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Global Capitalism, Temporality, and the Political Economy of Communication
Over the last two decades, a concatenation of world-historical developments have produced a world of temporal acceleration in which time itself conforms to the technological imperatives of instantaneity and simultaneity. Corporations, financial enterprises, and media systems are constituted by real time networks of communication. But the impacts are contradictory. Technologized representations of instantaneity and simultaneity may reify the global present and occlude the historicity of powerful global institutions. Conversely, real time technologies and networks may be used to depict and challenge global configurations of power. Added to which, temporal acceleration and real time cannot erase the counter temporalities of duration, sequentiality, and historicity. With these thoughts in mind, I shall critique the accelerative tendencies of global capitalism and identify the conflicting temporalities of globally mediated communication.
Time, Space, and Globalization
My approach to these developments and tensions stands against epistemological accounts of space which overlook concomitant epistemologies of time. Richard Ek’s article, “Media Studies, Geographical Imaginations and Relational Space,” is a case in point. He argues that contemporary information and communication technologies produce symbolic worlds which generate feelings of placelessness and that unfolding actualizations of the virtual erase the distinction between mediation and spatialization. Thus, “space IS media and media and communication technologies ARE space” (Ek 2006, 56, capitalization in original). Equally, however, one could make the observation that mediation is synonymous with the constitution of time and temporality. In this view, experiences of placelessness have an inbuilt temporal aspect. If one’s geographic sense of here and there weakens, local feelings of history and prospectivity will diminish.
The idea that temporality and spatiality are mutually constituting needs to inform our understanding of globalization. As David Harvey has argued in his discussion of “time-space compression,” the apparent shrinkage of space “to a ‘global village’ of telecommunications and a ‘spaceship earth’ of economic and ecological interdependencies” also shortens time horizons “to the point where the present is all there is” (Harvey 1990, 240). The mutual constitution of time and space is not a unilinear process. As Doreen Massey notes, globalist teleologies of technological advance, market expansion, and/or developmental progress erase the multiplicities of spatial experience. Adjacent countries in the so-called developing world, for example, do not necessarily share the same developmental aspirations. Equally, globalist teleologies preclude openness toward the future (Massey 2005, 82). Massey’s nuanced appreciation of time–space mutuality is evident in her discussion of “contemporaneous geographic differences” and “power geometries within the contemporaneity of today’s form of globalization” (italics in original). For me, these formulations raise fundamental questions about historical change. How should one conceptualize and periodize global contemporaneity? My answer here draws upon Aril Dirlik’s notion of global modernity, an emergent category designed to decenter an older Eurocentric conception of modernity associated with western Imperialism, colonialism, and the presumption of civilizational progress. Today, against the backdrop of decolonization and the demise of cold war spatialities, a plurality of cultural modernities intermingle (Dirlik 2007, 94–7). Confucian, Arabic, Islamic, African, Japanese, western, Hindu, and other cultures, each internally differentiated, share the global stage. Across different scales and within virtual spaces, global modernity is facilitated by the density of transport, information, and communication networks. These networks underpin everyday socioeconomic connections within and between diasporic communities. Their fluidity and contingency is highlighted by French social theorist Jean Francois Bayart who notes that Moroccan small traders out of Marseilles “work hand in hand with Turks from Brussels and Frankfurt, Pakistanis and Indians from London, Senegalese, Italians, Catalan and Andalusian gypsies and Tunisians, who open up new doors to them that enable them to make other connections with Libyans, Lebanese or sub-Saharans” (Bayart 2007, 120–1).
Let us now consider the temporal features of contemporary globalization. What are these features and how did they emerge? These questions have been addressed by social theorist Barbara Adam. She notes that within late medieval Europe, the calendric system and the mechanical clock enabled precise, standard measurements of sequential time. These innovations became the template for commercial enterprises, trading networks, and the early-modern state. Increasingly, standardized measures of sequential time defined the routines of private and public life at the expense of seasonal and biological time. The growth of industrial capitalism after 1850 positioned clock time as the absolute indicator of productivity, costs, and profit. Disciplined workers and their families were expected to internalize these principles of time use. Bankers, accountants, and retailers instinctively equated clock time and monetary value. The standard demarcations of clock time were exported worldwide through the establishment of railway and steamship networks (Adam 2004, 111–17, see also Thompson 1967). In 1884 the inaugural International Meridian Conference agreed to standardize time zones across the globe (Adam 2004, 112). Crucially, however, this ascendant temporal regime had to absorb the arrivals of wireless telegraphy, telephony, and radio broadcasting. With these innovations, speed of transmission transcended the durational and sequential properties of clock time. Subsequent technological advances such as satellite television and networked computers ushered in a new form of time standardization and reordered the global-temporal environment.
