How is individual identity constructed in the environment of global information and media flows? How valid is Marshall Mac Luhan's global village concept in this environment?
Nowadays, each of us is aware from the pattern of our everyday lives that there have been lots of changes linked with the development of ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) and globalization. Scholars have increasingly begun to talk about Information society and about the fact that people are entering a new age of information, a new mode of information. Almost all agree to point out that quantitative changes in information are bringing into being a qualitative new sort of social system. In such a context globalization seems to make reference to a space where the global and the local interact using ICT as a tool. More than an increasingly internationalisation of affairs ( meaning more links between autonomous states) that process is also a growing interdependence and interpenetration of human relations and an integration of world's social and economic life. Then, it consists of changes which strongly affect both the local and national spaces. All those changes lead people to face a new digital environment, which reaches beyond the roots and the referents used by individuals to construct their identity, which is not stable. Then what are the role of the media flows and global information in that search? Firstly, Mac Luhan theory of global village seems to be a good starting point to see how media flows and the spread of global information can change the construction of identity and make people more eager to develop a global identity. Nevertheless, such changes are the cause of different fears and withdrawals to defence some people's identity and this concept is asking some questions. Indeed, people have finally to construct their identities in combining the global and local necessities.
[...] 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. Scholars speak about the “glocalization”: it is often use in social sciences to describe an active process where there is an ongoing negotiation between local and global. It means that there is a global influence (provided by the generalization of the ICTs) that is altered by local cultures and re-inserted into the global by a constant circle. [...]
[...] Internet especially entails people to create differently them identity To put it in a nutshell, thanks to those media flows which compressed time and speed and make people closer and able to communicate and exchange everywhere at any time, identity can be built in mixing and confronting more different cultures and values without being homogenised as people can normally chose their sources, the models they want to identify and can make the global things more personal in adding their own experiences. [...]
[...] Nowadays, surrounded by such a digital environment created by the global information and media flows, we can say that individuals have much more references to build their identity than before. Some studies point out the fact that child for instance begins to form a sense of personality identity, an emerging consciousness of existence life, and self through interactions on three levels. First the child interacts with persons (parents, friends, classmates).Second he interacts with the environment (the crib, the room, the house, and nature in general). [...]
[...] To put it in a nutshell confronted with that global environment people more and more want and chose to construct their identity in distinction from the others. Under certain circumstances we are under the impression that they want to assert themselves in groups which are different in order to get a real social sense. Nevertheless the choice to come back to these primary identities remains to be something caricatured and simplified: people cannot turn them back totally against the globalization. [...]
[...] We are under the impression that identity is paradoxically less and less rooted in physical and stable characteristics it is no more a place-based question: individuals have to build it and to make their own choices, to find their own interaction between the global and the local. They want it to be more self reflective. B. The complexity to build identity for individuals among that new digital interconnected environment has generated some fears People in such a global information context can be afraid of losing the way to construct and claim their identity: homogenisation and cultural imperialism can be problematic to have the diversity remained. [...]
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