What to read after Global Babel?

Globalization as we know it today would be unimaginable without the revolution in information and communication technologies of the last thirty years. Yet have we achieved “one world” as the promotional hype for cellular and digital networks would have it? This collection of essays, Global Babel: Questions of Discourse and Communication in a Time of Globalization, explores the current state of communication and discourse in a globalized environment. The essays are united by an awareness that, whether understood technologically, economically, epistemologically, or culturally, globalization is a discursive field with discrepant assumptions, categories and conclusions. As such, globalization is double-edged, and complex. It can certainly enable the exploitation of the powerless by the powerful; in different contexts, or at different moments, it can also facilitate individual and collective agency. It is this doubleness, this complexity, that this collection seeks to bring into focus.

This volume offers an interdisciplinary forum where technological, aesthetic, and ethical issues relating to globalization inhabit the same conceptual frame. Together the essays address the central issue of how the new knowledges of globalization are being articulated, and explore the cultural consequences and success of such communication and knowledge exchange.