Like global modernity and global manifestations of real time, global capitalism is a contemporary phenomenon. It was presaged by the collapse of national and Third World liberation movements, Soviet Communism, and national Keynesianism. The concomitant spread of neoliberalism helped to globalize financial flows and production networks and marketing strategies. According to political economist William Robinson, macroeconomic activity, broadly conceived, is dominated by transnational corporations (firms with headquarters in more than three countries). He draws from various World Investment Reports published by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and from privately commissioned financial reports to outline the growth of such corporations (7,000 in 1970, 60,000 in 2000) alongside the growth in cross-border mergers/acquisitions (14 in 1980, 9,655 in 1999) (Robinson 2004, 55, 58). The latter trend is especially telling: for the largest corporations, the distinction between home and host country has weakened. Between 2000 and 2007 inclusive, cross-border merger and acquisition deals in excess of US $1billion totaled 1,335 (compared to 479 from 1992 to 1999) (UNCTAD 2008, 5–6). Each World Investment Report indexes the overall transnationality of a corporation against a composite of three ratios: foreign assets to total assets, foreign sales to total sales, and foreign employment to total employment. From 1993 to 2006, average transnationality values for the top 100 transnational corporations rose by 40 percent (29). The internal and external operations of transnational corporations are driven by the demands of temporal acceleration. The following section will explicate the logic and fragility of these developments.
Global Capitalism, ICTs, and Temporal Acceleration
Information and communication technologies (ICTs) drive the temporal accelerations of global capitalism. To understand this process one must first appreciate that ICTs constitute a new and substantial sector of global capital accumulation. In 2001, historian Jerry Harris identified four emergent subsectors. Established hardware corporations such as Cisco, Hewlett Packard, Sun Microsystems, and Compaq produced chips, boards, boxes, servers, routers, and other infrastructural components. The next wave of corporations wrote software applications, developed operational systems, and installed network architectures. Intuit, Microsoft, Oracle, and Novell quickly became the dominant players. Subsequently, Internet and dot.com companies attracted speculative and longer term investment. Resilient innovators such as AOL, Amazon, EBay, Google, and Yahoo developed expanding services and popular profiles. Meanwhile, landline-based telecommunication corporations such as AT & T, Cable and Wireless, Deutshe Telecom, and Nippon T&T developed or purchased Internet services, cable and broadband connections, satellite hook-ups, and wireless communication services. Industrially based electronic corporations invested in the manufacture of semiconductors, fiber optics, software wireless phones, and other ICT-related products. Such corporations included Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, and Toshiba (Harris 2001, 36–7). By 2003, 18 of the top 100 nonfinancial corporations came from the ICT sector (UNCTAD 2005, 267–9). Between 1995 and 2000 the global telecom equipment market alone grew from US $62.5 billion to US $141.7 billion. Similarly, worldwide revenues from various telecom service markets increased from US $300 billion in 1990 to US $925 billion in 2000 (Yin 2005, 291–2). Over the same period the telecommunications industry ranked second in the global mergers and acquisitions market behind commercial banking (Yin 2005, 295). In the United States the proliferation of telecom infrastructures and Internet applications encouraged aggressive lending from banks and speculative investment from equity traders and fund managers. Throughout the ICT sector, new stock offerings drove up share prices and increased trading volumes. Exaggerated projections of increased demand for network capacity attracted more lending and speculation until share prices fell. The subsequent collapse and/or contraction of debt-laden corporations led to further transnationalization of the ICT sector. Critical communications analyst Dan Schiller outlines this process. During 2004 Telefonica from Spain purchased South and Central Americas wireless networks from Bell South. Telenet from Mexico acquired wireline networks from MCI in Brazil and AT&T in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Columbia, and Peru. China Netcom gained a major regional affiliate from the bankrupt Global Crossing, and a subsidiary of India’s Tata group purchased a transnational cable network from Tyco International. Schiller describes these appropriations of telecom properties by transnationals from the global south as a “historic sea change” (Schiller 2007, 99).
Within global capitalism, the emergent ICT sector has intermeshed with a media-entertainment system transformed by convergences of technology, content, and cultural consumption. Advances in Internet applications, digital television, and, more recently, mobile telephony have blurred traditional separations between broadcasting, computing, telecommunications, and consumer electronics. Such is evident in the evolving structures and strategies of corporate ownership. From about 1980, media conglomerates with lucrative holdings across key media markets took over stand-alone businesses. Major players such as Time-Warner, Bertelsmann, Viacom, Disney, NBC Universal, and News Corporation subsequently acquired worldwide cross-media portfolios. During the 1990s, a broader picture took shape. A global oligopoly of media-entertainment corporations effectively established a dominating presence across core areas of cultural production and leisure activity (film, television, recorded music, print media, hotels, resorts, theme parks). Each corporation sought to control the production and distribution of cultural content through vertical integration. In film and television, for example, News Corporation conjoined Twentieth Century Fox with the Fox Network (1985), Disney acquired the ABC network (1995), CBS merged with Viacom (1999), and Universal appropriated NBC (2004) (Winseck 2008, 38). Media-entertainment corporations have also integrated new media acquisitions with established holdings. Thus Viacom bought NeoPets, a major children’s website in the United States, for US $160 million in 2004. Similarly, in 2005 News Corporation purchased the social networking site MySpace for US $500 million, a gaming and entertainment site IGN.com for US $620 million, and America’s largest sports site, Scout Media, for US $60 million (Winseck 2008, 42).
