Jeff Hart’s blog Globalization, may I introduce you to Mediation grapples with William Mazzarella’s discussion of reflexivity and self representation in the media, within the context of accelerating globalization. Hart explains that television and the internet are far-reaching mediums at the forefront of globalization which creates distance between information and its implications (Hart 2011). In this, globalization has transformed self-representation and reflexivity especially in terms of culture and the nation.
Mazzarella views information as capital and media as the mode of its dispersion. However, before media is dispersed, it passes through screens and filters (Hart 2011) as it is framed and represented. The process of editing determines what the viewer sees and understands. Hart brings into discussion the emergence of citizen journalism with the increasing technology of video and photo capabilities on cell phones. Hart explains that “we” as citizens have empowered the media as facilitators of knowledge (2011). On the other hand, he acknowledges that Mazzarella asserts that people are becoming cognitively and affectively dependent on external processes of mediation (2004). In other words, while citizens are producing media, they are simultaneously developing dependencies upon media and reliance on technology. Citizens are to some extent, active agents engaging in the self-representation of media.
Kelly Askew asserts that media has become a basic part of culture (2002). Hart recognizes that the media in an increasingly globalized environment is “our” avenue to the foreign, or the “other” (2011). He is engaging in Mazzarella’s discussion of media and globalization as reflexive; it allows viewers to compare their own culture to that visible in the media. This impacts how we view our own culture and other cultures (Askew 2002).
Heidi Waechtler’s blog Imaginary Homelands utilizes Mazzarella’s theories of globalization and mediation to understand the ways in which communities become mediated and reconstructed through new media. In essence, Waechtler provides an extreme example of the “imagined community” (Anderson 1983). Similarly to Hart, Waechtler begins by discussing Mazzarella’s call to focus on reflexivity for both the informant and ethnographer (2004). Globalization causes mediation to shift, allowing cultures to view themselves at a close distance (Waechtler 2011). As Mazzarella argues, the process of globalization has inspired a revaloratization of the local and the subsequent attempt to search for authenticity of the local (2004). Waechtler like Hart recognizes that Mazzarella views mediation as the filtering of media; the way we frame and represent a culture. Further, she offers that the audience of the mediated wants to ignore the process of mediation and forget the way media is framed and represented. However, she draws attention to how dangerous it is to ignore the process of mediation by asking “what happens when a local culture is being mediated to a global audience – but the locality being represented ceases to exist, except in the mind of the mediators? (2011).”
Waechtler provides the example of Pine Point, a mining town in the Northwest Territories that no longer exists. While the town no longer exists physically, it is represented and reconstructed virtually in a story of time and place “told through an interface that incorporates a handful of voices (Waechtler 2011).” Through an online community of memories, Pine Point is the most extreme form of the imagined community; it is a community of memories. In a physical and temporal distance, the creators of this community were able to mediate the culture of Pine Point, thus recreating a culture which ceases to exist (Waechtler 2011). Through her analysis of reflexivity and imagined communities, Waechtler analyzes how the media and globalization allows us to imagine that which no longer exists within our local ways of life (Anderson 1983).
Works Cited
Anderson, Benedict
1983 Imagined Communities, Pp. 9-46. London, New York: Verso.
Hart, Jeff
2011[2011] Jeff Hart’s blog: Globalization may I introduce you to Mediation. http://jeffalexanderhart.blogspot.com/, accessed March 25, 2011.
Mazarella, William
2004 Culture, Globalization, Mediation. Annual Review of Anthropology 33:345-367.
Waechtler, Heidi
2011[2011] Mixed Media: Blogging Anthropology 378, Imaginary Homelands. http://blogs.ubc.ca/mixedmedia/, accessed March 25, 2011.
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