The Human Interface and The Global Village: Infrastructure, Modernity, Media, Society and Culture

The world is shrinking. Cities are feeling the ever present pressure of seeing themselves as part of a global whole and obeying to its volatility. We, as peoples, have the strenuous pressure of conforming to a growing series of principles, participations, and goals in order to be part of the dialogue proper of the “global village” (McLuhan, 1964). There are, of course, cultural considerations to these phenomena, which in turn inform societies and the way we build cities, cultural infrastructure and identity. We are constantly negotiating with the way we constrain ourselves into these spaces, and, sometimes, our capacity and adaptability is not on par with what a fast paces change demands, thus, our cultures, are also constricted. This makes way for a very interesting way of seeing communities and of forming cultures. Everything, at this level, seems carefully interrelated: media as strategic for the advancement of national identity and cities as spaces for this behaviours to take hold and develop.

We see these flows it in the intricate tradition and cultural microcosm of Tsukiji Market in Tokyo that Theodore Bestor portrays almost fantastically in his book Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World; in the way people act as a circuit, as a motherboard, within the confines of chaos in Johannesburg's city center in Abdoumaliq Simone’s essay “People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg”; or in the way everything, under the guise of transnational flows, is injected into collective consciousness and identity in Arvind Rajagopal’s essay “Advertising as Political Ventriloquism: Agency, Corporation and State in the shaping of India’s Branded Market”. All these advance the idea of modernity as the crux of our current contemporary dialogue about how culture and media, shape our global societies.

Being weary about the way things are evolving, is to negate history and dwell in alarmism. This is precisely why Theodore Benson’s rumination on Tsukiji market, in Tokyo, is so valuable. By analysing the inner workings of an eight-decade old machine, which is well oiled, he uncovers a circuit that owes more to tenacity and tradition than to the looming presence of modernity. He writes,

“[...] the marketplace is also constructed by an external logic of time and space, both in the geography of Tokyo and in the historical flow of institutional evolution. Tsukiji’s players perform to a script shaped not only by the internal, day-to-day, exigencies of the marketplace, but also by historical legacies of the marketplace’s location and development.” (51)

Here, Benson is signaling, precisely, to an acknowledgment of the global village and its imposing infrastructure, but also to a certain natural resistance to its supposed power. When cultural development threatens with soporific tendencies, places like Tsukiji are an antidote that keeps the system in check. Through its microcosm of mores and traditions, these space serve as a daily reminder that tradition should always balance out rampant evolution. Benson also signals to this, “[t]okyo’s slick shopping districts and financial centers seem worlds away from Tsukiji’s low-tech, high-touch trade” (56). Despite being immersed in one of the most explicitly modern cities in the world, the market is a repository of community that can compete in the world stage precisely because of its ability to retain quality in the face of mounting–and conceptual–pressure from other economies.

This is very much of the case of places like Johannesburg, in which internal economies and the way communities have been built, are fraught by the essence of the haphazard and the makeshift. Their resistance is not rooted in a deep understanding of tradition, but rather, of getting by. Understanding the individual as central to the creation of more abstract networks is capital to also understanding the inherent power modernity has over the cultural and economic establishment. It is also primordial to understand exactly how people act as infrastructure. To wit, Abdoumaliq Simone states in his essay, that, “such conjunction of heterogeneous activities, modes of production, and institutional forms constitutes highly mobile and provisional possibilities for how people live and make things, how they use the urban environment and collaborate with one another.” (71)

This is basically a notion of positive mapping of available resources. It also portrays infrastructure, which allows an informal approach to economy, politics and society, therefore, allowing–even celebrating and benefiting– from individuals co-opting the spoils in order to make something more comprehensive and sartorial for their needs. This, of course, happens almost anywhere in the developing world. Local establishments and governments know rather well that they have favoured a culture of jugaad that allows them to purposely run subpar enterprises, because the very impetus of globalisation cannot not make sense of it by its own; these are instances in which even the staunchest of advocates of modernity cannot conform to a trickle down theory.

Advertisement, is a key reminder of this. By funneling a product through the prism of people, emotions or culture, it ends up being at the mercy of cosmopolitan volition. In Arvind Rajagopal’s essay about the complexities of the advertising industry in India and its relationship with politics, representation, and culture, he gives us this thought,

“[...] even when the term culture is brought into the analysis, it tends to be defined in such a way as to reinforce the separation between economy and culture, whereas advertising actually links and reworks the relationship between the two categories” (2)

Of course, this is a view that presupposes a benevolent relationship that is assumed from a mediatic and advertisement perspective, but seldom does this idea ends up catching up with reality. I tend to agree with Rajagopal’s thesis that, ultimately, advertisement enables some sort of streamlined simplicity with an otherwise convoluted and complex relationship. To this point, and whilst analysing global advertising trends, Rajagopal writes,

“[...] Advertising both sustains and makes the market visible; it indicates not only the inseparability of information and commerce, but as well the growing sophistication and indispensability of elements held earlier to be purely instrumental” (4).

