Google’s economically driven Globalization narrative
Table of contents
1. Introduction………3
2. Historical and theoretical context………...8
2.1. Frederic Jameson’s ‘’postmodern’’ space………..11
2.2. Arjun Appadurai’s global and ‘’fluid’’ space…………...14
3. Google advertiser……….24
3.1. The global, spatial design of Google………27
3.2. Google advertiser as an ‘’arbitrage’’ strategy………..30
4. Google translator as an ‘’arbitrageur’’ of culture……….36
4.1. Google’s statistical machine translation………....41
4.2. Machine translation as a ‘’glocal’’ strategy………...46
1. Introduction
I would first like to begin my introduction with a very simple phrase: ‘Google it’ that provided the basis for my thesis idea. Within a few short years Google has become ‘’the top search engine in the world and has earned the most esteemed privilege in contemporary pop- culture –it has become a verb’’ (Piper 2004). If a search engine has become a verb, is safe to assume that it’s not just a multinational company but something of a phenomenon.
Additionally, the new word ‘’Google it’’ communicates ambiguous semantic codes and has constructed a new vocabulary, which is closely linked to the broader phenomenon of globalization. And while Google is considered one of the most contemporary and massive mass communication medium it has been profoundly affected by globalization but
simultaneously it has also affected the process of globalization, by creating its own globalization narrative.
In order to comprehend this narrative, it is useful to observe the nature of Google or in other words to attempt to define the company, but it is a difficult task. And the difficulty lies in Google’s multidimensionality and hybridity: it is considered simultaneously a
multinational company, a brand, an institution, a search engine, a communication medium, an advertising company, which is gradually becoming a social discourse itself. This social discourse communicates notions of globalization, that are usually associated with easy information access and fast idea exchange within the diverse web-space of Google.
Paradoxically, I hypothesize that in Google’s case the narrative is celebrated as a progressive process that unifies successfully the constantly shifting populations. Diversity is celebrated in many different ways and in the intercommunicating spaces of Google in which a utopian,
interconnected and globalized society is mirrored. Google, subsequently, becomes the idealized, globalized medium where technology celebrates globalization.
However, the innocent passage towards globalization hides some ‘’dark’’ aspects as Google’s narrative of Globalization encompasses economic factors, that are not easily grasped. The convenience and speed and the multiple services that Google offers, particularly within the free, borderless libertarian web-space have switched the focus to analyze the socio-economic operation in terms of a capitalistic model. ‘’Capitalism’’ a product of modernity has transformed to many forms so far, affected cultural behaviors and lifestyles and created master narratives and metaphors in the same manner or sometimes in parallel with
Globalization narratives. But, what can we understand from the broad project of the economic forces of Globalization is that they occur historically in periodic waves and they are driven by different factors. In addition, in order to interpret the economic aspects of Globalization in a contemporary object and take a specific position, we have to take into account the historical conditions under which it arises. I will attempt to theorize Google’ s components by adopting specific parts of theoretical context in order to deconstruct the mistakenly confused emergence of Google’s Globalization narrative as the post-modern framed ‘’Americanization’’ argument, or the modern perception of ‘’capitalism’’, which matches with past historical contexts. Incorporating an understanding of time within speed web-spaces allows to rethink my object operations in a different basis and thus allows to eliminate some past cultural and economy relationships, responsible for the misinterpretation of Globalization theories.
Furthermore, as Google operates in the web-space the rhythm of global flows reproduction occurs in incredible speeds. In my opinion the confusion of globalization is a result of speed of change because there is a tendency to treat ‘’time’’ and ‘’space’’ as separate concepts (Schmidt 11). Technology’s ability to transform time in high speeds has created ‘’spaces’’ we
can’t understand. Google has created such ‘’undefined’’ spaces of a cosmopolitan diversity, where Globalization seems to be a very productive process and diversity takes place in a fully harmonized and balanced mode. Every user has free access to various ‘’spaces’’ either as an information searcher, an advertiser, a translator, simultaneously in Google India or in Google France. These spaces are strategically designed under a very powerful and useful model of a business Globalization, because they address the bright, celebratory and utopian side of it. However, Globalization is an ongoing broad process and generates bipolar relationships in economic and cultural objects between the local and the global, which I find disharmonious and problematic. On the one hand, Internet spaces are global in their reach and decentered from regional and geographical contexts. On the other hand, the transformation to local in terms of language and culturally diverse populations applied to Google services, is
comprehensive in the transnational space, that global capital produces. Global flows are reproduced and treated separately but they still follow a dominant force: capital forces. In order to translate this economic-driven narrative though, we must focus on the company’s different but interrelated operations linked to their spatial production and
capitalistic values. Precisely, the reference point for my analysis for this broad project named Google is the global advertiser webpage description: “Use Google’s online tools to help you research and find new markets, target your ads and expand your reach to international customers” and “Use Google’s online tools to translate your website and ads and offer localized customer support by communicating with your customers”( Ads." Global Advertiser). I would like to further investigate how these two sentences are articulated in Google translator and advertiser, and furthermore how they communicate Google’s Globalization narrative in relation to their hidden economic scopes
Subsequently, in the first chapter I will negotiate the historical and theoretical context of the homogenous and heterogeneous binary system of Globalization in order to examine the
