Online Journalism - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

The (Re)Construction of Reality 217
with the influence of the economic and cultural centres.
Importantly, globality by no means embraces everyone on the planet
and its beliefs; information networks, economies, markets and
culture, while they affect the whole population, remain completely
inaccessible to most individuals. Those Internet prophets who anticipate
an imminent wired world remain obdurately blind to those
who have yet to see, much less use, their first telephone. Albrow
emphasises that as industries such as finance move offshore their
global centres can become entirely virtual places. ‘International
finance lives at the ends of telephone and video links.’ 14 A further
significance of the process is that as the world becomes one the
nation state becomes an anachronism. Globalisation is not merely
the ‘intensification of global interconnectedness’ 15 or the ‘elimination
of economic borders’. It represents fundamental systemic
changes for the planet affecting both its polities and its economies.
… the system loses its coherence. It can no longer replicate itself
by absorbing new lands and peasantries, and instead fractures
into a whole variety of differing strategies for production, capital
accumulation and the creation of new needs. It becomes what
Lash and Urry (1987) call ‘disorganized capitalism’. 16
That capitalism, following the logic of Fordism to an inevitable and
often draconian conclusion, entails the flexible production systems
enabled by information technologies – lean and just-in-time production,
zero-hour contracts and the flexible labour force, mobile capital
and the focus on niche markets. One of the defining attributes of a
disorganised capitalism is its capacity, since it can no longer expand
into new markets, for falling back upon the old and appropriating
any objects capable of turning a profit on its behalf, including its
own discards and oppositional forms. George Soros, the speculator
who took on whole economies in the 1980s and 1990s, fears a capitalism
now voracious enough to devour even its own structural
supports and ideology. ‘… The untrammeled intensification of
laissez-faire capitalism and the spread of market values into all areas
of life is endangering our open and democratic society. The main
enemy of the open society, I believe, is no longer the communist but
the capitalist threat.’ 17