Through the Looking Glass

This week in the reading “The Media and Globalization” it talks about many different things but the most interesting of those things is how to be cosmopolitan. Hannerz, the author, describes it as a person who can connect with the local community but also with the global community. But how does one achieve this without being labeled with other names such as tourist or immigrant for example. He talks about how when it comes to a modern cosmopolitan they achieve this through the media and communication. People who are trying to achieve this sense of the international community look at it through “artificial eyes”, which is the way he describes it. “Artificial Eyes” means that we have eyes and we can see the news but we can’t touch, thus meaning that we are not able to have first account experiences. People who only see the world on T.V. or in newspapers or books are looking through other people’s experiences and not their own which could be described as less cosmopolitan.
The biggest example where cosmopolitanism is not welcomed is when large scale war has broken out and it is not welcomed. If you take the Afghanistan and the Iraq war then there is this sense of non freedom where only the news and film makers will dare to go in a time of crisis. This is when cosmopolitanism crumbles because you can’t travel to these places and like George Bush said “You’re either with us, or you’re against us”. So unless your the definition of being an American then you are against the country.

When the war broke out in 2002 there was almost a lock down on society because the international community could not be trusted. The two buildings on September 11th/ 2001, which were the bench mark of World Trade had fallen in the country that believes in freedom. Freedom which is intertwined into the definition of cosmopolitanism.
There is such a wide spectrum of definitions of being cosmopolitan, a world traveler who is educated but yet still participates in the world community by experiencing different culture, learning languages or living with a person of a different culture. It used to be a male explorer by definition but in the modern world any gender can be cosmopolitan especially with the rise of media and communication to get you started.

Ehren Scheffler