ABSTRACT
As the 1990s begin, it is clear that the frozen impasse of the Cold War has thawed, bringing new possibilities and problems for the capitalist world-system. Yet, some central points must be remembered. During the strategic deadlock of Soviet and American superpower over the past four decades of Cold War, the everyday commerce of transnational corporate capitalism has transformed significantly the established cultures, politics, and society of many nation-states by developing electronically-mediated consumption communities within and alongside their traditional ways of life.1 Indeed, the end of the Cold War marks the intrusion of these transformations even into the centrally planned economies of China, Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union. Conventional codes of power, ideology and resistance are changing in all of these still modernizing regions, but in ways that now are unclear, contradictory, and incomplete. Within such transnational consumption communities, the flow of goods, services, and signs generates densely encoded ‘hyperrealities’ or ‘mediascapes’, which form new regions and sites of shared cultural consciousness that continuously but cryptically display the workings of power and ideology. But whose power and whose ideology? The institutionalized forms of organized power are increasingly dominated by the networks of transnational corporate capital (based mainly in Japan, North America, and Western Europe), under the watchful vigilance of weak transnational zone-regimes (tied to either Soviet or American superpower), which reveal their biases most directly in the electronic imagery and technology underpinning the hyperreality of contemporary mass consumption and production.
