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How social media enforce glocalization - the processes of identity change in selected ...
new then about new social media? Th ey are mostly free of charge, easy to use and access,
web based, spread across unprecedented numbers of global populations and technically
more developed since they enable the manipulation of text, images and videos. Th ey
are currently dominating the usage of World Wide Web in almost all countries around
the world.
Since these processes involving Web 2.0 social media are new and still not part of
substantial social and cultural research we will attempt to describe the main processes
and mechanisms that can and do infl uence the reshuffl ing of cultural identities3 in a
process of glocalization in Central and Southeast European countries. We understand
glocalization as the main process of cultural change in the process of globalization.
Robertson defi nes it not as a polarity but as a complex relationship between the global
and the local (1995: 35). 4
Th e argumentation in the article is mostly theoretical and conceptual. Th e fi rst
section deals with globalization in general and the spread of communication structures
in particular which infl uence the processes of shaping and reshaping cultures. In the
next section we describe how media communication types in contemporary network
societies are being fundamentally changed. In the ensuing section we discuss how the
notions of media space have evolved from hyperreality to virtual reality to digital
space. In the following section we describe how Facebook as a technological context
enables communication and cultural identity reshaping. Finally we discuss the ways of
reshuffl ing national culture through the example of Wikipedia.
Riding the globalization tide
Th e main characteristics of globalization are far-reaching changes of nation states and
national societies. Beck describes globalization as a process in which transnational actors
increasingly interconnect and infl uence the reduction of power of nation states and undermine
their infl uence. Globalization produces diff erent, more or less autonomous logics: economic,
cultural, ecological, political, and so forth (Beck, 2003: 28). However, the main characteristic
of all these processes is that they change the spatial and temporal coordinates of social relations.
Giddens describes globalization through a “disembedding mechanism” of lift ing out the social
relations from their local interaction contexts and their restructuring inside an unspecifi ed
time-space expansion (1990: 21). What Giddens means by space is, however, rather vague.
Is it transborder space of interconnected national territories or is it perhaps media space in
a media broadcasting or network paradigm? What infl uences most the disembedding of
3 We understand cultural identity as being formed and reshaped through processes of discursive
exchange of values and symbols in the process of interaction and communication.
4 “Th e global is not in and of itself counterposed to the local. Rather, what is oft en referred
to as the local is essentially included within the global. In this respect globalization, defi ned
in its most general sense as the compression of the world as a whole, involves the linking of
localities” (Robertson, 1995: 35).
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