising for our own corporations’ benefit)?  On the playing field of global cultural flows, I just get the feeling that the breeze only blows one way – from us to you – and exchange is a word we ignore. And stealing nearly every good show from the UK and making our own version here doesn’t exactly count.

The mentioning of nostalgia in the essay also makes me wonder what kind of value something nostalgic to Americans would mean to someone in the Philippines who probably won’t have the same feelings or sentiments of nostalgia. I personally enjoy Queen’s “Another One Bites The Dust” because it reminds me of middle school swim team and happier times, blah blah blah something sappy, therefore it has nostalgic value to me.  But is there some twenty-something Filipino girl that can say the same thing about “May Isa Na Namang Kumagat Sa Alikabok” by Michael V.?  She can develop her own nostalgic meaning to her cover version of the Queen song, but Appadurai accurately coins this “nostalgia without memory” (3) and states that “their future is [our] past” (4) . Just a very interesting concept to me.
*Sidebar – Thea, I really enjoyed reading your travel experience, but I have to complain – I had “Oops I Did It Again” stuck in my head the entire time I wrote this 🙂

Britney in the Rice Paddies

“…if a global cultural system is emerging, it is filled with ironies and resistances, sometimes camouflaged as passivity and a bottomless appetite in the Asian world for things Western”.  (Appadurai, p. 3)

In 2002 I took six weeks out of work to travel in Cambodia, the Philippines, and India.   I’d traveled before, but this was my first real taste of the effects of globalization.  It was 6 months after September 11th.  I was afraid of open hostility from locals (based in the assumption that few support terrorism, but many dislike Western dominance), but mostly what I found was that they were happy for my business.  There were marionette dolls of Saddam Hussein for sale right outside of the airport.  As soon as I said I was American, there were usually strangely jolly expressions of condolence, followed by a lot of jokes about Bush.  There was a general vibe of friendliness, followed by a very clear message:  “Now America’s been brought low.  How does it feel?”  Clearly I was still seen as the rich American, but something else was going on–an acknowledgement, and perhaps pleasure in the fact that the epicenter of capitalism had taken a big hit.

Whether I was in Bangkok or a remote village, Britany Spears was everywhere:  t-shirts, videos, pirated CD’s, on kids watches, beach towels, underpants.  Along with a lot of strategically placed images of the twin towers on mugs in shops, Brittney was the face of the West.  I stayed in a tiny village near some rice paddies in the Philippines, and each morning I would eat breakfast to “Oops I did it again” playing on a tiny TV set in the middle of a family restaurant.  Old men and mothers watched her videos with as much interest as young girls.  The younger men who had a sense of cool were much more interested in Rambo, which they played later in the afternoon.   You got the sense that they’d seen the movie hundreds of times.

Appadurai addresses this fetishizing of Western culture in the Philippines as “nostalgia without memory”, “one of the central ironies of the politics of global cultural flows” (3).  The creation of nostalgia for a “world that was never lost” is a critical aspect of what Appadurai calls the “image production and reception” of global culture.  Even months after 9/11, the celebration of Western culture seemed stronger than ever, particularly in the Philippines.  This surprised me.  I expected more unease.  It points to the incredible power of homogenized global entertainment—made for the masses to enjoy no matter how disenfranchised the viewers may be.