Concurrently, ICT corporations have become involved with the media-entertainment sector. In 1988–89 consumer electronics company Sony purchased CBS records for US $2 billion and Columbia Pictures Entertainment for US $3.4 billion. Further acquisitions over the next 15 years positioned Sony as a major media-entertainment conglomerate. In 1998 telecom corporate AT&T acquired cable conglomerate TCI along with Liberty Media Group for US $148 billion. Two years later, Internet service provider AOL merged with Time-Warner to produce a combined valuation of US $125 billion (Hesmondhalgh 2007, 160–2). From the late 1990s, Microsoft’s growing involvement in digital media and electronic games gave it a top tier ranking as a media-entertainment corporate. On a larger scale, General Electric assumed a triple profile in diversified industrial products, ICTs, and media-entertainment (Flew 2007, 71). In 2006 Google, with over 50 percent of the search engine market, purchased video-sharing site YouTube for US $1.65 billion. This transaction was preceded by technology, traffic, and advertising revenue arrangements with NBC-Universal, Time-Warner, Viacom, and News Corporation. Media political economist Dwayne Winseck notes that Google has become a “powerful nexus in the unfolding relationship between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ media” (Winseck 2008, 42–3).
As ICT-media corporations became transnational profit generators, ICT-media infrastructures precipitated the acceleration of financial transactions, production cycles, and consumption patterns on a global scale. Real-time communication networks allowed investors and corporate executives to speed up profit rates, cross-tabulate profit ratios, and contract the temporal parameters of profit measurement. Once government control over exchange rates and capital movements became unsustainable, private financial institutions were able to independently generate credit and currency units. In this context, the Eurodollar market that emerged in the 1970s eventually became part of a vast stateless system of financial transactions. Major banks and financial institutions offered syndicated loans, international securities, currency trades, forward exchange contracts, and derivative options from various branches in cities worldwide. Meanwhile, the opening of national stock exchanges to foreign institutions generated a massive global equities market. Within this market, institutional investors and speculative traders fueled the growth of transnational mergers and acquisitions. The globalization of finance capital depended upon microchip computers and associated advances in telecommunications. Satellite, optical fiber, and cellular networks expanded and accelerated information transfer between computer terminals. All of these developments created an unprecedented economic environment; multiple currency units and complex financial assets worth trillions of dollars were traded globally in real time (Castells 1996, 2000, Held et al. 1999, Singh 2000).
The proliferation of ICT infrastructures has also globalized networks of management, production, and distribution. Corporates allow affiliates greater autonomy and encourage channels of two-way communication (e.g., via email, e-commerce, intranets, video conferencing, mobile telephony, and interenterprise computer networking). Such arrangements underpin the management of complex, technologically innovative production chains in response to changing market conditions. Transnational corporations use information and communication systems to decentralize and subcontract operations and to centralize financial control. This pattern is common to otherwise separate sectors of production, such as textiles, garments, automobiles, and semiconductors (Dicken 2003, 317–436). At the same time, major firms in the same industry co-operate through joint ventures, subcontracting, franchising, and research projects that will design specific products for identifiable markets. For Manuel Castells, these innovations were indicators of the network enterprise. Within this organizational model, firms remain the primary unit of capital accumulation, property rights, and strategic management, while routine business practices are performed by flexible ad hoc networks (Castells 1996, 2001, 67–78). High-speed interactive communication within and between businesses has transformed the temporal environments of corporate management. Ida Sabelis, a leading researcher in this field, points out that almost all of the executives included in her various research projects identified “acceleration and speed” as the “core organizational challenge” that had emerged over the previous 20 years (Sabelis 2007, 261). She quotes a female manager of an ICT corporation who was said to schedule teleconferences “during the day and after hours in order to synchronize with Asian and American partners in real time” (Sabelis 2007, 262, italics in original).
The spread of ICT-media infrastructures, products, and services has also accelerated everyday practices of consumption. The idea of convenient, ready-made solutions had always been inherent to modern consumer culture. However, recent devices such as MP3 players, digital cameras, Internet search engines, handheld remotes, and multifunctional cell phones have opened up new time-saving opportunities. Personal media technologies are easy to operate, ready to hand, and offer instant access to an emporium of purchasable commodities. Online shopping exemplifies the widespread assumption that the delivery of consumer goods should be rapid and continuous. For cultural theorist, John Tomlinson, the character of consumption practices has shifted from “an emphasis on steady accumulation and the enjoyment of continued possession” to that of “the immediate and repeated appropriation of new goods” (Tomlinson 2007, 137). Quickening rhythms of consumption are intimately associated with technological mediations of experience. In this regard, global communication infrastructures combined with personal media technologies allow cultural industries spanning film, music, fashion, sport, celebrity promotion, tourism, and related leisure activities to normalize immediate gratification and the “nowness” of consumer lifestyles. At the same time, the globalization of fast-paced consumer lifestyles remains tempered by socioeconomic inequalities and cultural traditions. In a major exploration of these themes, Edward Comor points out that the growing middle classes of India and China remain demographic minorities with the majority of rural and urban dwellers within each country still lacking sufficient income for repeat, aspirational buying (Comor 2008, 117). In China, Comor notes, traditional “from scratch” food preparation has limited the spread of supermarkets and the demand for processed food (Comor 2008, 125–6). Nevertheless, over the long term there is little doubt that capitalist consumption “‘frees’ modernizing cultures by elaborating more mediated, commodified and abstracted forms into everyday life,” installing rapidly circulating brands and lifestyles as taken-for-granted indicators of socioeconomic development.
