Essay 4-Music and the Global Community

    Arjun Appadurai's idea of 5 different landscapes are a perfect channel for understanding the relationship between money, international politics, and global media present during the Live 8 concerts on July 2nd, 2005.  The relationship between ideoscapes and mediascapes is particularly interesting.  Mediascapes refer to the capabilities to produce information in the media as well as the images that are produced (Appadurai, 1990).  Ideoscapes are defined as "concentrations of images, but they are often directed politically and frequently have to do with the ideologies of states and the counter-ideologies of movements explicitly oriented to capturing state power or a piece of it" (Appadurai, 1990, 299).  The mediascape of the Live 8 concerts was vast.  The concerts were available to be viewed on television, streamed on the internet, heard on satellite radio, and later available for purchase on DVD.  The ideoscape of these concerts relied on the vast mediascape to make the idea of ending African poverty global.  These concerts are a perfect example of the media wishing to publicize the counter-ideology of musicians and activists around the world. 
    Appadurai also mentions how mediascapes and ideoscapes use ethnicity and images of different ethnoscapes (in my case, images of starving African villages), which have blurred the boundaries of identity based on location and that we "stay linked to one another through vast media capabilities" (Appadurai, 1990, 306).  This was the case during the Live 8 concerts, when the vast media capabilities mentioned above attempted to link the globe together using the African ethnoscape as a common link.  This directly relates to Doreen Massey's concept of an "adequately progressive sense of place".  Her notion of place is "one which would fit in with the current global-local times, and the feelings and relations they give rise to and one which would be useful in what are, after all, our inevitably place-based political struggles" (Massey, 1993, 64).  The African poverty ideoscape behind the Live 8 concerts is definitely a place-based political struggle, but we can avoid drawing boundaries outside of the realm of the African problem.  National boundaries seemed to disappear as people in America watched hours of concert footage taking place in Germany, Italians in Rome watched Americans in Philadelphia enjoying the same music they were, and so on and so forth.  Mediascapes and ideoscapes seemed to break down national boundaries while the world came together to attempt to resolve a place-based political struggle.  Waisbord and Morris (2001) seem to echo this idea.  They state, "the availability of transnational media may facilitate the creation of transnational collective identities" (xiii).  Before the rise of transnational and global media corporations, this was not possible when the first Live Aid concerts took place in 1985.  Although the concerts were available on 95% of televisions around the world, different nations around the world saw different content.  Some saw abbreviated versions of the concerts, some nations saw interviews and press conferences, and some nations saw the entire concert (http://liveaid.free.fr/). The exact opposite occured with the Live 8 concerts.  American and British media corporations used the cause of ending African poverty to bring over 3 billion people together around the world together over the internet, radio, and television in an environment where ethnic and cultural differences were set aside in light of powerful cultural citizenship.

References

Appadurai, Arjun (1990).  Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Economy. Public Culture 2(2): 1-24

Massey, Doreen (1993).  "Power Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place".  Ch 4 in Bird, John et. al.
    (editors) Mapping the Futures : Local Cultures, Global Change. London, Routledge 59-69

Waisbord, Silvio, and Morris, Nancy (2001). Introduction: Rethinking media globalization and state

    power. In Media and Globalization: Why the State Matters. Lanham, MD; Boulder, CO; New
   
    Yor, NY; and Oxford, UK: Rowman and Littlefield. Pp. vii-xvi.

http://liveaid.free/fr.// Accessed Wednesday June 13th, 2007 8:00 pm

Posted at 12:06PM Jun 15, 2007 by FULTON, WILLIAM in General  |  Comments[8]