ruqayyahali, Appadurai

Appadurai says toward the end of the reading: "I have employed a set of terms (ethnoscape, financescape, technoscape, mediascape, and indeoscape) to stress different streams or flows along which cultural material many be seen to be moving across national boundaries." (M 521) These five terms are his descriptions of the various scapes of global culture. Appadurai's main discussion is about global culture and its development in the world today. He talks about how these landscapes are the building blocks of 'imagined worlds' which are created by historical imaginations of groups around the world. (M 514) 

From what I understand, Appadurai's imagined worlds are the ones created by technology. The social media networks that keep us globally connected but not interpersonally connected are a good representation of this. Rather than have connection through physical means, i.e. meeting and having a conversation, we connect through virtual world. A lot of people in today's society do not know their neighbors but they know people they've never met from around the world. This allows us to be more interconnected globally but miss out on benefits of those immediately around them.

One example I can think of is with families. When I was growing up and had just gotten a cell phone, I was not allowed to use it during family time or at the dinner table. Now as an adult, my parents still discourage the use of phones during family time but even more so because they are direct ways to access social media in addition to texting. The reason my parents were always so against this was due to the fact that we were not paying attention to the people, the humans, right around us. We were too busy paying attention to those we were virtually connected to. This is an increasing problem I see today with young people and adults. I rarely see a moment when a family is eating dinner at a restaurant when they don't all have their phones out.

Appadurai says that this is a negative influence of globalization because it takes away from human interactions and only allows us to exist in a virtual world. This is an issue because it makes the world seem interconnected when we really aren't. Real world issues seem to be bridged because we are all connected globally but the issues still exist, we just turn a blind eye because we live in these imaginary worlds. We care more about the global community rather than cherishing our local communities.