Global capitalism’s drive toward internetworked instantaneity has polarized the human condition. Wealthy global elites enjoy the personal and material advantages of extraterritorial mobility, while the poor are consigned to the secondary experience of locality (as slum dwellers, rural laborers, refugees, office, factory, or domestic workers). From a temporal perspective, those who benefit most from the rapid circulations of money, imagery, information, and knowledge routinely position the poor as “out of time.” From within lifeworlds of impoverishment, time is experienced variously as loss, insecurity, exhaustion, boredom, or fate. Beyond the squalor, institutions of academic accreditation and technical-managerial expertise produce mobile knowledge workers in the form of marketing experts, computer consultants, lawyers, accountants, financiers, and managerial specialists (Hoogvelt 2001, 138).
Meanwhile, intracorporate and intercorporate infrastructures globally interconnect downtown metropoles, technology parks, and gated suburban enclaves in a process of insularity that requires the constant surveillance of public spaces and the expulsion of surplus humanity into densely packed or sprawling slum areas (Davis 2006). Although rich and poor may, in given circumstances, live far apart, these bifurcations are as much a temporal as a spatial phenomenon. Wealthy elites inhabit time-worlds of business, travel, consumption, and leisure activity which are phenomenologically distanced from the poor. The real-time networks of global capitalism stratify temporal experience within and across urban-suburban environments. The real time tendencies of global capitalism are, however, self-undermining as well as being socially divisive. In the absence of countervailing temporalities, the drive toward internetworked instantaneity magnifies instability and uncertainty. Within global finance derivatives and futures trading via computerized funds, transfer systems accelerate high-risk speculative activity that implicates and destabilizes the surrounding economy (Soros 1998). The 1997 Asian currency crisis, the 1998 Long Term Capital Management collapse, and the Wall Street financial crisis beginning in 2008 have, successively, provoked calls for transparent, international standards of accounting, auditing, insurance payment bankruptcy resolution, and interbank settlement (Rude 2005, Krugman 2008, 165–91).
The prevailing temporal precepts of global finance strongly influence the priorities of nonfinancial corporations. Institutional equity investors and investment analysts in the capitalist west measure corporate performance against short-term profit imperatives. In the United States during the 1980s, for example, specialist takeover firms broke up old, diversified conglomerates. Profit and share price projections rather than yearly/half yearly results, have become the standard performance criteria (Zorn and Dobbin 2005, 269–89). In contrast, corporations from East Asia have fostered long-term business-to-business relationships based upon mutual obligations. Bilateral arrangements are embedded within a broader ensemble of interrelated companies, and diversified industrial groups are often centered around a core bank (Dicken 2003, 225–35). Ongoing global rivalry between these discrepant temporal priorities of corporate activity will determine the future organizational culture of transnational corporations.
The accelerative, short-termist tendencies of global capitalism also clash with the national-temporal precepts of state authority. The worldwide consequences of neoliberal privatization illustrates this point. In a state-facilitated national economy, energy transport infrastructures operate over long periods of time in response to long-range socioeconomic needs. Under private corporate ownership, these infrastructures are reorganized to fit short-term measures of commercial profit and shareholder value. Nation-states thereby lose the fiscal and temporal capacity to shape macroeconomic futures. In these circumstances, national-temporal rhythms of judicial process, electoral democracy, and representative assembly are circumvented.
Global Mediations of Real Time: Reification and Critique
Discussion thus far has proceeded to the following position. The technological capacity for instantaneous and simultaneous communication underpins both the pluralistic expressions of global modernity and the routine practices of global capitalism. International conference delegates, diasporic bloggers and street traders, transnational political activists, foreign exchange dealers, corporate middle managers, and International Monetary Fund (IMF) officials all make use of the Internet, mobile telephony, and electronic mass media. These observations pose a major question for critical theorists of communication. How does one distinguish between progressive and pejorative manifestations of instantaneity-simultaneity? This is not just a matter of infrastructural usage or application; real-time capacities are also symbolically displayed throughout traditional and emergent media domains (i.e., in the form of language, imagery, textual and technological formats). Such displays can be positioned as an ideological expression of global capitalism or as a resource for alternative communication practices. My understanding of this dual perspective builds upon John Thompson’s insight that although symbolic constructs serve, ideologically, to reproduce prevailing relations of power, they are not always employed for this purpose (Thompson 1994, 56). The ideological technique of reification is especially relevant to the present argument. Here, Thompson remarks that: “relations of domination may be established and sustained by representing a transitory, historical state of affairs as if it were permanent, natural, outside of time. Processes are portrayed as things or as events of a quasi-natural kind, in such a way that their social and historical character is eclipsed” (Thompson 1994, 65). From this standpoint, ideological representations of real time obscure the sociohistorical circumstances of its own emergence as the functional basis of global capitalism. Examples include the unfolding immediacy of global television formats; multimedia advertising and corporate branding; the illusion of disembodied presence within the cyberworlds of electronic gaming and immersive virtual reality; and the built kinetics of theme parks, expos, shopping malls, and moving billboards. The scale, intricacy, and pervasiveness of such developments presents a formidable challenge to critical communication researchers. The ideology of real time appears to be everywhere at once and nowhere in particular. My own investigations will, nevertheless, start with a critique of satellite-driven television news. There are sound reasons for this selection.
