Local and global belonging
I recently read Kallinikos’ critical stance on how ethnographic and social constructivist approaches of social science studies on technology take on user-centric and context-centric approaches, referring to the researcher’s bias and the influence of personal orientation on studied material. In his argument for macro-sociological and multi-sited ethnography I found the incorporation of the relevance of the local and its influence on global processes missing. Bestor for example reminds us that people experience global processes in particular locations, from which they derive their understanding and definition of the (global-yet-seemingly-local) processes themselves. Interactions with the global are outcomes of negotiations within the local. Both local and global activities are mutually defined processes that structure identities, associations with a specific locality are made available globally through commercially produced images of the “outside” world. Gupt on the other hand argues that in order to understand global and trans-national configurations we must understand how feelings of belonging to an imagined community bind identity to spatial locations. Instead of forming nations, border transgressing information technology, informs a process of belonging to a locality by its interrelation to the global. In this sense, it appears less crucial to investigate upon the term trans-national but rather to talk about interplay of global-local belonging and how information technology might reinforce or eliminate spatially or culturally perceived borders. While technology in everyday use in the home, in the office, in the grocery store, etc. has often been associated with only another tool for convenience and efficiency, it has been tactically applied for local, emotionally rich and culturally diverse situations, however transgressing spatial and temporal borders and simultaneously creating feelings of remote presence and connectedness, while re-defining belonging.
Which technological characteristics reinforce connectedness to a local, which ones to a global, and which ones to both? How are different technological implementation layers, such as hardware, visible and invisible infrastructure, software, or user interfaces applied for local idiosyncratic goals and how are these extended across imagined borders? The virtual space dependent on various physical implementation layers on the one hand ridicules as Bester termed it “fixity of a Western (or national) core as an illusion” and on the other hand contributes to the substantiation of another local that doesn’t consider national borders and extends upon what we might call global, but is constrained by and only existing through the various localities.