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The Mythology about Globalization 29

While it is true that the structural transformation of capital, information and
goods markets would not have happened as it has without modern telecommu-
nications and computing, the potential of IT as a force for public and private
good is inflated to say the least. Especially, much ‘wired societies’ euphoria over-
looks problems of differential access, principally North-South, to the alleged
benefits and the complexity of differential impact on time–space perceptions and
social experience.
The postmodernist attention paid to temporal and spatial categories as emble-
matic of a more globalized, transnational culture, differentiates their meaning
from an earlier modernity. Claiming that classic theorists such as Weber and Marx
favoured time over space, where the road to modernization was one of becom-
ing rather than of being, Harvey (1989: 205) sees conflict: ‘beneath the veneer of
common-sense and seemingly “natural” ideas about space and time lie hidden
areas of ambiguity, contradiction and struggle’.
Such contradictions are based on subjective as well as objective material
factors. Thus, redefinitions of time and space provide a material connection
between the processes of a more global cultural and political economy and the
postmodern condition. But the unknown frontiers of a postmodern world create
a crisis of uncertainty for Jameson (1984) wherein the ‘hyperspace’ of a global
culture requires new ‘cognitive maps’ to negotiate.
Uncertainty about where and when we are in the world is at odds with the
idea that technology can confer benefits of time–distance compression for all.
The mobility of commerce, organizations, information and people does not make
time and space irrelevant, rather, it highlights the extent to which these areas of
experience have become more, not less, multilayered, interrelated and complex.
For the uprooted, the restless or the peripatetic, the business of ‘living life’ (family,
friends, work) in three or four time zones requires new negotiating skills in a
perceptual world of spatial indeterminacy and temporal recalculation, a world
of ‘time without time’ and ‘space without space’ (Ferguson, 1990).
Neither do we know much about how shared broadcast media experience
alters time–space perceptions by bringing the faraway near. Speculation, for
example, as to how television may foster reproduction of political action or repli-
cation of iconic protest images from one part of the world to another, overlooks
the fact that the mechanisms by which any such effects might occur remain
something of a black hole in communications research. To a greater extent than
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other myths about globalization, ‘Time and Space’ typifies the extension of our
horizons and problematics in the communications field.

The Myth of ‘Global Cultural Homogeneity’

This myth relates to McLuhan’s notions of global village shared experience
and to aspects of postmodernist and media imperialist interpretations of a more
culturally (and economically) intertwined world. More specifically, it relates to
the interconnectivity of the transnational organization of cultural production,
distribution and consumption in the broadest sense, and, in the context of this