Firstly, satellite television is a long-recognized, worldwide manifestation of real time. According to television historian Lisa Parks, the first truly global satellite spectacular was the 1967 two-hour program, Our World, co-ordinated by the European Broadcasting Union, edited from BBC studios in London, and transmitted to approximately 500 million viewers in 24 countries. The significance of this accomplishment was clearly understood at the time. As Parks points out, “Our World’s producers fully exploited what they understood to be the unique properties of live satellite television: its capacity to craft a global now” (Parks 2005, 22).
Secondly, the subsequent routinization of live satellite television and global “nowness” invites examination. Global television news began with CNN World Report in October 1987, launched as a complement to CNN’s already established domestic network and world headline service (Medina 2003, 86). Over the next decade, CNN established numerous bureaux outside of the United States and signed joint ventures with media companies in different national markets. By 2003 CNN International had been regionalized into six scheduled channels: North America, Europe, Middle East/Africa, Asia/Pacific, South Asia, and Latin America (Chalaby 2003, 467). As CNN expanded, BBC television developed its own global strategy. A worldwide news channel was formed in 1991 and the BBC World brand was launched in 1995 to capitalize on the Corporation’s international profile and spread its news-gathering costs over more services. Satellites with global reach were complemented by those with pan-regional, national, and subnational footprints, further increasing the availability of live 24/7 news coverage. A 2007 survey identified over 100 24/7 news channels worldwide. Four were entirely global (CNN and CNNI, BBC World, CNBC, and Bloomberg TV) and one was almost global (Fox News). Another 27 could be classified as pan-regional, of which Al Jazeera (Arabic) and Al Jazeera (English) had major international reach (Rai and Cottle 2007, 54–7).
Thirdly, global satellite television is worth examining because it meshes with other technologies of real time. From the late 1990s wireless infrastructures decoupled computers and communications from fixed locations, further multiplying the locales from which live sound and images could be constructed and received. Laptops could be linked to satellite phones. Images from digital cameras could be edited onto a laptop and transmitted via the Internet, from the site of a breaking story, back to the reporter’s central office. Miniature video cameras enabled freelancers to obtain vivid footage from disaster sites and conflict zones. Together, these news-gathering innovations have normalized the rolling, 24/7 news cycle (Jukes 2002, 15). Information and communication technologies have also multiplied the sites of news reception and reshaped the experience of news consumption. Major, real-time news events are streamed throughout the Internet via specialist news sites and rolling headlines. In May 2005, TV Media, a consortium of South Korean companies, launched Digital Multimedia Broadcasting (DMB), allowing cell phone and laptop users to access television content from 24/7 news channels. Telecom and ICT corporations worldwide are developing similar services as the global market for mobile television expands (Lee 2005, 59). Ongoing remediations of television reception allows the real-time world of global television news to merge with the everyday routines of work, leisure, and domesticity.
Fourthly, global television news requires examination because of its relationship with other real-time formulations. As I will show, financial, political, military, and televisual networks of communication overlap to the point where global mediations of real time eclipse the historical character of unfolding events.
Real-time feedback loops
In the mid-1990s, in a prescient analysis of global media events, McKenzie Wark noted that the technological vectors of satellite television were integrally connected with the technological vectors of financial, diplomatic, and military communication. Consequently, everyone and everything was, potentially, the “object and/or subject of a mediated relation, realized instantly” (Wark 1994, 15). Because these vectors implicated the entire globe, there was no synoptic vantage point from which to represent global events. In these circumstances, the constitution and development of major events could not be easily separated from their mass mediation, and mass-mediated, globally transmitted information about an event became inexorably drawn into other, media- and event-related vectors of communication (e.g., global finance, international diplomacy, military networks). This in turn activated a process whereby the representations of a momentous event made by journalists, camera teams, editors, and interested parties fed back into the event itself via a global loop encompassing television, radio, telephone, and fax technologies (Wark 1994, 22).
Since Wark’s initial observations, the proliferation of satellite channels, computer-mediated communication, and mobile telephony has continuously generated intersecting global vectors and feedback loops. Digitalized foreign exchange markets, for example, adhere to time practices corresponding with those of global television news. Traders worldwide watch and participate in the market continuously and simultaneously while market transactions and associated information arrives continuously on networked computer screens. As Karin Knorr Cetina observes, in this environment, information is not verified against any external reality. Instead, “the material on screen can only disclose itself as information in as far as it is new compared to earlier material.” Consequently, “the new is presented as-things-happen and vanishes from the screens as newer things come to pass” (Cetina 2005, 43).
