Post Class: Appadurai

In Arjun Appadurai's piece, "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Culture Economy," he talks about the sustained cultural forces that are occurring on a big scale in the society that we live in. He says talks about how global culture has changed so drastically in the past century (with technological advances making it easier for people to migrate and intermix cultures) that we can no longer understand it "in terms of existing center-periphery models" (514). To understand these complexities, one must "look at the relationship among five dimensions of global cultural flows" (514), including ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, finacescapes, and ideoscapes. If we can begin to understand the disjuncture of these five dimensions of global culture, we can better understand that we are living in a contemporary and complex world.

I really grasped Appadurai's idea of ideoscapes, which are images produced and recirculated by institutions. These images often are very political and seek to inculcate the masses with ideologies that promote the views and agendas of institutions, while also demoting ideologies that counter their movements. These images have the power to rewrite history and to affect cultural memory. Appadurai's ideoscapes are closely related to Herman and Chomski's reading on Propaganda. They both state how institutions have control over the media, and therefore can control what the masses are exposed to, effecting their opinions, views and thoughts. We as a society must be critical of the images presented to us through the media, and realize the specific agendas and intentions of the institutions controlling them.