Article contents
Digital Networks and Citizenship
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 October 2020
Extract
Paradoxical as it may appear, isn't it through the rights of man that transpires today—at a planetary level—the worst discriminations?
—Jean Baudrillard, Les mots de passe
Critical discourse today locates an antagonism between globalization and citizenship. The deepening of globalizing processes strips citizens of power, this position maintains. As economic processes become globalized, the nation-state loses its ability to protect its population. Citizens lose their ability to elect a leadership that effectively pursues their interests. When production facilities are dispersed beyond the nation, jobs are lost to foreigners, labor markets are affected by conditions in countries with diverse living standards, and capital flows, at the speed of light, to places of optimum returns. Consumption is also planetary in scope, bringing across borders alien cultural assumptions as embodied in commodities. The popular need no longer be the local. Although foreign goods are inflected with community values and easily adapted to local conditions, they remain indexes of otherness. What is more dramatic still than the changes in production and consumption, nation-states are losing their cultural coherence by dint of planetary communications systems. Much of contemporary music is global music or at least a fusion of diverse musical cultures. Satellite technology and the Internet bring all media across national boundaries as if those borders did not exist. Global processes run deep and wide, rendering problematic the figure of the citizen as a member of a national community.
- Type
- Talks from the Convention
- Information
- PMLA , Volume 117 , Issue 1: Special Topic: Mobile Citizens, Media States , January 2002 , pp. 98 - 103
- Copyright
- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2002
References
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