aspects that could adapt to Google’s content. I find it crucial to stress that Globalization occurs differently and is somehow a relative quality depending on the objects context on which it is interpreted. In the broad project of Google’s case global forces and local voices, technological facts and cultural groups are juxtaposed in a mysterious, de-teterritorialized global world. However this juxtaposition of different factors adapts to different objects in a distinctive manner thus it creates difficulty to approach the ‘’correct’’ theoretical boundaries in order to adapt them to various cultural or technological objects. I personally find this standardized dualistic approach- homogeneity and heterogeneity- challenging , because it discredits major factors and it lacks in flexibility. Additionally, because of these distinctive difficulties, I selected to negotiate them in terms of Google translator and advertiser, which incorporates and contests so many different cultural, economic and technological
components that appear to be distributed equally. Google has created its own
web-Globalization narrative, a narrative, in which every aspect visibly and sometimes invisibly communicates strong economic values, redefined by business Globalization strategies. Additionally, the global capital performativity displays in the diverse,
intercommunicating spaces of Google, mutates to spatial performativity and simultaneously creates two contrastive arguments in terms of the phenomenon web-globalization: the homogenous and the heterogeneous perspective. Globalization as a fluid world of a whole, promoting a homogenous cultural environment in opposition to a new articulated bipolar relationship of the local with the global. On the one hand, the universalistic, homogenous narrative assumes that technology ‘’affects people and cultures in predictable and inevitable ways’’ (Ribak and Turow 2). The predictability lies in Internet’s easy accessibility and its browser system, and its competence to exist everywhere and to link millions of users in a single system and thus stresses limited value to the local context. The universalistic narrative implies homogeneity and addresses a global culture as whole, distant from any local or
regional distinctions. On the contrary, the relativist narrative, which positions the users in ‘’actual time and places’’ (Ribak and Turow 2) , acknowledges local communities from heterogeneous perspectives and examines the interplay of the local with the transnational. Generally both perspectives’ core dynamics are translated to many different Globalization models and depict the tensions between cultural homogeneity and cultural heterogeneity, but what they underestimate are the economic values. Meanwhile, contemporary perspectives on the Globalization of the Internet ‘’don’t recognize negotiations about its meaning that take place in many societies, causing the web to be defined simultaneously in terms of local cultures and world markets’’(Ribak and Turow 1). Generally, I believe that web Globalization is a very complex and ambiguous process related to the simultaneous
definition of cultures and markets and generally discussed in their interrelated conditions. But the interpretation of global flows in technological objects such as Google in both
universalist-relativist scenarios, are sketched as mutually exclusive, while they are not. In the first chapter, In order to comprehend Google’s business Globalization narrative, I will begin to analyze the economic and cultural relationships using firstly, Frederic
Jameson’s theory of cultural capitalism, demonstrated in ‘’Postmodernism and the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’’ and secondly Arjun Appadurai’s ‘’Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’’. I expect to demonstrate that Google shares some post-modern features but its operative dynamics in the economic sector are beyond the post-modern or post-modern logic of capitalism. The dominant powers are no longer visible in a
non-institutional context and it’s not only capitalistic networks or the industrialized society that affects cultural practices. In fact, the way that the web globalization is culturally operating in Google is economically driven, but ‘’it’s clear that the economic component of our ‘’cultural dominant’’ is no longer that particular brand of ‘’post-modernism’’ or ‘’late
economic globalization is processed outside of governmental institutions and geographical barriers, because under certain conditions , the national is no longer the national, but it has to be rediscovered as the ‘’internalized Global’’(Beck 23).
Moreover, even though post-modernist theories attempted to give definitions to the project of ‘’web-globalization’’, either culturally, either economically –or either both-, I am personally engaged with Globalization theories that acknowledge the fluidity and chaos of the present cultural, global, conditions, such as Arjun Appadurai’s ‘’Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy”. However, while my object is designed under very complex interrelations it becomes hardly applicable with all the suggested conditions in a specific theory. Subsequently, I am conducting my research using two opposite globalization theories that take into account the global cultural economy conditions. I hypothesize, that web Globalization applied to the selected theories, can’t be totally framed by particular theories as the new vocabulary should be in a continuous reproduction due to the fast ongoing global shifts.
The main reason for this transformation is that the complex relationships of cultural production in the context of web-globalization are rapidly transforming and their theories can be easily applicable. As a result, the solution is to construct a new vocabulary for this project of web globalization in the present moment, ‘’where capitalism seems nowhere near the point of its exhaustion” (Nealon 15). Mainly, because within the web-context, the boarders are not visible and the corporate mechanisms and strategies operate in a relatively free space, and replace ‘’capital’’ with ‘’information’’, as in Internet ‘‘language’’: “clicking’’ instead of ‘’buying’’. Information is evaluated by the user’s ability to flow in different spaces of cost-free transactions, designed by a specific company. As a result, capitalism shifts its relation to nation state or multinational companies and emphasizes on the diversity of the global users. The corporate power is no longer a homogenous logo or a nation-state but the cultural
diversity of the user. The company takes advantage of the user’s diversity for its own
benefits, as globalization is also related to localization. As a result, I translate the emergence of the user’s cultural diversity in Google translator and advertiser, part of a business
globalization strategy decoded in the definition of arbitrage. The ‘’arbitrage’’ is a strategy known also as ‘’glocalization’’ and strengthens the company’s economically driven
Globalization narrative, while the local is juxtaposed with the global in a very conflicting and mysterious way.
