Globalization, may I introduce you to Mediation

            The media and its facets have transformed the self-representation and reflexive experience. The distance between information and its implications, and the general public has been bridged in many more ways than one. Television and the Internet serve as two far-reaching mediums of mediation that have emerged at the forefront of globalization, allowing people to have seemingly endless amounts of information at one’s fingertips at any second.

William Mazzarella (2004) sees various forms of capital, especially information, that have been projected into society as assets of media that need to be addressed. Looking to see how information is mediated through the media, he sees many screens and filters that information passes through – from which content is captured on film, to how it is framed, to how will it be represented – before a person receives it, be it on the social activists’ webpages, worldwide newspapers, or the six o'clock news. “Transnational imaginaries” often oppose “regional commitments and interests” (352), where corporate goals quash local considerations. Without media, many of these cases would pass unknowingly, or uncriticized, by the global populace. Thus, we have empowered the media as facilitators of knowledge, as bringers of ‘truth’, deciding what we should know and how we should come to understand it. Mazzarella pushes this further in a different direction, that commercial media sources have made people “cognitively and affectively dependent on external processes of mediation, whereas previously stable and locally rooted ‘schemas’ have sufficed to make sense of the world” (2004). We are no longer stopping to look around and critically judge for ourselves the problems of the world; rather, we are looking for answers found in Google search results or in CNN headlines, created by the meeting of globalization and mediation.

Nevertheless, Mazzarella sees media and mediation as an avenue to look at the ‘other’, at the “places at which we come to be who we are through the detour of something alien to ourselves” (356). As a self-reflexive process, we compare our culture to that which we see in the media. By looking here, we begin to understand more about what the culture we live in. Relatively speaking, the meeting of globalization and mediation has allowed us to look at the ways in which other cultures function and compare them to ours.

Through the media, for example, the Kayapo Indians residing in the Brazilian Amazon basin were able to assert their identity and their struggle for land claims in the face of imposing World Bank and Brazilian government-backed hydroelectric companies. Proposals for six hydroelectric damns along the Xingu river had been put forth that would devastate the Kayapo’s native land through population displacement and disruption of migratory fish routes (which the Kayapo depended on), destroying much of the Amazon rainforest along the way. Filming widespread demonstrations featuring Kayapo leaders and Western celebrities – Sting, and Body Shop founder Anita Roddick – to draw even more media attention, the Kayapo held press conferences with world news media, international human and indigenous rights organizations, as well as World Bank and Brazilian governmental officials to demonstrate what was at stake. Ultimately, the Kayapo managed to stave off the hydroelectric companies by asserting their identity to protect and secure not only their land, but their legal control over their resources as well (Turner 2003).

What is interesting is that it is one of the first cases in which the “combination of political, economic, environmental, and ideological pressures with revolutionary new media technologies that has enabled native peoples to take their case directly to the peoples and governments of the world” (Turner 2003). The Kayapo cut out the middlemen – NGOs, human rights tribunals – and took it amongst themselves to assert their identity and struggle to the world. What is also interesting, though not immediately apparent, is that this is telling of our own culture. In their preparation for the political demonstrations, the Kayapo consulted local British Columbian governments as well as First Nations groups to assess broader implications of our hydroelectric damns. Thus, we are looking at this “dual relation… of simultaneous self-distancing and self-recognition” (Mazzarella); the Kayapo are apart from Western society at the same time a part of it. Due to the collision of globalization and mediation, as evident in the Kayapo’s demonstrations, these apparently alienated places, places that the ‘other’ resides in, are not as distant as we once thought.

References

Mazzarella, William. (2004). Culture, Globalization, Mediation. Annual review of Anthropology 33:345-367.

Turner, Terence. (2003). The Kayapo Resistance. In Conformity and Conflict: Readings in Cultural Anthropology, Spradley, James and David McCurdy (eds). Pp. 387-404. Allyn and Bacon: Boston.