William Gibson's Pattern Recognition

This is a result of media globalisation and transnationalising audiences emerging in a globalised society today. Media globalisation is a phenomenon that causes us to be understood

William Gibson’s post-modernist novel Pattern Recognition was very complex in the chronicles of Cayce Pollard’s life in finding the maker of very moving and provocative footage. There were several themes throughout the story such as trust, interpersonal, and social relationships and the variation between art and advertising throughout the novel.

At this point of time, globalization has grown to be a phenomenon that is significantly important economically, politically, and culturally. The amalgamation and incorporation of the world economy around the globe has reshaped business. Not only this, it has created "new social classes, different jobs, unimaginable wealth, and, occasionally, wretched poverty" (Kiggundu 2002, p. 4) by restructuring the lives of the individuals. For some, globalization is associated to modernism and contemporary practices. Others understand it as American domination (particularly those living in Asia). On the other hand, some people believe it to be the emasculation of America (Kiggundu 2002, p. 4).

Before starting this project, I knew very little about photography, photographers, or exactly how much impact photographical images have had on our society. I have never taken a photography class, or researched too in depth about specific pictures or photographers. This project has allowed me to delve deeper into the world of photography in order to understand just how much influence pictures can have over society’s beliefs, emotions, and understandings’. I have have chosen two highly influential photographers, Diane Arbus and Dorothea Lange, who I have found to both resonate with me and perfectly capture human emotions in way that moves others.

Visual practices in this era are key elements for the president in order to enable his ideas to be conveyed to his audience, here he is able to Label individuals as heroes and villains, this is an ideal way of building a relationship with American society since they are bombarded by media to portray a vision of what is right and what is wrong, and usually there are victims and perpetrators. As the article elaborates, two important aspects to the process of visual interpretation, one of them being that the images are interpreted with already existing context; images come with words and historical baggage. Hence, our hero and villain dilemma, followed by visual images are presented as objective and authentic pieces of evidence, “not a representation of reality, but reality itself.” Pg.618

Ideographs function to elicit emotion from the public through their association to common concepts and their application to different societal issues. Words like “freedom” and “democracy” act as ideographs in that they have certain connotations and that are then manipulated according to the cultural situation. An ideograph as outlined by McGee has four critical characteristics: it is able to warrant power or guide behavior; it is used in political discourse; it is an abstraction representing collective commitment; and it is culture-bound (205-209). Janis L. Edwards and Carol K. Winkler in their study “Representative Form and the Visual Ideograph: The Iwo Jima Image in Editorial Cartoons” argue against Michael McGee’s belief that ideographs are limited to verbal language (198-212). They protest that visual images can also be used as ideographs because they fulfill McGee’s formulated features of an ideograph and are not merely icons, which are visual representations of words that always symbolize the same concept or idea. The utilization of Mount Rushmore in editorial cartoons functions as an example of a visual ideograph as distinguished by Edwards and Winkler. Through an analysis of editorial cartoons with the Mount Rushmore image, I will provide further evidence to Edwards’s and Winkler’s claim that visual images can exist as ideographs by fulfilling the major characteristics of an ideograph as defined by McGee.

The article I have chosen is,” The Problematic Complexities raised by the Dynamics of Globalization by Deane Neubauer. Deane Neubauer is a Senior Researcher with the Globalization research center, University of Hawaii, Manoa, and U.S.A. This particular article discusses different subjects of globalization through it relevant dynamics. Such as: the collapse of time and space, migration and urbanization, wealth creation and distribution, transformation of global media, trade and consumption and transformation of value. The notion of globalization has become a commonplace and through everyday conversation, throughout news reports, within scholarly discourse. The article is meant to bring more clarification to the nature of the notion

Globalization, which is the international integrations of people, economics, and culture, has changed the world. Cultural globalization is “a phenomenon by which the experience of everyday life, as influenced by the diffusion of commodities and ideas, reflects a standardization of cultural expressions” (Watson 2016, para.1). Many people believe that their culture is under fire by cultural globalization and the birth of the new global village. One such example of this is the case of the Canadian Magazine Dispute of the 1990’s.

