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• Title: Digital Media, 419, and the Politics of the Global Network (Report)
• Author : CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
• Release Date : January 01, 2011
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 93 KB

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Where does the global meet the digital? The easy, immediate answer might simply be that the two meet everywhere. Indeed, if globalization as a process is by definition everywhere, and if digital information is at least potentially ubiquitous by virtue of its fluid transmissibility, then the discourse of totality that frequently surrounds both domains would seem to dictate that they are equally, interchangeably, and indistinguishably universal and universalizing. Lev Manovich exemplifies this utopian idealism regarding the cultural stakes of digital mediation as follows: "in new media lingo, to 'transcode' something is to translate it into another format. The computerization of culture gradually accomplishes similar transcoding in relation to all cultural categories and concepts. That is, cultural categories and concepts are substituted, on the level of meaning and/or language, by new ones which derive from the computer's ontology, epistemology, pragmatics. New media thus acts as a forerunner of this more general process of cultural re-conceptualization" (12). Manovich's postulates suggest that digitality performs the process it describes, translating the (allegedly) unimpeded fluidity of digital coding into a seemingly equally unimpeded cultural fluidity. Within such a perspective, the computer is at once the symbol, the means, and the agent of cultural change: the malleable ontology of the operating system seemingly has the capability (whether direct or indirect) to reshape the contours and possibilities of lived cultural experience in its own image. Indeed, when seen on a global scale, the "re-conceptualization" Manovich describes is as much the product of a highly rhetorical and ideologically entrenched culture of computerization as it is of the "computerization of culture" he refers to. In its emphasis on the mutual totality of the digital and the global, the equation Manovich makes syllogistically smoothes over the instabilities and irregularities within and between them. The convergence of these two domains is indeed far-reaching; globalization and digitization are deeply intertwined, co-constitutive phenomena. Neither element can be fully thought without the other. To reckon with globalization without accounting for the digital transmissions that underlie and sponsor it, or to reckon conversely with the digital without accounting for its global capacity for circulation and transmission, is to understand these phenomena in less than their full scope. However, as Caren Kaplan notes, "the rhetoric of cyberspace and information technologies relies heavily on a hyperbole of unlimited power through disembodied mobility ... references to boundless space, unfettered mobility, and speedy transfers abound. In this heady environment, new technologies promise ever-increasing powers of transformation and transport" (34). Kaplan's critique suggests that, contrary to the rhetoric she outlines, the relation between the global and the digital is one of unevenness and dissonance, of stoppage and parataxis, rather than of smooth cohesion and symbiosis. As such, a critical approach towards the global and the digital that takes full account of their interdependence must attend to the complex ways in which they overlay, suppress, and reveal one another, relating in configurations that exceed a simple convergence of absolute (and absolutely positivistic) values. This uneven interdependence of globalization and digitization exemplifies the need for what Edward LiPuma and Benjamin Lee describe as a shift in critical attention from a focus on performativity to a focus on circulation as "a cultural process with its own forms of abstraction, evaluation, and constraint, which are created by the interactions between specific types of circulating forms and the interpretive communities built around them" ("Cultures" 192). Contemporary information's capacity for global circulation--its ability to constellate and engage multiple new communities of int

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