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Roehampton Conference Abstracts
15. Saied R. Ameli (University of Tehran, Iran):
Dual Globalizations: Synchronic Immigration - Glocality of Iranian
Society
Saied Ameli is Assistant Professor of Sociology. His
latest book is Globalization, Americanization and British Muslim Identity
(2002). He has presented many academic papers in different conferences
in Spain, Italy, Germany, Poland, Austria, Kazakhstan and the United Kingdom
over the last two years.
Dual globalizations explain the appearance of the second world above
the first world. Although there is a geometrical relationship between
these two worlds, the first world can be defined as the ‘real world’,
which is distinguished from the second world by sensible environment and
nature, geographical boundaries, particularity of culture, nation-state
forms of political system and tangibility and reality of events. The second
world can be defined as a cybernetic, completely industrial, symbolic,
spaceless, online world, and a world that is detached from the civility
of nation-states. As a result, the 21st century can be branded as a ‘domination
of the virtual world —cybernetic world -- over the real world’.
Based on such an outlook, dual globalizations refer to the many globalizations
in the ‘real world’ and the globalizations that are taking
place in the ‘virtual world’. It seems that gradually the
distinction between these interlinked parallel worlds -- the first and
the second worlds -- is becoming more institutionalized and lucid than
ever before. This process, or projected process, of changes has brought
world society into a new typology of social, political, economic as well
as cultural stratification. In particular, a dichotomy of virtual immigration
and immigration in the real world becomes increasingly diversified and
yet remains intangible.
Accordingly, it can be argued that human society is facing two critical
changes:
1) Objective changes: Objective changes explain how simultaneous communication
together with fast transportation made the whole globe objectively more
compressed then ever before. This enables a new concept of inter-cultural
communication and a new objectivity of neighborhood to be brought into
the economic and cultural mainstream.
2) New subjective orientations: Perception of society has also changed;
today people consider themselves to be not only citizens of a particular
nation-state, but also as belonging among the six billion population of
the World. This is because people are more connected to the transnational
commodity, values and cultures of different nations then ever before.
This subjectivity has brought globalism parallel to localism. What has
emerged is a new synchronic cultural belonging embedded in ‘glocalism’.
Conventionally, citizenship was objectively and subjectively meaningful.
For example, an Iranian who was born and grew up in Iran was a citizen
of Iran and had a strong sense of belonging to Iranian society and Iranian
society alone. Today the cyber geography of a person is not necessarily
a reflection of his/her national geography. People might live in a particular
geography objectively, but act in different space--cyberspace subjectively.
That is why immigration nowadays is not only ‘real physical immigration’
taking place in the actual world; we are facing at least two other types
of immigration. The first one is ‘virtual cybernetic immigration’
which is the result of the ‘virtualization of reality’ and
the ‘realization of virtuality’. The second one is the result
of the dialogical interaction between the ‘real world’ and
‘virtual world’; we can call it ‘glocal immigration’.
Here glocality do not necessarily reefer to what Robertson (1995) mentioned,
i.e. the simultaneously enlarging and telescoping influence of global
and local forces. Here glocalization explains the ‘duality of real
space and virtual space’, where real space is natural and people
have more root on it at a local level, and virtual space consists entirely
in processes of ‘coding’, ‘encoding’ and ‘decoding’.
The latter can be considered as a dislocation of place and space. Here
glocal immigration refers to the idea of cyborg citizens (Gray, 2002)
which is a reflection of the interaction between human and cyborg space,
and cybercitizenship of virtual communities that are taking place beyond
race, nationality, religion and even culture.
Based on such an approach, this presentation attempts to study the idea
of immigration among Iranian university students to find out their feel
of immigration subjectively and objectively. Therefore three types of
perception about immigration are relevant here: physical immigration,
virtual immigration and glocal immigration. The last is a type of partial
immigration that arises from varieties of hybridity, between many problematical
interactions in the real world and the virtual world – particular
attention will be paid to this.
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