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When technology, media and globalisation conspire: Old threats, new prospects |
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Publication year: 2004
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Author(s): Anita Gurumurthy
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Category:
Tools
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Source / Location: January 2004, Women in Action
http://www.is-watch.net/node/692
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This paper was presented during the panel on globalised media and ICT
systems and structures and their interrelationship with fundamentalism
and militarism organised by Isis International-Manila during the World
Social Forum in Mumbai, India in January 2004. The author contends that
the global economy supported by ICTs stands upon the intersection of
the crumbling proletariat of the North and the off-shore proletariat of
the South, as seen in issues of labour, media and militarism. The
feminisation of labour and the conditions of female labour have been
underscored in globalisation literature, as being structural to the new
international division of labour brought on by the new ICTs. In this
milieu, the author raises questions like: Who are the women who can
aspire to become “knowledge workers”? How real is the much celebrated
mobility and flexibility that women are supposed to enjoy in the IT
sector? She also considers the politics of geography and how
polarisations of the global city have implied the disappearance of
various economic activities from the focus of state support. Further,
the intellectual property regime has commodified social knowledge, and
in the global market only certain forms of knowledge are recognised.
Against the backdrop of the social landscape of South Asia, which
reveals glaring faultlines of religious, linguistic and ethnic
assertions and conflicts, the new communication channels of the
technology age pose a huge threat to social capital and the legitimacy
of nation-states. The author also discusses that for women from the
South, militarism also has a more insidious face: the increasing
abandonment of their sexual and reproductive rights at discursive and
political levels. She concludes that the current challenge for feminism
at this juncture is to conceptualise differences among women in a way
that allows for the articulation of universal concerns; concerns that
will make way for a Southern perspective and feminist
reconceptualisation of the global economy, and also provides ways to
achieve this both at local and global levels (Adapted from author).
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