Jamie Spatt
English 102: College Writing and Research
Section 056
Erik Chandler
Assignment #11

Globalization is similar in its nature to fire. Fire is not in itself a good or bad thing; it can be used for many good things like cooking food, heating our homes, and sterilizing equipment as well as for many destructive and harmful things like burning down towns, homes, forests, or even destroying lives. As our society moves forward into a more and more globalized structure, we have to be careful how we are using globalization and what we are doing to control it and make sure it doesn't cross over from something helpful and beneficial to something dangerous and catastrophic. It is easy to see why globalization would be beneficial to society. Globalization has the potential to spread innovations in healthcare, education, government, technology, or potentially anything you can even think of, to the furthest corners of the globe. In the past 20 years, 200 million people have left absolute poverty behind. Advances in medicine, improved public health policies, and greater food supplies have lowered infant mortality and lengthened life expectancy. Countries who use child labor forces tend to move away from child labor practices with growing incomes that can stem from a globalized economy.
So how could globalization be considered dangerous and feared by many people despite the fact that many also accept and even strive for it’s advancement? Some of the major issues surrounding this aspect of globalization involve the fact that with the spread of globalized economies, many of the more urbanized countries begin to lose job markets to overseas workers instead of keeping the jobs close to home. This could be a detriment because for example in America there are many people who need jobs and we see more and more of our manufacturing and development jobs going overseas. Also a concern is that globalization is moving too fast and the only countries ideas to get spread are the ideas of the countries with the biggest numbers in population and in revenue. While it can be argued that that may not be the worst of problems, picture what it is like to be a citizen of a small country losing your heritage and culture to a few countries that seem to have all the power and don’t really care to preserve your culture in their race to globalize the world. Also if you’re looking at the ‘shark’ vs. the ‘minnows’ aspect you have to wonder how fair it is to have those few top countries have the majority of the decision making power when it comes to major issues in things like government, education, healthcare and technology. In some ways it seems like with globalization the middle class gets bigger and evens out which is not necessarily bad, but the rich and powerful get even more rich and powerful and so the world runs the risk of being run behind the scenes by a select few, who are most likely corrupt and saturated with greed and an unfair balance of power.
Furthermore, there are other possibilities tied in with globalization that have the potential to lead us into dark waters if we don’t be careful how we act on them. One of them is security. "In a word, discipline wants to produce order, while security wants to guide disorder." (Agamben p.1 paragraph 3.) As the world moves towards globalization the issue of security vs. discipline gets harder to control and understand. Security in itself doesn’t sound like an all-bad thing, and it doesn’t need to be, but it can be if the leaders of a nation decide they want to use it to their advantage. For example, when 9/11 happened, some believe Bush used that state of emergency, uncertainty, and chaos for the American people to get us into another war on purpose, and some even think he and others in the government planned 9/11 itself. Not saying that that’s necessarily true, but it is a strong possibility, and if it didn’t happen with 9/11 it could easily happen anytime a major catastrophe occurs. This is why we need to be extremely careful about how we deal with these issues, and who gets to make these decisions, especially if the world is going to become more and more globalized and those in power become fewer and fewer in numbers and those under them become more and more in numbers. "Maybe the time has come to work towards the prevention of disorder and catastrophe and not merely towards their control...On the contrary, we can say that politics secretly works towards the production of emergencies." (Agamben p.2 paragraph 5.)
Another possibly dangerous aspect to consider when discussing globalization is the spread of technology and the influence of media on society. "Already today there is hardly and event of human significance towards which the artificial eye, the camera lens, is not directed." (Junger p.31) Globalization has also sparked a new way in which citizens see the world as they are able to see more and more of what goes on in other countries like the Abu Grhaib prison photos Allen Feldman refers to in his essay, "On the Acturarial Gaze." The context in which we are shown these types of imagery can easily be altered and changed by governments through the media so that people get a certain message from them and perhaps not the message they would get on their own if they were showed the complete truth of them instead. In a global sense, this can be very dangerous for some cultures because the ones with the most power, America being the strongest, are the ones with the greatest access and foothold on the global media. Also American citizens, if this isn’t reading too much into things, are probably the people who’s influence matters most in a global sense, and our media, being arguably the most advanced in recent times, is the one most being sought after to manipulate. "Since the gulf war. We have witnessed a global repositioning of the visual communication practices, utilities and technologies of the state and media as regards political mobilization, identity formation, geographic perception, political violence, urban planning, public safety, and human rights. The circulation, of anthropologically threatening images of violence, terror, covert infection and social suffering has intensified in our public culture." (Feldman p.1, paragraph 1) And certainly the changing of technology and communication has greatly changed or modern society and culture. And with those changes will come responsibilities in making sure these changes are for our benefit and not our destruction. The surfacing of images like the Abu Ghraib prison photos and others into our daily news is for us, as Feldman states, both an 'enchainment' and an 'enchantment'. This enchants us in a morbid sort of fascinated way, and it captures us and moves us to support whatever it is our government wants to do to handle it unquestioningly, and this part of it, the blindly following, is our enchainment. We lose our own sovereign rights to our right not to be subconsciously influenced by the media who intern are influenced by ill intentioned governments to get us to think a certain way in order to support their own twisted agenda's.
