Did I (Gasp!) Conflate Narratives?

When I put the name "Glocal Man" on this site and launched it two weeks ago, a whole bunch feedback complained the word "glocal" was dorky.

This one from Chloe does the same but in high-flown language that makes a lot of sense when you think about it:

As a poet and as an anthropologist, the term "glocal" collapses and conflates stories.

It denies that some realities and positions are experienced separately, and while influences from the outside may come in and penetrate, the really "local" as in the rural, does not have the same penetration outwards.

This term tries to "harmonize" all of the global local connections and make unitary narratives in the same way globalization as a process does. It dissolves particularities as single unit data into a broader system. For instance, globalization is the standardization and harmonization of political, corporate, monetary and other systems, e.g. under the world trade organization the customary cultural norms of regions and communities are dissolved into new trade standards and recognition regimes, shaped by the intellectual property rights legislation that do not recognize "non-commercial" arts, science, cultural and intellectual resources as "property."

Furthermore, in the approach of writing a "glocal" story a cosmopolitan journalist unites many more disparate experiences, relationships and connections into a singular coherently globalized story. However, this approach does not do justice to yet to the way a story is experienced in a particularistic manner by individuals within particular cultural, linguistic, political and regional systems - it merely traces that such a particularity exists as an exception to the soveriegn/dominant media stories.

Saskia Sassen called globalization an "exponenential manifestation of the local." However, I believe only cosmopolitanauts experiences this.

Hence, while a cosmopolitanaut may have a "glocal" experience, their world view must still be recognized as unique and does not necessarily give "voice" to the local angle or story, as much as remind themselves that what they are engaging in is a journey of translations. They are tracing and pioneering pathways. But simultaneously, they are contributing to a globalization that some others seek to resist by amping their efforts at localization.

Anyway, despite these thoughts, I am bookmarking this site and look forward to the lively discussions and frontiers that may be formed here in nonetheless.

I finally changed the name.

Comments

[Jay Rosen]

I love this story, Doug. And you made the right call. But it is missing something. You had a neat ending, which was to be laconic: I finally changed the name (after she said all that.)

But as a reader I want to know: what did you make of what Chloe said? How did it register in your own language game? What sense did you emerge with, or what was the insight of hers that made you change your mind? You left that out.

You told me what she said. Now complete the post. Tell me what you heard that made you change your mind.

[Jane Shevtsov]

To Chloe, if she ever reads this:

I think I understood what you said, although I greatly prefer English to postmodernese. But I saw how you privelege the local over the global and, as the person who, for better or for worse, coined "worldplace" as a more euphonious alternative to "glocal" (fish in throat), maybe I can explain a little about what it is.

I study ecology and geography and have become intensely interested in local-global interactions. As Denis Wood puts it in his book Five Billion Years of Global Change, each particular place is the result of an intersection of global flows, be they physical, biological or social. At the same time, the global emerges from the local. This is not new but thinking about it IS new and may require some new words and concepts. I don't know what connotations Friedman intended for "glocal", but to me, thinking in worldplace terms means honoring the particular and local while seeing it as intimately connected to the general and global. Doug McGill does an excellent job of this.