In his essay “Culture, Globalization, Mediation” William Mazzarella is concerned with the relationship between processes of mediation and globalization. Trying to shed light on mediation as a key component of social life – integral to any kind of interaction – as well as by investigating the media's role within globalization, Mazzarella proposes a new and less restricted understanding of the 'medium' that allows for the conclusion that in fact mediation can be encountered wherever people interact with one another (2004:345–346).
This notion is based on his idea of the ambiguity of all media: The medium is not only the material framework that facilitates as well as restricts social practices, but it “is also a reflexive and reifying technology” (2004:346). Hence, providing us with “external representations” (2004:346) of ourselves and letting us construct and imagine ourselves as well as others in the first place, media constitute a tool that we can use and that at the same time utilizes us. The medium's implied constant oscillation between absence and presence, its direct interference with 'culture' – something that is intensified by globalization as will be shown below – leads Mazzarella to understand mediation as a social practice utilized by people every day. It is due to these premises that Mazzarella suggests a rethinking, a broadening, of the traditional notion of the medium, insofar as he likes to acknowledge the 'media potential' of cultural practices such as performance and thus go beyond the term's merely technical implications (2004:345). By blurring the distinction between medium and culture, he attempts to promote their coconstitution (2004:353), for the medium itself is deeply cultural and culture is always the product of mediation.
Mazzarella's main interest, however, lies in identifying an inherent contradiction in how anthropology as an academic discipline deals with mediation: On the one hand is has been stressed how modern life is increasingly mediated. On the other hand mediation has often been denied its impact, for advocating the idea our lives being the result of processes of mediation would deny the possibility of objectivity, truth and hence disrupt notions of security and 'authenticity' that is, despite efforts to unmask its constructed character, still a concept deeply-rooted within society in general as well in the academic psyche in particular (2004:347, 354).
Thinking globalization and mediation together Mazzarella makes us aware of the fact that due to globalization the overall level of mediation has increased while he is also highlighting that there has never been such a thing as a 'true' and objective, immediate access to the world. As a consequence of globalization many anthropologists switched their focus of study from the global stage to the small-scale “production of locality” (2004:346). While studying other people's practices of representing culture, however, they came to notice that as a result of ongoing processes of globalization people in various parts of the world were facing and confronting the same issues, something that was believed to be no longer the case (2004:347).
Mazzarella's idea that due to globalization mediation's inherent dialectical doubleness – its close distance (2004:348) – comes to the fore as a crucial factor in how we envision ourselves as well as that processes of mediation are at the very root of what we understand as globalization, is very well illustrated by online software applications such as 'Skype' allowing users all over the world to get in contact with each other. While such programs evoke the impression of immediacy, they also increase the distance between their users and make them aware of various differences. The fact that these differences are no longer to be perceived as 'cultural', but as something that needs to be recognized as a function of all processes of mediation (2004:360), is something we can take away from Mazzarella's article and attribute to his effort to illuminate how globalization impacts on mediation by means of readdressing the tensions between the local and the global and the issue of close distance.
References Cited
Mazzarella, William
2004 Culture, Globalization, Mediation. Annual Review of Anthropology 33 (2004): 345- 367.
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