It is clear from this account that the reified time-world of foreign exchange trades and other related financial transactions parallels the world constructed by television news. These worlds are conjoined by the routine activities of major business-financial news brokers such as Reuters and Bloomberg, who offer multiple streams of news and information worldwide to the financial press, business magazines, daily newspapers, radio stations, television channels (including their websites), and specialist clients (traders, analysts, and investors). Simultaneously, global television news programs present unfolding information about currencies, equities, bonds, and futures. Within equities markets, for example, analysts collate, condense, and interpret business-related information for major corporates. The relevant information includes announcements from central banks, ratings agencies, and government-appointed monetary authorities, along with earnings reports from listed companies. At the same time, analyst assessments enable financial-business news journalists, specialist news channels, and news brokers to compile summary accounts of stock market activity. These accounts are combined and re-presented continuously on 24/7 satellite channels (global, pan-regional, national).
Real-time communication networks then, conjoin the activities of financial-business journalists, market traders and market analysts. Interlinked major players from all of these groups respond to financial-information flows which are endogenously generated. Market participants routinely make buy-and-sell decisions based on expectations of future prices which are partly shaped by incoming analyst reports and by updated financial news content across all media. The real time feedback loops that proliferate are inherently volatile and globally infectious (Thompson 2003, 34–7, 2004, 14–18).
The real-time news flows of global television also interact with the decision-making practices of government foreign policy and international diplomacy. The immediacy of high profile political events may exert an accelerating influence upon the course of those events and shorten the time available for policy making. Failure to act swiftly may create a media image of political indecision or dissension (Gilboa 2003, 99). In some cases, the very intensity of live news coverage may influence a foreign policy decision. According to Piers Robinson, this occurred in February 1994 when the mortar bombing of a Sarajevo market place provided instant CNN footage of human carnage, which impelled the Clinton administration to issue an ultimatum to Bosnian Serb nationalists: namely, that if the shelling of Sarajevo continued, air strikes would ensue (Robinson 2002, 86–7).
This turn of events is not automatically generalizable, however. Global television news coverage will not alter a predetermined policy position. From a macroperspective, however, global television news flows and international political communication are integrally and continually connected. Thus televised images of an unfolding atrocity or catastrophe accelerate diplomatic exchanges whatever the policy outcome. To this extent, global television has partly replaced ambassadors and policy experts as a source of critical information about major international events.
Of course, similar observations could be made about the international impact of the telegraph, the telephone, or radio transmission. Nevertheless, it can be argued that a qualitative shift in the nature of international diplomacy has recently occurred. In this respect, Eyton Gilboa makes the following observation: “Before the global communication revolution a leader could have sent one message through local media to his people and another through foreign media to other peoples. Today this distinction has disappeared and a policy statement reaches at the same time both local and foreign audiences including enemies and allies” (Gilboa 2003, 107). This scenario typically occurs in the period before a war or military intervention. If the imminent conflict is of maximum news value then feedback loops occur whereby statements and actions from major protagonists generate multiple responses worldwide. This in turn provides journalists from every television news network and other media outlets with ever-replenishing sources for breaking news stories.
Real-time flows of global television news also interact with military communication networks and the prosecution of military campaigns. The 1991 Gulf War offers an obvious starting point. For the first time, a major military intervention unfolded televisually for audiences worldwide. Amid the US bombing of Baghdad, reporters often provided traumatic pieces to camera by focusing on their own location in relation to surrounding events (Hoskins 2004, 50–1). Behind the scenes, global television and military networks relied upon the same technologies. Night vision lenses developed for night combat enabled 24-hour reportage from combat locations. Satellite communication itself enabled global telecasting and military mapping of the globe. The installation of missile tip cameras fused global media communication with the exercise of military power: the vision of a target became connected in real time to its destination (Wark 1994, 42–4). The critical point, for my purposes, was that these interactions between military and media communication networks were reflexively reinforcing. On certain occasions journalistic interventions and news judgments directly affected military statements and decisions, which in turn generated further news stories. After 1991, the reflexive interaction between media and military communication intensified, reflecting the rapid proliferation of 24/7 satellite channels in combination with the digital remediation of television news gathering and news reception. During the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003, events on the ground were intensively and rapidly circulated outward into global, pan-regional, and national mediascapes. These multiple mediations influenced the tactics and communication strategies of military commanders. At the same time, regional and international circuits of political communication reflexively overlapped with the real-time force field of media–military events.
There are, of course, many other networked organizations involved in the global mediation of real time. Examples include nonfinancial corporations and business organizations, millenarian terrorists, and armed resistance groups in conflict zones. Empirically, the reflexive repercussions of these multiple interconnections play out across different communicational domains (i.e., global, international, transnational, national, local). The extensity and the density of real-time feedback loops across scales depends, however, on the location (as well as the magnitude) of the event and events in question. A financial collapse, military alert, or political assassination within a global city will have multiscalar repercussions. In a more peripheral location, such events will unfold less extensively and less prominently.
