18/09/14 10:18 Multiple Cultures - Multiple Perspectives: Abstracts: Christoph Raetzsch

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Christoph Raetzsch:
Cultural Hybridity
Cultural hybridity has been a term to describe societies that emerge from cultural contacts of
European "explorers" and those "explored". Instead of explaining these contacts as mere imposures of
a major culture onto a minor culture, hybridity emphazises their mutual intermingling. According to
Roland Barthes a "third language" evolves that is neither the one nor the other. This model of hybridity
is still based on a contact between two partners at one time. But what happens to cultures if hundreds
of them enter into a form of dialogue all at once? Most of our images of different peoples, places and
events stem from the mass media. We no longer board a ship and discover different continents but the
world is now just a click away. But hardly anyone solely derives his knowledge about the world from
the mass media. We are still embedded in local actions and social landscapes although the latter
can span around the globe. Thus we live in a "third place" as well. We understand and live in different
languages the language of the mass media, with all its models of encoding, processing and
evaluating events and information and our given local tongues. Between these two languages we have
to negotiate meaning, structure impressions and define our own personalities.
Marshal McLuhan described this cultural state as the "Global Village" where our senses would be
short-circuited and closely related to a global consciousness. His famous aphorism of the medium that
is the message itself becomes very clear today. It does not matter why we use the internet but that we
use it. The distribution of computers allows vast numbers of people to communicate regardless of their
specific cultural backgrounds. But these backgrounds do not disappear. They live on and become
mediated again. Images, reports, documentaries show us the world but as representations they are no
longer bound to a distinct reference. In Baudrillard's idea of simulation we find the keyword to this new
world that describes the "liberation" of the signs from their referrents. But whereas Baudrillard
describes this as the vanishing point of meaning it could also be inverted and stated as the explosion
of meaning. Signs from any place in the world are open to further combination, variation and
subversion the moment they become mediated. Thus cultural hybridity emerges where we witness the
dance of signs - that is largely in the urban centers of the world where information travels fastest.
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