The Long Conversation

In class last week Professor Hayden joked about his annoyance when someone responded to his blog post a year after he posted it. This got me thinking about how modern communication technology enables us to have these conversations, which last over time and over space. Gone are the days when a ‘lengthy conversation’ is long in the sense that you are in one place talking with one person for a long time. Today it could mean long in the sense that you are speaking to someone a long distance away from you, or long in the sense that a long period of time passes between exchanges.  Although it may be extremely annoying to receive a response a whole year later, I think it is the ability to have a ‘long conversation’ – over space and over time – that reflects the power of communication technology as it exists today to transcend the limitations of time and space.  So, to relate this idea back to the subject matter at hand, what does this mean in relation international communication and globalization?

In his essay Globalization, Supranational Institutions, and Media, John Sinclair states that, “…much globalization theory emphasizes the evident triumph over time and space that has been brought about by converging media and communication technologies in the global era.” (Sinclair 67). He talks of several theorists who have developed concepts surrounding this idea – to name a few, Robert Robertson’s idea of ‘the compression of the world’, Anthony Giddens ‘time-space distanciation’, and Harvey’s ‘time-space compression’. Sinclair explains the core similarity in these theories in that, “... they all have identified the control of space and time as the defining abstract principle behind globalization.”
So, globalization is characterized by the control of space and time. Sinclair further states that “The media are central to this control…” (67) because of (1) the ability of technology to transcend time and space and (2) allowing individuals access to global networks via this technology – global networks which can control space and time because of the ability of the technology to transcend space and time. These global networks- Facebook, blogs, and other social media networking programs - are transformations of Benedict Arnold’s notion of the ‘imagined community’. A key facet of the imagined community is that you will likely never meet the members of your community face-to-face, and therefore your fellowship exists above and beyond space. Accordingly modern communication technology creates an exaggerated version of the traditional imagined community existing above the notion of space, which has the effect of transforming traditional social functions, such as the conversation. Sinclair touches on this idea when he talks about Joshua Meyrowitz’s idea of the “consequent ‘disembodiment’ and spatial displacement of mediated social relations and behavior” (67) due to global communication technologies’ transcendence of space and time. In other words, because communication technology has the power to overcome the limitations of space and time, this power can change social interactions because they, in turn, are no longer tied to space or time.

The idea of a traditional face-to -face conversation is inherently linked to time based on the space over which the conversation is taking place. You cannot have a face-to-face conversation when the other person responds a year later. However, time in a conversation does not matter with modern communication technology because space does not matter. One can have a 'long' conversation, or an instantaneous conversation with a person thousands of miles away, which seems to be a contradiction of the relationship between time and space in its traditional sense as well.  Karl Marx was ahead of his time in many ways; maybe the modern conversation is what he was referring to when he spoke of the ‘annihilation of time by space’.