Page 96 - Contemporary Political Sociology Globalization Politics and Power

82 Politics in a Small World

most other victims of the war, many of them civilians, are nameless and
faceless, represented only as statistics and as the names of places on maps.
Judith Butler argues that the unevenness of these representations fore-
closes our ability to conceive of some people as having lives . In this way,

inflicting such casualties is made bearable: it is literally imaginable because
the lives of “ Others ” are already unreal, not really human (Butler, 2004 :
chapter 2 ).
Butler is hinting here at an alternative, that the media might unify,
rather than divide, a political community around our common humanity.
We may not share a human condition, given that we live in such different
ways around the world, but we may share the conditions in which the
question “ who is human? ” becomes a global question. Alongside the
changing structures of global governance we discussed in the previous
section, the principal change in this respect is developments in global
media. Global communications systems involve integrated satellite and
cable systems that transmit information quickly and cheaply across huge
distances, while transnational communications conglomerates are expand-
ing the global trade in information and communication products
(Thompson, 1996 ). Changes in global media potentially alter the condi-
tions in which the question “ who counts? ” is raised beyond the nation.
This is especially the case with satellite TV: news stories and pictures of
distant events are sent into homes around the world, enabling “ imagining
beyond the nation, ” even the creation of a global political community.
As Bruce Robbins puts it:

If people can get emotional as Anderson says they do about relations with
fellow nationals they never see face - to - face, then now that print - capitalism
has become electronic - and digital - capitalisms, and now that this system is
so clearly transnational, it would be strange if people did not get emotional
in much the same way, if not necessarily to the same degree, about others
who are not fellow nationals, people bound to them by some transnational
sort of fellowship. (Robbins, 1998 : 7)

Global media, along with changing structures of global governance, seem
to offer the conditions in which “ we ” might experience ourselves as
belonging together with others who have rights and obligations that really
count across borders, not just in law or morality, but through solidarity
and political action. Certainly, what John Urry calls “ banal globalism ” is
increasingly evident in the media: images of planet Earth, of the diversity
of humankind, of world - famous celebrities, and of campaigns concerning
global risks are now quite routinely shown to denote our commonality