Page 13 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

JAMES LULL

stock of traditional less-mediated cultural influences that make up the most
taken-for-granted aspects of everyday life.
Unlike previous eras when values and ways of life were tied mainly to local
contexts and influences, cultural forms today circulate far more widely and are
used in ever more innovative ways. The resulting struggles over culture and
identity on a global scale have become core issues for scholars across a wide
range of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. This book adds to the
ongoing debates and does so with an open mind. The diverse perspectives
presented in the following chapters have been brought together here in order
to give advanced students an opportunity to discuss and debate the very terms
of the future.

Communication and cultural globalization
Communications technology has become decisive in sociocultural transform-
ations taking place worldwide. This book attempts to take full account of
technological developments in contemporary cultural activity, including the
nuances and subtleties of computer-mediated communication, but it considers
the more directly experienced and ‘non-rational’ sides of life too. Human
emotions and routine everyday experience – factors which are often left out of
theoretical discussions about culture and society in the Communication Age –
occupy a central place in this volume. The emphasis given to communication is
key. By focusing on processes of human interaction and on their constitutive
signifying practices rather than simply on the hardware or content of information
transmission and exchange, we keep the human considerations in the forefront
of the analysis where they belong.
That is an especially consequential priority in an age when technocratic
thinking and language – which operate interdependently with the same dis-
passionate mentality that drives most global economic activity – have assumed
such tremendous visibility and allure. The technological and information revo-
lution that created the Communication Age in the late twentieth century took
place during a ‘period of the global restructuring of capitalism’ (Castells
1996: 13). Clearly, the economic incentives and rewards of global capitalism
continue to be supported and advanced by the institutional use of state-of-
the-art information and communications technology. Patterns of economic
domination that have long been in place are now being extended even more by
the rush of high technology and global connectivity.
When we turn our attention to the cultural dimensions of globalization,
however, we see that ‘informational capitalism’ has also created ‘historically
new forms of social interaction’ (Castells 1996: 18) that embody and provoke a
multitude of contradictory tendencies which often shake up traditional power
relations. We must be careful therefore not to oversimplify things by blaming
technology and globalization for all the world’s ills, as Zygmunt Bauman
(1998) and others have tended to do. The hub of the Communication Age, the

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