Fractured Impact
- Hueiyen Lanpao Editorial :: July 20 2015 -
In the Post Globalisation period, scholars around the world have argued that national boundaries as “physically” mapped and reflected in the minds have become even fuzzier and nation states are increasingly finding it difficult to control the flow of political, social and cultural imageries.
However, it should be noted that the origin for this phenomenon has been invariably traced to both the print and visual media’s characteristics in influencing and to some extent determining cross-border movement of ideas, goods, capital and people.
There have been numerous stories based on the theory that trans-national thoughts as reflected after the print and television media, challenges boundaries, questioning the principle of “territoriality” and demarcated nationalism.
Are we then supposed to conclude that it is very well the end of modern nation states’ attempts to use print and electronic media as means to reinforce the idea of a territorially or nationally “established order”.
Certainly not, if one closely monitors and identifies who actually hold the power to monopolise the process of knowledge production and allows their ideas to shape people’s perception of socio-political reality.
To make sense of such a situation, one has to understand the logic that sets trans-national ideas into motion.
The world over, there has been serious scholarship on the dynamics of globalisation and its subsequent impact on cultures of the world.
And with the emergence of new communication technologies like the internet as potent medium of communication, media discourse has now focussed on examining earlier models of communication dealing with questions like: Who is an audience? What is a communication medium? How are messages mediated?
The print media, voice-only (radio), audio-visual (television) and the new technology medium like the internet and their “simultaneity of operation” have led to “multiplied and fractured” impact quite contrary to the simple linear impact experienced earlier in the past.
The impact of the global process of shaping and re-shaping ideas does have a definitive impact on smaller nationalities, ethnic groups and minorities.
Though there have been serious attempts to intentionally homogenise diversities within a nation, any powerful state’s endeavour has had either mixed response or an impact never likely to be imagined in the 1960s or the 1970s.
This is why, the ongoing process of knowledge production has to be minutely understood by those who foresee the pangs of being an endangered group likely to be swayed by momentary belief in the utopian national grand-narratives.
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