By sustaining and engaging the market, the social construct becomes currency for the way we can understand the importance of advertisement. To mediate through images, especially in dense nodes of urban mobility, is in tandem with the very essence of these places. Both Bestor and Simone gives us a similar sense of this case by depicting spaces that are mediated by their own chaos. In a way, chaos is a necessity for these places to find their balance. Advertisement, feeds quite well from these very tennants: it knows how to create balance from seemingly dichotomic identities and behaviors in order to put forth a unified idea that builds upon fabricated philosophies of what should be, and how to consume and relate with that.

As we understand the mesh, the circuit, that informs places like Johannesburg, or Tokyo, we can see that even within highly sophisticated places, the demand for practical growth and empirical knowledge is what keeps certain networks functioning. Given the recent boom in hyper-stimuli thanks to the access to more interconnected gadgets, these forms of piracy and infrastructure have taken on a whole new meaning.Technology and necessity (alongside boredom) are perhaps the two greatest motors for creativity, and even though many times these are not conjoined, in the intricate systems of developing countries, these are not mutually exclusive either. In fact, they play off of each other, and advance the illusion of autonomy within a larger system.

In Simone’s essay, he writes, about how the people seek Johannesburg precisely because of its “locus of complex barter arrangements and transshipment” (76). In Bestor’s account of Tsukiji, a space which is arguably more coherent and regulated by internal mores, there is still a essential sentiment of the makeshift. He notes that even though there is nothing “black” about the market,

“[t]he warrens of alleys and dilapidated storefronts exude a seediness–with every turn, signs warn of pickpockets–that lures shoppers with the unspoken suggestion that the good for sale are, at the very least, great bargains” (65)

In Tsukiji, the “quaintly old-fashioned [is also regarded] as cutting edge” (65). In Johannesburg, the same seediness and chaotic nature is something that many behold. This is why in the convoluted, he who can navigate seamlessly, is highly regarded as a sort of master, as an epicurean of the urbane.

Interestingly, in order for these formations to find a current, a mediated push for this sort of identity must have come from somewhere. Indeed, going from a non-consumerist society to a highly consumerist one often signals a western (thus ultimate) idea of modernization. Rajagopal makes the following observation of the way this made its way in India and how it pushed the population into interrelated and complex systems of informal circuits of economy,

“Beyond the content of the communication, which prompted branded, packaged goods that the overwhelming majority of the population could not afford, the modernity of advertising was also a matter of form. (6)

The art of the form is crucial to understanding the highly complex way in which culture is formed, and identity emerges as the pinnacle of cultural expression within a society. In India, at the onset, there was a sort of segregationist consumerism, in which bazaars–much like Tsukiji or Johannesburg inner-linings–were considered dirty, subpar and backwards. When such a impetus comes in almost official language, in which advertisement engulfs society with a push towards a western-centric idea of consumerism, therein emerges what the french sociologist Henri Mendras called, “the countersociety”. This distinction is valuable to our assessment of cultural velocity and creation in the modern world since it signals a very conscious effort to mitigate any imposition. Alfredo Toro Hardy, in his book The Age of Villages: The Small Village Vs. the Global Village, describes the countersociety as thus, “[members] of a society that refuse to accept the velocity imposed by the society in which they live. A slow population within rapid changing nations, constitute the most evolved expression of a countersociety” (199). This is very much a concept that is on par with the way we are seeing the push back emerge from many developing nations.

As we can see from these theses and ideas, the concept of a living and working interconnected cultural construction is very much alive in modern times. Just like we can see fish and culinary tradition at the center of Tsukiji as a metaphor for Japan’s every growing globalised takeover of Japanese identity, Johannesburg inner-city systems of piracy, drug trade and black market follow similar suit but in a more localized way: it challenges, constantly, the idea that a preconceived cultural identity can be imposed without feeling a pushback from a countersociety eager to establish its own economic and cultural representation. India has also found itself in a tradition in which bazaar culture, wrapped around the construction of a counterculture of independent financial evolution, gave resistance to the archaic ways in which certain advertising “retained a colonial mindset” by upholding foreign goods as superior to Indian goods. This, of course, has changed in its form, but generally, the content remains the same, and the discourse is taking on a more prominent role within a world that is now rethinking and reshuffling its relationship with the global north and the idea of rampant modernity at any cost.

Identity, then, is at the core of these fluctuations. By constantly having to be in a state of alarm or preparedness, these cultures are eagerly and decidedly negotiating their own construction of what a global village should be, how networks and circuits should work, and how much of their bodies, minds and representation will be left at the mercy of the urban and economical infrastructure.

Works Cited

Bestor, Theodore C. Tsukiji: the Fish Market at the Center of the World. University of California Press, 2004.

Hardy, Alfredo Toro. The Age of Villages: the Small Village vs. the Global Village. Villegas Editores, 2002.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. Sphere Books, 1973.

Rajagopal, Arvind. “Advertising as Political Ventriloquism: Agency, Corporation, and State in Shaping of India's Branded Market.”

Simone, Abdoumaliq. “People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg .” Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis , Duke University Press Books, 2004, pp. 68–90.