Brooke Bumgarner - Revisiting Appadurai

"It takes only the merest acquaintance with the facts of the modern world to note that it is now an interactive system in a sense that is strikingly new" (511) wrote Appadurai. This much is clear in society today, as each country does not merely possess the consumer goods of their own land, but we find goods shipped from near and far into almost every area. There is no denying however, that there are still areas of the world virtually untouched, or not near as easy to reach as others, however, "this intricate and overlapping set of Eurocolonial worlds... set the basis for a permanent traffic in ideas of peoplehood and selfhood, which created the imagined communities (Anderson 1983) of recent nationalisms throughout the world" (Appadurai, 511). However, this does not apply purely to capital, but even more importantly to the technical and mediated sphere of human life.

"For the past century, there has been a technological explosion, largely in the domain of transportation and information..." (Appadurai 512). Today, argues Appadurai, our media and technological advances make it so that media can be transmitted widely throughout the world. We are living in an era of cultural interactions that are blending our cultures together, it seems. It is further argued by Appadurai that, "most often, the homogenization argument subspeciates into either an argument about Americanization or an argument about commoditization" (513). Many today argue that Americanization is occurring throughout our world, however, we fail to understand how each culture may make simulated ideas their own.

Appadurai importantly argues that, "the new global cultural economy has to be seen as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order that cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing center-periphery models... the current global economy has to do with certain fundamental disjunctures between economy, culture, and politics that we have only begun to theorize" (514). A very important statement to take into account, we have only begun to theorize them, for the world we are in is ever changing.

The disjunctures he argues are made up of five dimensions: ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes. All of which, I believe are constantly in flux, as noted above, ever changing.

Ethnoscapes can be understood as the shifting of and exchange of individuals through cultural boundaries, best understood as migration I suppose.
Technoscapes can be understood as the fluid, new and advancing exchanges of information and interactions between cultures due to the power of technological advances.
Financescapes is closely related to the previous two, however because of the specifics of every culture and landscape, it is hard to imagine a truly global political economy as Appadurai calls it. It appears to me that his is still the dimension with the biggest gaps. It is widely unpredictable because of its nature of change he argues.
Mediascapes Appadurai claims "refer both to the distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information" (515) across cultural boundaries previously held. This is reflective widely of the various media outlets- news, television, magazines, ect. that help us create an imagined world in which we can blend each part of cultures we like to create a utopian idea of what we would ideally wish to exist in.
And finally, ideoscapes, deal with the political side of such imaginary worlds, or fantasizes and they deal frequently with "ideologies of states and the counter-ideologies of movements explicitly oriented to capturing state power or a piece of it" (Appadurai, 516).