As far back as the fourteenth century, writers have merged text and photos to convey messages. While they originated in a religious theme, once the contemporary time came around they started to become symbols of political revolt and protest. Comparing two different articles in a seventy five year gap, there is an obvious shift in the way the media wanted to project tragedy.

Similarly, Ludewig has argued that the “existence in limbo, the feeling of having lost the past without having found one’s place in the present, has led to people taking refugee in a utopia, a mental construct that exists outside of facts”. Hence, ‘Good Bye, Lenin!’ could be perceived as functioning as an imagined reality enabled by mediascapes, a globalisation paradigm introduced by Arjun Appadurai. Appadurai has argued that the “[t]he image, the imagined, the imaginary – these are all terms that direct us to something critical and new in global cultural processes: the imagination as a social practice”, a form of negotiation between individual sites of agency and globally defined areas of opportunity. Mediascapes, together with ethnoscapes, technoscapes, financescapes and ideoscapes, form building blocks for these imagined worlds, in which the reality is evident as fluidity rather than concreteness, since media generates a pictorial dimension, in which one can live in a world one strives to live in. The key characteristic of a mediascape is that it offers, especially in television and film forms, a selection of images producing narratives, profoundly blending the realm of commodities and the

I think many of us would agree that we are living in an era of transition: generally, from one phase of modernity to another; more specifically, it is harder to say. Let's ask ourselves for a moment how this sense of change might guide the rhetorical study of visual media. Of the many possible answers to this question, there are two I want to put on the table.

Media, through technology and its use by agents in social and material production, operates on a local and a global level through its production and dissemination. This creates spaces in which roles and agendas can be played out to the conclusion of an end product. This end product, however, is not only the produced media, but the anticipated reception of the consumer and the after-effects of the content specifically targeted by the producers or more generally as a consumable thing by a wider audience. Whether we talk about the local or the global, something that shouldn’t be discounted is the cultural accumulation and dispersion that takes place in both spaces in practice. Hannerz writes, “culture is learned and acquired in social life” (Hannerz 1998: 8), “it is somehow integrated” (ibid), and “these collectivities” (ibid), are “affected by interconnectedness in space” (ibid). The third point is the most important when we talk about the global, as the global has become created and defined by the interconnectedness it inevitably generates.

Visual communication has made a massive impact around the world. Since the birth of the internet, computers, smartphones, and tablets, visual images are readily available from just about anywhere. Communication can be read or looked upon and can take place in different forms. Visual communication offers several benefits including the ability to express our thoughts, feelings, and actions in the shape of an image. Furthermore, communication reached new heights over the last several decades, causing verbal communication to decrease due to social media, emailing and texting. With the amount of time that people spend on their mobile devices, verbal communication will continue to decline and could end up being almost non-existent, while today visual communication dominants nearly all communication forms leaving our younger generation to suffer from a lack of social interaction. Therefore, visual communication has its advantages and disadvantages, impacting all aspects of our life. It supports oral communication, tells a story, and quickly captures attention. However, it also has ethical and legal implications if one elects to use media that does not belong to them.

Mediascapes refer both to the distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information (newspapers, magazines, television stations and film production studios), which are now available to a growing number of private and public interests throughout the world, and to the images of the world created by these media. These images of the world involve many complicated inflections, depending on their mode (documentary or entertainment), their hardware (electronic or pre-electronic), their audiences (local, national or transnational) and the interests of those who own and control them. What is most important about these mediascapes is that they provide (especially in their television film and cassette forms) large and complex repertoires of images, narratives and ethnoscapes to viewers throughout the

"It is unimaginable to think that, in a world of such connection, there is so little meaning," says Jean Baudrillard, a respected French philosopher that, throughout the 1980s, critiqued what today we call globalization. Globalization, reduced to its ideological foundation, is the process by which increasing communicative technologies, like the Internet, have made our world "smaller." In essence, our communities, cultures, and lifestyles have become drastically linked. But, as questions surface about the connections of our era of rapid globalization to sovereignty, economic independence, and cultural uniqueness, we must understand that the question of globalization is not merely one of economics or sociology, but a broader social process of liberalism that is dooming the planet to certain ecological devastation.