ABSTRACT
It’s August 2008 and I’m in Melbourne watching a live telecast of sprinter Usain Bolt winning the 100 meters gold medal at the Beijing Olympics. I’m not at home, or even in front of a television set, but peering at the screen on a friend’s mobile phone as we walk down the street. Suddenly a message arrives from friends in London with the first photos of their newly born baby. We look at them, and then ring a colleague to discover that the place we’re heading for is actually just around the corner. I text my partner to let her know where I am, and then glance at the first news coverage of Bolt’s record-breaking run. Although the details of the above account are imagined, exchanges along these lines
are increasingly commonplace, albeit more common in some places than others. The point of my story is to highlight the way in which routine social interactions now often involve complex technological mediations operating across a number of levels. At one level, global events are screened on a variety of media platforms, including television, internet, and mobile phones. These events garner massive audiences across the world: the Beijing Olympic opening ceremony claimed the largest ever “live” screen audiencearound two billion. In addition, the process of responding to and interpreting events has accelerated; instead of news cycles defined by the arrival of the morning paper or the broadcast of the evening news, we now have journalism metered by the speed of pervasive “real time” media. The blurring of the lines between event, live presentation, and interpretation gives rise to the rolling twenty-four-hour news coverage that characterized the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003. At a second level, private communication now routinely occurs across great geo-
graphic expanses, enabling widely dispersed communities to maintain forms of “distant intimacy” stitched together by the frequent exchange of small messages. If the content of such messages often seems mundane to outsiders (and even to participants), the significance of the process of exchange should not be underestimated. Media have become integral to the enactment of social ties via social networks distributed over vast territories. As Scott Lash (2002: 15) puts it, “because my forms of social life are so normally and chronically at-a-distance, I cannot navigate these distances, I cannot achieve sociality apart from my machine interface.” Moreover, routine communication not only bridges vast distances but reconfigures local practices, such as visiting friends. The fact that these
different scales and trajectories are now dependent on the same complex technological systems shifts our understanding of the coordinates of “public” and “private” and alters the space-time texture of our everyday lives. Finally, we might note that media not only enable new forms of mobility through
their capacity to bridge time and space, but they are increasingly becoming mobile themselves. This shift from fixed and discrete points of production and consumptioncentered around key sites such as studio, home, and office-to pervasive networks that can be accessed on the run is reconfiguring the characteristic spatial experiences and rhythms of social life. Foundational presumptions of sociology, such as the emphasis on structure and “solids,” are being challenged. Indeed, the social is reconceptualized as “liquid” (Bauman 2000), “mobile” (Urry 2007), and composed of “flows” (Castells 1989). In this chapter, I will analyze some of the ways in which media technologies have
contributed to the transformation of social relations of space and time. To conceptualize space and time as social relations is, first of all, to insist that they are neither “natural” nor “objective” systems. Rather, understandings and valuations of space and time emerge from complex interactions involving technologies, institutions, material infrastructures, forms of knowledge and imagination, embodied experience, and social practices. My analysis here will trace the historical role played by different media technologies in
helping to constitute the nation-state as a dominant frame for modern culture and social life. After identifying some of the tensions in this project, I will conclude by arguing that contemporary developments, such as the emergence of global digital networks, have accentuated gaps in the alignment of territory, culture, and sovereignty that once defined the ideal nation-state, incubating new patterns of cultural affiliation and belonging not yet solidified into formal institutions. Clearly, media comprise only one force at work in contemporary debates over glo-
balization, and they need to be assessed in the context of other dynamics, including new processes of economic exchange affecting trade, investment, and production; new patterns of migration affecting the movement of people; and new “global risks” such as climate change that increasingly drive demands for “post-national” forms of governance. Nevertheless, focusing on media offers strategic insights into emergent relations between national and global formations at a number of levels. Media not only form a primary source of information and images about both “home” and “foreign” territories-helping to orchestrate complex processes of identification and belonging-but media flows offer visible demonstrations of the impact of global processes on national sovereignty. National regulatory regimes are more difficult to maintain in the face of satellites and the internet, as China found during the Beijing Olympic Games, while national regulation of intellectual property is increasingly challenged by digital “piracy,” on the one hand, and standards established by powerful content producers such as the United States, on the other. These examples serve to remind us that media, in the broad sense, underpin globalizing processes in most other sectors, enabling the rapid, ubiquitous, and distributed forms of communication that are becoming the taken-for-granted backdrop to social life in the twenty-first century.
