In the Matrix: East West Encounters

Abstract

The logo for BBC news broadcasts used to show a globe which turned slowly through its axis before returning to the world’s European and Western face. This has been replaced by an enigmatic sequence in which an angled disc of the British Isles gives way to a series of swirling ellipses of parts of the globe. Superimposed on these images are the scrabbled, then clearing names of world cities. That this sequence has been supplemented by the channel identification of a coloured hot air balloon of the globe which floats against a variety of backgrounds, confirms that something has come adrift. Our picture of the world has been quite radically disturbed. One reason is the ubiquity and all-atonceness of telecommunications. This development, allied to the vast influence of corporate powers operating over and above national borders and the deliberations of national governments, seems to have kicked the globe into a speeding multi-coloured blur. It’s clear too, whose foot the boot is on. Globalization equals Americanization, says Thomas Friedman (1999): a thesis Time Warner and AOL showed themselves only too ready to prove in a merger which greeted the twenty first century with a power-house of world wide ‘infotainment’.