One of Feldman's sources, Junger, is quoted on page 204 of the essay saying, "As during the inflation, we continue for a time to spend the usual coins without sensing that the rate of exchange has changed." This quote is incredibly fitting. We continue today going about our business as usual without even realizing things are rapidly changing as far as or visual influences and where they are coming from and who's ideas and desires are behind them. Whether used by terrorists or non-terrorists methods of image making and imposition don't simply record an event but become the event by forcing onto our consciousnesses the political 'code' of people above us in the hierarchy of government officials. One might even say we are in evolving into people of double-consciousnesses, the newer harsher conscious having the possibility to see oneself as merely an object, and above and beyond the realm of mental or bodily pain. In this day and age we are more succumbed than ever to things that can harm us, even irreversibly, that we aren't even aware of. We continue to remain blissfully unaware of our greatest dangers as a society as they continue to elude us. And if America is greatly being effected in this way, and America is at the forefront of globalization, we have to be careful what we are leading people of other countries into in our work towards a single global community. We have to be careful what sort of plans and values we are carrying over into this type of worldly and united society.
Yet another area that needs concern when dealing with the globalizing world is ethnicity and ethnic violence. "There are surely other ethnocidal imaginaries in which forces of global capital, the relative power of the states, varying histories of race and class and differences in the states of mass mediation, produce different kinds of uncertainty and different scenarios for ethnocide." (Appadurai p.243) In relation to globalization the mixing of ethnic cultures becomes so huge and confusing, acts of violence are conducted partially out of fear and partially out of a personal anger because of the lack of an ability to understand and comprehend who’s who and who’s on who’s side because it can no longer necessarily be determined just by looking at someone and their skin color of other cultural features, whereas not too long ago that was possible. Violence because of ethnicity sometimes is also a way for certain violent cultures to see a person inside of something described as merely a 'body' that fits in with the ethnic whole. "The problem of fake identities seems to demand the brutal creation of real persons through violence." (Appadurai p.242) However sick and twisted these acts of violence are, they are a way in which some of these people try to discover real persons within bodies. Globalization can lead up to these acts of violence because it creates that confusion in some foreign societies, perhaps the less educated and less wealthy. So in a way globalization can be accredited to both the cause and the cure, as education with a stronger globalized force could bring these people to resort to less violent means in dealing with cultural and historical issues between peoples. One of the dangers we face as a society post 9/11 and the War on Terror is our growing unreasonable judgment of people of peculiar races, especially that of Middle Eastern decent. In this way the media and thorough press coverage of the war, of 9/11, of Abu Ghraib, have changed us for the worse. How many times since 9/11 have we seen people judge the person wearing the turban the second they see them walking through the airport or getting on the bus. On page 206 Feldman states, "We cannot ignore the violence generated by interventions to reduce harm." And this is a perfect example of this. It is because of this that the motives and reasons behind what is flushed into our media, however true must be analyzed for the greater good. While ideologies and agendas can be resisted, the power of the publics 'actuarial gaze' onto the intense, obscene, and threatening images in the media today cannot be denied. And this in it’s own way is a form of the new and globalizing ‘world’ society.
Globalization is in my own and many others’ opinion, inevitable. Whether globalization will as expected by the majority, turn out for our good and our benefit as a societal whole, or turn against us and cause us more difficulty and social struggles, is impossible to tell for certain. It is our job as a globally expanding community to be careful what the consequences are of our actions and do the best we can to ‘kindle’ globalization gently. If we cannot take control and make the right choices concerning globalization, we may live to see ourselves consumed by relentless fires of our own poor decisions and carelessness.





Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. "Security and Terror." Theory and Event 5 (2002) [online] available
at http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v005/5.4agamben.html
Appadurai, Arjun. "Dead Certainty: Ethnic violence in the Era of Globalization." Public
Culture 10 (1998): 225-247
Feldman, Allen. "On the Actuarial Gaze: From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib." Cultural Studies 19 (2005):
203-226
Junger, E. "On Danger." New German Critique 59 (1993): 27-32