ABSTRACT
A miasma is an atmosphere that obscures and vitiates. The concept of miasma has several advantages. First, it points to the fact of things being obscured. Second, it suggests vision as being inhibited by something that acts as a kind of screen. Third, the screen it connotes is smoky or gauze-like. A miasma brings to mind something suspended in the air, alternately shrouding and clouding one’s perception. Media analysts Edward Herman and Robert McChesney have observed that in context of capitalist globalisation, mass media tends to address individuals less and less as citizens and more and more as consumers. The miasmic dimensions of capitalist globalisation are most easily discernible in what it is believed to signify for our present and future economy and in the transnational senses of self, belonging and desires that it supposedly generates. In the ideal world of neoliberal globalisers, the ‘local’ represents market opportunity and a pliant labour force able and willing to serve metropolitan capital.
