A Visual Ideology of Globalization (original) (raw)
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Visual Culture and Globalization: The Visual Archive Project of the Global Imaginary
global-e, 2014
Although 'globalization' has been presented in the mainstream academic literature primarily as an economic-driven process, it must be emphasized that its cultural and visual-ideological aspects are of equal significance. Pervading and altering the urban social fabric through hybrid 'cultural objects', the 'global' has the symbolic power to transform urban spaces by creating the 'global imaginary' in a single place. Manfred Steger defines the 'global imaginary' as a concept referring to people's growing
SYMBOLS OF CONTEMPORARY CULTURE
The symbol related problems are developed in the subsequent articles of this publication. In the following texts the reader finds a number of different perspectives, addressing symbol as a specific – using Charles Peirce’s phrase – iconic sign present in different areas of public life; a particular arrangement of open space and closed space; a complex form of community existence of ethnic and cultural groups – increasingly present in the discourse on postmodern society. Symbols are also presented as gestures, actions, persons. Diversity of symbols explored by the authors in different fields of culture: architecture, literature, shamanism, politics, theology, proves that symbol still constitutes important feature of our lives. We look at how various forms and places are being picked by symbols for their existence and functioning in the broadly defined postmodern culture. From the editors: Monika Banaś and Elżbieta Wiącek
The Visual Imaginary of Global Media
2019
Since the explosion of cartography in the European expansion of the 15th century, globalisation in its many variants has always depended on media, but it has also pictured and otherwise visualised the media of its planetary reach, and very often done so in imagery that picks at the gap between the persistence of the local and the deracination of the global enterprise. Through an overview of historical medals, logos, stamps, poems, paintings and engravings, the paper focuses on the visual imaginaries employed to mythologise and to make sense of the reach and power of global media, noting in particular the reduction of land and sea to blank canvases on which communication media superimpose their networks. The paper serves as a genealogy of internet cartography and infographics, attending to the problematic relations between text, numbers, diagrams and pictures and their displacement of environments and localities.
Globalization and Visual Rhetoric: The Rise of a Global Media Order?
Globalization: Past Present Future, 2023
In investigating and discussing the limitations and abstraction of “big data” quantitative measurement as a new capitalistic mode of operation that colonizes people’s perception of the world, the study settles on a qualitative “small data” approach to understand change. Thus, by means of digital ethnographic fieldwork and an alternative media aesthetics frame- work, assisted by the method of global iconology, the chapter aims to reassess globalization as a visual-ideological phenomenon. Specifically, it investigates how the “reglobalization” of the world is mediated under pres- ent conditions of image domination. It does so by focusing on Instagram visual social media cultures and the role that transnational digital media elites play in the destabilization of the imagined multipolar world order we live in. In adding nuance to an understanding of how capitalism is restruc- tured and mediated in the era of computer vision, machine learning, and pattern recognition algorithms, the study will also speculate on the impe- rialistic role transnational media corporations play and on the possibility that they may, or may not, contribute to the rise of a global media order.
Symbols and symbolic meanings in constructions of nations and national identity
2017
The idea for this special issue evolved in the framework of the project Discourses of the Nation and the National, conducted at the University of Oslo (ILOS), which held the symposium National Symbols across Time and Space in September 2015. 1 Starting from a general assumption that some crucial aspects of the "nation" and the "national" are constructed and deconstructed in discourse, and that national social formations and nationalisms are persistent phenomena although they experience transformations and reappear under the guise of transnationalism and cosmopolitanism, the project comparatively studied various aspects of the national across various discourses. Assuming that the modes of realization, visibility, and importance of the reproductions of the national vary from country to country, the project's activities (symposia, core project members' research, guest researchers' projects, doctoral projects, and guest lectures) concentrated on a range of regions and countries, with an emphasis on North American, Romance, and Slavic studies. The topics examined within the project include borders, space and identity, metaphors in identity construction, discursive construction of patriotism, urban landscapes, diaspora communities and their identity, food and national identity, and television and national identity. The realms of discourse examined include mass media, scholarly discourse, discourse by intellectual and political elites, discourse of urban planning, semi-official computer-mediated discourse, graffiti, and literature. The symposium National Symbols across Time and Space was devoted to the widely recognized crucial role of symbols in national identity construction: this is reflected in one of the definitions of national identity as "a form of imaginative identification with the symbols and discourses of the nation-state" (Barker & Galasinski 2001: 124). We provided a platform for discussing official and unofficial national symbols, as well as symbols of cultural identity, be they concrete (material) or abstract, in the light of the assumption that nations and national phenomena have lost their significance at a time of cultural globalization. We examined how cultural globalization affects symbols and symbolic meanings. Furthermore, we discussed whether national symbols reflect universal patterns in symbolic systems, or whether they depend on the particular features of different national discourses. The topics discussed at the workshop included national day celebrations, political symbolism, the symbolic function of language, and fictional characters as symbols. Before addressing how the four articles in this special issue relate to previous research on symbols, we provide a short overview of recent studies. Due to limited space and the fact that symbols and symbolic meanings is an extremely broad field of research (studied, e.g., within social representation theory, social psychology, peace psychology, anthropology, political science, nationalism studies, and the arts), the overview focuses on research in the twenty-first century, particularly on volumes that discuss more than one national symbol, 2 more than one region, and topics of general importance. 3
Introduction As soon as we recognise that language is central to culture we are forced to recognise that cultural communication is very much tied up with the use of signs. In what follows, I will try to give some idea of what humans are capable of accomplishing through our use of signs and how our signs, always culturally conditioned, both enrich and complicate our ability to communicate as cultural beings.
What the Image Wants: From the Pictorial to the Sociocultural Representation
The Buckingham Journal of Language and Linguistics, 2010
Through the multifarious conceptual net, the first preoccupation is to limit the image senses that will be adopted, that is, the picture, the visual, pictorial, symbolic and those related to this semantic field. The meaning ax does not separate the abstract-mental ...