Appadurai pre-class

For Thursday’s class we were asked to read, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy”, by Arjun Appadurai. He talks about and relates to many theorists we have covered thus far. According to Appadurai the imaginary is made up of five dimensions of global natural flow; 1. Ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, and ideoscapes. He discusses imaginary by saying, “the image, the imagined, the imaginary- these are all terms that direct us to something critical and new in global cultural processes: the imagination as a social practice”. This quote reminds me a lot of Baudrillard, because he talks a lot about the imaginary as well and how it plays a big role in society. We like to use our imagination, because we like it better than the real. This is because the imaginary comes across so much more appealing than the real. Appadurai also says how people around the globe live in imaginary worlds, and Baudrillard would agree with that statement also. Baudrillard believes that sometimes imitations are created to look so realistic that it is hard to determine what is real and what is fake, to the extent that we start to live in these imaginary worlds, because we cannot tell the difference. Appadurai also claims that there has been a “technological explosion” in the past century (including trains, airplanes, telephone, computers, and internet), which has created a deeper level of communication…or does it? People would think that this has created a way to share culture with more people, but really it just Americanizes other places and cultures throughout the world. He gives the example of people from the Philippines’ “affinity for American popular music” and how they appreciate songs from our past almost more than we appreciate them.

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