The Global Sociology Blog

I may have mentioned before that I consider Zygmunt Bauman one of the most interesting contemporary social theorists on late modern society. So, this article attracted my attention:

facebook, the transumer and liquid capitalism « Sociology Lens via kwout

This prompts Mark Bahnisch over at Larvatus Prodeo to assert the following:

Weightless capitalism at Larvatus Prodeo via kwout

Both arguments reminded me of Malcolm Waters’s point on globalization.

As I have written elsewhere, according to Malcolm Waters (2001), there are three types of human exchanges that can be more easily globalized, that is, deterritorialized:

• Material exchanges refer to any interaction involving the transmission of material items, such as factory work, trade in goods, tenancy. Material exchanges tend to be localized in spaces. Raw materials – agricultural goods, petroleum – are extracted from specific locations. Factories are located where labor is available and cheap. Manufactured goods are transported to western markets for sale and consumption.

• Power exchanges refer to the exercise of leadership through coercion or legislation, for instance. By definition, the exercise of power applies to territories but also to international relations, that is, relations between nation-states, such as war, diplomacy or alliances. Power exchanges therefore extend internationally across territories.

• Symbolic exchanges refer to any form of communication, exchange of information or data. This includes the mass media, the entertainment industry, advertisement and propaganda, etc. Symbolic exchanges involve the transmission of signs and symbols. Because technology makes it possible to disseminate symbols rapidly and widely, symbolic exchanges can be easily detached from territories and therefore, globalized.

Based on these forms of exchange, Waters proposes a globalization theorem:“Material exchanges localize; political exchanges internationalize; and symbolic exchanges globalize” (Waters, 2001: 20). But where many articles see the beauty of social networking (and the potential to talk back to power through ICTs, as the Iranian reform movement shows), Bauman is more measured.

For him, global flows shape individuals’ lives both positively (greater access to knowledge and information) and negatively (insecurity generated by financescapes, precarization of work), each scape creating its own type of risks. The solidity of the state is undermined by the “liquidity” of flows since they are transnational, trans-border phenomena. This is what prompted Zygmunt Bauman (2000) to describe the first modernity as heavy or solid modernity, as opposed to the liquid late modernity, which is the condition of globalization.

As Bauman puts it (2000), “capital can travel fast and travel light and its lightness and motility have turned into the paramount source of uncertainty for all the rest. This has become the present-day basis of domination and the principal factor of social divisions” (p. 121).

It remains to be seen whether the "Iranian Revolution will be twittered", causewired movements have their limits beyond symbolic impact. One could also argue that there is a precedent for a social movement using ICTs to globalize its cause and, in a sense, try to obtain some protection by making itself visible when the state tries to limit its ability to communicate: the Zapatistas and one could argue that they were more revolutionary than the current Iranian movement.