Individual identity and global information. The global village (Mac Luhan)

Résumé du document

This paper will discuss how individual identity is constructed in an environment of global information and media flows, and will examine how valid Marshall Mac Luhan's global village concept is, in this environment. The pattern of our everyday lives has made us aware of the numerous changes linked with the development of ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) and globalization. Scholars have increasingly begun to talk about an Information society and about the fact that people are now entering a new age and mode of information. Almost all of them agree to point out that quantitative changes in information are bringing into existence a new qualitative social system. In such a context globalization seems to refer to a space where the global and the local entities may interact using ICT as a tool. While bringing about an internationalization of affairs (meaning more links between autonomous states) this process also creates a growing interdependence and interpenetration of human relations and an integration of the world's social and economic life.

Extraits

[...] Actually the old referents, which offered an automatic predefined identity, have been challenged with the spread of the global digital environment. There was a kind of determinism in the development of individual identity: the identity could be considered as a gift, something automatic, determined by your physical space, your family, your language Nations states were really essential to many people's identity. To the majority national allegiance was the central element of their being. Everywhere to a greater or lesser degree nation states influenced identity by constructed mythic pasts made up legends, history, literature, traditions, celebrations, customs It provided an more simple and stable identity. [...]

[...] He uses the Net as a representation of the global and the self refers to the culture the local. Consequently, new social formations emerge around primary identities, and may focus on be sexual, religious, ethnic, territorial or national aspects. When nostalgia for the local becomes more important than the open- minded vision of in the choices made by the individual to construct their identities we are in front of primary identity expression: globalization can also implicate the resurgence of those primary identities. [...]

[...] Whether urban or rural, young or old, wealthy or working class, we are using ICTs, going out to consume foods, cultural events and entertainments publicized in the mass media. Media provide personal as well as collective means of communication. In that way they are becoming an essential tool of our way of life. Nowadays information networks link together people all over the world and make them easily informed on everything they want to know. In a way persons had created information and communication technologies which are now more or less “creating” people. [...]

[...] Initiating global business practice standardization in 2002, Coca Cola experienced declining profits. Today, Coca Cola marketing managers and scientists collaborate directly to develop new marketing strategies and the "big successes have come from markets where [marketing specialists] read the consumer psyche every day and adjust the marketing model" (Byrnes, 2000). The global is “recreated” by individual and nations in a more local way: the construction of individual identity in global information and media flows is a continuous complex game of combinations between those two levels. [...]

[...] Actually, the questions of identity tend in a certain extent to be internationalized since the media offers all international information, more and more people are involved in international organizations or in global movements. II End of “given identity”, fears and withdrawals: individuals have to cope with confusion With the birth of that globalization, the spread of global information and media flows, individuals are faced to a bigger digital environment, to more references to construct them identities. However the identity in that “global village” is becoming less and less linked with the references” especially with the Nation state It let people in certain confusion. [...]