The detemporalized present versus temporal contemporaneity
As I have indicated, instantaneous and simultaneous media communication constructs an ever-present world of immediacy. In a similar vein, social theorist Carmen Leccardi identifies a present which has become detemporalized. This is not a present that progresses, conventionally, from the past toward the future. Rather, it is a self-defining present disconnected from any sense of past or future. Drawing from Agnes Heller, Leccardi argues that the present has become “all there is” (Heller 1999, 7, cited in Leccardi 2007, 30). Under such conditions, historical time and prospective futures cannot be subjects of open debate. Yet, as I have also argued, we inhabit a world of temporal contemporaneity in which real-time information-communication networks facilitate a plurality of cultural modernities. This is exemplified by the contraflows that shape the ecology of satellite television news, such that various diasporas draw upon particular channels to reaffirm linguistic and cultural ties. Middle Eastern networks, for example, cater to audiences in North Africa, Central Asia, Europe, and North America (Rai and Cottle 2007, 63).
It is in this context that one can appreciate the global and temporal significance of Qatar’s Al Jazeera. Formed in 1996, it soon established a studio infrastructure, 24-hour coverage, a field correspondent team, regional bureaux, website services, and an expanding global presence that attracted diasporic Arab audiences in Europe and North America (El-Nawawy and Gher 2003). When the United States subsequently decided to invade Iraq, Al Jazeera confronted an enormous real-time orchestration of power and propaganda organized around spectacular narrative forms that were “fully integrated into military and corporate public relations campaigns” and which furnished “hog fuel for 24 hour news channels and websites” (Compton 2004, 3). In response, Al Jazeera replaced its usual live and recorded program schedule with 24-hour rolling news providing on-the-spot stories and footage from Baghdad, Mosul, Basra, and the Kurdish zone. Once Iraqi hostilities began, the term “Al Jazeera” became a major searched-for web topic and Aljazeera.net became the world’s most popular Arabic site (Allan 2004, 353–4). Against the US narrative of “Shock and Awe,” Al Jazeera footage was captioned “War on Iraq.” Initial news bulletins ended with the anchor saying “we leave you now with live pictures from Baghdad.” Silent panoramic camera shots of the flame-lit city carried the byline “Baghdad is burning” (Miles 2005, 241–2). Over subsequent days, rolling news footage revealed bombed houses, distraught families, children and adults with missing limbs, overrun hospitals, and bloodstained corpses. Such coverage sparked a wave of protests around the Middle East and Al Jazeera gave these substantial prominence. This had political and diplomatic repercussions worldwide (Miles 2005, 242).
Al Jazeera’s countercoverage, and precipitation of, globally televised news events associated with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq are of historic importance. BBC World and CNNI no longer monopolized real-time reportage of international events involving the Middle East. Temporal contemporaneity had successfully challenged the detemporalized present. There are, however, inbuilt limits to such challenges. The major global networks continuously disseminate real-time versions of globality which obscure structural configurations of economic power. Other satellite channels do not have the operational scale or global reach to confront this symbolic world.
Depicting Global Capitalism: Coevality and Critique
Global mediations of real time obscure the historicity and geosocial totality of global capitalism. At the same time, global news, remediated by digital technologies, also vividly illuminates the social worlds of wealth and poverty. This contrasts sharply with the sinecured metropolitan worlds of late nineteenth-century capitalist imperialism. The occupants of these worlds do not “want to know about their colonies or about the violence and exploitation on which their own prosperity is founded, nor do they wish to be forced into any recognition of the multitudinous others hidden away beneath the language and stereotypes, the subhuman categories of colonial racism” (Jameson 2003, 700)
The crucial issue here is not that these metropolitan citizens lacked knowledge about imperial and world capitalist expansion; but that the knowledge available was not constructed by marginalized populations themselves. Their particular experiences of capitalist imperialism could not be communicated between colonial outposts and had no public voice within the metropole. In his historical critique of western anthropological research, Johannes Fabian argues that anthropology constructed its object in ways that erased the historical and temporal perspectives of the cultures under investigation, a process he calls “the denial of coevality” (Fabian 1983, 30–1). While synchronous events occur within the same physical process of time and contemporary events occur within the same qualitatively termed period of time, coevality refers to the sharing of time. It involves reorganizing historical time in a way that gives identity to the other (in relation to oneself), openness to the possibility of cotemporal understanding (with regard to otherwise disparate ways of life), and an appreciation that cotemporal relations are embedded within broader social totalities and relations of power (Fabian 1983, 31–2). Conversely, its denial occurs when marginalized peoples and colonized subjects are positioned as “other” to the assumed centrality of “our” time (as backward, traditional, premodern, tribal, rural, peasant) or when a univocal discourse of historical time overrules or silences the specificity of their experiences.
