just some pretty landscapes, enjoy :)
Sunday, December 8, 2013
Appadurai, post 12/4
Appadurai states, "The new global cultural economy has to be seen as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order that cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing center-periphery models (even those that might account for multiple centers and peripheries)" (Appadurai, 514). He is meaning that our contemporary world is multivalent and susceptible to many different meanings and interpretations. Nothing today just has one simple meaning, it can interpreted and critically analyzed differently by many different people. It is a notion of disjuncture that our postmodern society has taken on and that everything is overlapping. He believes that this disjuncture is very unsettling. Dr. Cummings introduced the term "contemporinarity" and the idea of big systems of flow and that we can move beyond the postmodern. The complexity of our global world now is dangerous because of how systematic it is. Things can do very wrong and it affects the whole system, it can be epidemic now. The complexity of the current global economy has to do with certain fundamental disjunctures between economy, culture, and politics that we have only begun to theorize" (Appadurai 514). This is why Appadurai created frameworks to dissect the relationship between global cultural flows: enthnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideascapes. These frameworks must be looked at critically to see this disjunctness of our world. The idea of America being the dominant culture now is at question. "...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" (Appadurai 513).
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Kelly, I really enjoyed reading your blog post on Appadurai because I thought you picked out some great key quotes from the reading and I also loved the images you included as well. One part of your passage that really stood out to me was "Nothing today just has one simple meaning, it can interpreted and critically analyzed differently by many different people. It is a notion of disjuncture that our postmodern society has taken on and that everything is overlapping." I found the text in the reading to be kind of confusing so I really liked how you put this concept of his into your own words, it made it much easier for me to understand. I agree with what you are saying. As a society we do in fact interpret things and define them very differently depending on the context, situation, or experience at hand. This concept made me think of an example that I know we can all relate to, especially at our age, texting. Sending a message with a few words can be interpreted and critically analyzed differently by many different people just like you said. Sometimes, just one text message can make a person second-guess what they said or how the person they are sending it to will take it. If you were talking to them in person you could read their movements, their tone of voice and body language. But over text you have only got their words, so you have to pay attention and decipher the true meaning. However, many times miscommunication occurs and people think one thing when really it was not meant that way at all. Technology, in my opinion, makes things more complicated when it comes to communication, thus why I agree with Appadurai and how he is unsettled about our post-modern society as a whole. Although I did not attend our last class, I like how you included Dr. Cumming’s idea of "contemporinarity." It is a great way to further explain Appadurai’s ideas and connect them to bigger picture examples.
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