RESISTANCE AND TRANSFORMATION IN THE INFORMATION AGE

As Sassen (1998) and Castells (1996) have demonstrated an essential moment of globalization consists of vast flows of electronic information, capital (legal and illegal), and movements of human populations. To understand social movements today we must also consider global flows of culture, international military/police actions, environmental toxins, and informationally mediated social movements and cyberactivisms. The coordination of a global firm typically involves thousands to hundreds of thousands of daily computer-mediated transactions across hundreds of offices, plants, and/or research centers throughout the globe. Financial transactions from ATM deposits/withdrawals to stock trades flow through electronically integrated global networks. These networks have enabled the internationalization of currency markets in which currency speculations, investments, and payments have become ever less dependent on geographic proximate and location. So too have electronically mediated information flows transformed politics and culture, usually in terms dominated by European politics and culture.

         There are also massive flows of people moving across the globe, from the TNC elites in their private jet to the millions of poor seeking better jobs in cities, especially those in the developed world. Certain industries such as elite hotels, restaurants, and airport lounges cater to the elites. Likewise, certain smugglers and exploitative employers encourage the migrations of the poor. Also among the global flows are increasing amounts of toxins and the destabilizing results of industrial production.

         The Internet is a foundational moment of contemporary globalization. The Internet has made once private information available to a greater number of people. Actions of private corporations and governments are now more transparent, accessible to larger numbers of people—much of which those in power might not wish public. In many authoritarian States where governments control information and the media, a variety of “alternative” web sites are popping up—as has been happening recently in the Middle East. Insofar as the global economy depends on vast networks, these same networks have the potential of offering new forms of communication, resistance, and progressive mobilization—as has been well noted by Castells (1997) and Dyer-Witheford (1999). The growth and maintenance of the Internet has fostered an intertwining of local and global systems, a “glocalization” that has become a central theme for our age (Robertson 1992).  The global impacts the local (and individual) and the local structures the nature of the global. While the globalized economy has become de-territorialized, it is nevertheless territorially instantiated. Otherwise said, global systems are grounded in local spaces and nodes of control that are concentrated in the administrative and service facilities found in the global cities (Sassen 1998). While the TNCs marshal global resources, and global institutions increasingly manipulate/control nation-states, the control functions that appear in the local nodes can be sites of protest. In the AGMs, social actions are organized around local protests at global conference sites and/or command and control centers. Yet, these local actions are organized and publicized through international networking facilitated by the Internet.

By:  Ulaya Sijali (BAPRM 42681)