ABSTRACT
Although globalization is probably the leading vision of the future in our time, enthusiasm for it has clearly waned. One of the main reasons for this is that the communicative networking of the world has not kept pace with its political and economic networking. This chapter explains why contemporary globalization is “two-speed”, with certain elites communicating across borders while the majority of people remain restricted to local realms. Researchers have yet to take the shortcomings of global “communication” seriously enough, but these can explain the setbacks of globalization, such as right-wing populism and religious fundamentalism, better than a purely structuralist approach rooted in a political or social science perspective. The present handbook is unique in its attempt to examine the dynamics and interactions of all the key social systems, namely the mass media, politics, economy, social movements, online communities and the lifeworlds of the small group and the individual.