Global modernity, temporal contemporaneity, and real-time communication networks presuppose cosmopolitan social worlds shaped by transnational, global-local, and translocal interactions. Such interactions constitute a vast mosaic of interpersonal, diasporic, intercultural, and ecumenical activity. It appears, therefore, that Fabian’s argument has been overtaken by events. The Eurocentrist preconditions for the denial of coevality no longer hold. However, as I have argued, the electronic networks and temporal accelerations of global capitalism continue to insulate the rich and excommunicate the poor. In light of these developments, Fabian’s argument can be recast: global mediations of real time reify the suppression of coevality between the lifeworlds of wealth and poverty. In one sense, this is a paradoxical statement. Compared to colonial times, contemporary mediations of wealth and poverty are all-enveloping. Images of opulence pervade Hollywood and Bollywood film and high-end advertising for cars, electronic goods, exclusive real estate, and luxury travel. Global, pan-regional, regional, and national flows of remediated, 24/7 television news highlight the celebrity lifestyles of world leaders, corporate CEOs, royalty, film stars, writers, artists, musicians, and athletes. Associated breaking news stories filter into radio reports, daily and weekly newspapers, and celebrity gossip magazines. Summit gatherings of global elites in Genoa, Quebec City, Sydney, Prague, Davos, and Washington DC receive prominent coverage. League tables of the rich and powerful are regularly published worldwide. Meanwhile, the poor and destitute are kept in the limelight by aid agencies and news media as the victims of floods, earthquakes, famines, disease outbreaks, and insurgencies. With the Internet, portable cameras, and mobile telephony depictions of poverty, crime, and violence freely proliferate. Additionally, news stories often feature critical juxtapositions of wealth and poverty. Press coverage of the 2008 G8 summit in Tokyo disdainfully listed the conference dinner menu and wine list alongside discussion of the world food crisis. Headlines worldwide in July 2008 included “Food for thought” and “Eat as we say, not as we do – a rich answer to hunger.”
In a mediated world of unfolding immediacy, however, the structural and temporal relationships between wealth and poverty are denied representation. This obfuscatory process is built into global disseminations of banal, cosmopolitan outlooks. Openness toward peoples, places, and experiences from different cultures and nations is superficially celebrated through branded products and advertising with images of fashion, food, music, wine, sport, and celebrity figures constituting a “ready-at-hand” global world of “exceptional co-presence” (Urry 2000, 6). This consumerist cosmopolitanism is continuously reproduced through personal computers, the Internet, cell phones, modems, planes, billboards, neon signs, and television (Urry 2000, 6). The ubiquity of television generates a world of “imaginative travel” where “sensations of other places especially facilitated through channel-hopping and programmes that simulate channel-hopping” can “create an awareness of cosmopolitan interdependence” (Urry 2000, 8). In this context, media researcher Dayan Thussu notes that “symbiotic relationships between the news and new forms of current affairs and factual entertainment genres such as reality TV have developed, blurring the boundaries between news, documentary and entertainment” (Thussu 2007, 69).
Although the global news and entertainment media systematically denies the structural and temporal relationalities between wealth and poverty, powerful countertendencies are at work. In an economically interdependent world, driven by instant transfers of knowledge and information, the whereness of one’s felt life can, potentially, be positioned in relation to other lived places. The televisual and ICT infrastructures that project the ontological givenness of global business activity also enables workers, feminists, Greens, human rights activists, and indigenous peoples to mobilize against global capitalist organizations. Examples include multiscalar campaigns against corporations (Shell, Nike, Exxon), supranational institutions (IMF, WTO, World Economic Forum), and associated summit gatherings. The proliferation of transnational social movements opposed to global capitalism has been synonymous with the formation of real-time alternative news forums such as Indymedia, which force global configurations of power and the coeval disconnections between rich and poor into public view. Film historian Tom Zaniello has compiled and indexed what he calls “the cinema of globalization,” noting the recent proliferation of short films on political, investigative, and news websites, and predicting the growing availability of “longer films about globalization made in this new media” (Zaniello 2007, 16).
Detailed investigation of these developments is beyond the scope of this chapter. It is, however, pertinent here to identify the preconditions for oppositional practices of communication which might utilize the real-time capacities of satellite transmission, Internet, broadband, mobile telephony, satellite phones, portable video cameras, and desktop editing. Oppositional forms of political expression must avoid representing the global as a fact or force of nature. For any given film, documentary, or news story, various geographically located perspectives and temporalities must be foregrounded and compared. It is also vital to thematize the capitalist underpinnings of long-term global trends such as climate warming and resource depletion. Global patterns of finance, production, consumption, transportation, and distribution depend on a corporately designed system of fossil energy flows which threaten our biosphere. If this general diagnosis is not publicly explicated, 24/7 satellite channels and associated news flows will endlessly remediate the outward symptoms of a chronic global condition (hurricanes, droughts, famines, floods, squalor, and social breakdown). Countering the superficial immediacy of such coverage also requires a predictive understanding of global trends. Before a major news event appears, activists, journalists, and filmmakers must prepare audiences for the inundation of breaking stories registering popular fears and panic behavior. The likely consequences of an influenza outbreak or a full-scale stock market collapse, for example, could be explored via documentaries drawing upon similar events from the past. Finally, oppositional practices of media communication need to capture the linked simultaneity of a global capitalist network such as an oil company, a consumer goods manufacturer, an agribusiness corporation, or a hedge fund. In each case, the concurrent nodal points of business transactions, profit realization, and human exploitation could be visually portrayed within a coherent narrative. This kind of representation will require multimedia networks of communication with the capacity to counteract global reifications of real time. Contributing to the construction of these networks is one of the most urgent tasks facing a critical political economy of communications that aspires to translate theory into practice.
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