2. Historical and theoretical context
Google is one of the most contemporary multi-brand, a corporation that has penetrated every aspect of daily life, making the brand name a symbol of innovative tech-culture but simultaneously endorsing its own culture; the Google culture. However, the construction of this reframed and new culture was based on many historical and cultural transitions. In order to begin the analysis of the brand’s services it is fruitful to highlight the chronology of the theoretical framework and its relationships with the capital in order to comprehend and highlight the mechanisms that are applicable to Google. Because ‘’Globalization is far from a novel phenomenon; it has occurred in periodic waves, whether driven by free trade,
population migrations, military conquests or religious conventions’’(Noris and Inglehard 6). While Globalization occurs in periodic waves, it also transforms in periodic waves. And this transformation is a result of the chronological development of technology, generated from the capital. During the last centuries and especially after the stigma of industrial revolution, that ‘’modernity’’ was created there was an emerging need to formulate social and cultural definitions such as “modern” and “post-modern” within the “bourgeoisie”, “capitalistic” and technology-oriented society in order to theorize and analyze various cultural objects.
Technology’s speed has created complicated and transformative objects underlined by fast and shifting modes of production. The production and consumption of these objects and their
complex interrelations with economy and culture, made their analysis a very difficult and chaotic task.
Modernity was marked by the presence of the “innovative” individual subject that resists and questions the traditional norms. Modernity is the triumph of the individual against the normative traditions, while tradition is ‘’ the group’s hold over the individual’’(Gable 108). Subsequently, the broad term of ‘’modernity’’ in opposition to ‘’tradition’’ enables the individual resistance to industrialized production but allows the simultaneous generation of capitalism. Capitalism a corporate driven definition creates values ‘’against’’ the individual’s ethics and morals, and reveals some cultural contradictions. Daniel Bell stresses one of the contradictions of the modern society: “On the one side, the values traditionally demanded by capitalism for its motivational basis, such as the work ethic, are being undermined by the cultural values being produced by post-industrial society, which encourages anti-achievement and hedonistic values” (Delanty 42). Modernity’s generation of an ideological
‘’incompatible’’ capitalism as well as the contradictory character of modernity didn’t give space for cultural renewal. The modern society realized the importance of the hedonistic values of consumption, by participating in capitalistic activities of production , which
required technological construction and innovation. Transport technology enabled to move in ‘’new’’ places, photography produced “new’’ perception of the self-image, industrial
factories became the place that one could accomplish the ‘’new’’ dream. The fulfillment of these new ideas became in exhaustion, there was an urgent need for the reconstruction of a new anti-modern cultural framework.
One step further in post-modernity’s logic was the deconstruction of the “make it new” idea, that modern created. First post-modernism denoted the new style of architecture, then it became a broader philosophical concept, and eventually it was used to reflect the broader cultural layers within society in any form. Even though scholars disagree among themselves
the only objective criteria about the definition of postmodernism could be the following: Postmodernism and its aftermath ‘’deconstruction’’ is a gateway against the rationality of modernity and ‘’entails a rejection of the emphasis on rationality characteristics of the
‘’modern era’’’(Grenz 12). Moreover, postmodernism in the business world means ‘’a shift to the centralized technique of modern control to the new model of ‘’networking’’(Grenz 18). And I would like to emphasize on the crucial term of ‘’networking’’, because it involves all the semantics that are linked to Google, thus it is mapping Google’s cultural economy. According to these general interpretation of postmodernism in global economy, Google entails all these features in order to be defined as a postmodern product. Especially when information technology blurs time and space, the world gets smaller and it is brought together in a manner never before possible. ‘’The make it new’’ idea of modernity to use innovative technology and travel relatively quickly is replaced by the ‘’post-modern capability to gain information from almost anywhere in the world almost
instantaneously(Grenz 18). Moreover, Frederic Jameson in his book ‘’Postmodernism and the Cultural logic of late capitalism’ underlines, how it is the mission of these celebratory and ambitious theories to demonstrate ‘’that the new social formations, no longer obey the laws of classical capitalism, namely the primacy of industrial production and the
omnipresence of class struggle’’(Jameson 3).
2.1. Frederic Jameson: postmodern‘’fragmented’’ spaces
According to Jameson, these theories articulate a whole new type of society, namely one that is ‘’post-industrial’’, ‘’information society’’ or ‘’consumer society’’. Indeed, the
metamorphosis of modern to post-modern culture has a strong link to corporate capital but its analysis is still conducted in terms of dominance and periphery capitalistic powers. In other words, in order to interpret global economy in social reality, according to Jameson’s perception of post-modern capitalism, we must examine the core in its peripheral,
interconnected relationships. Applied to Google’s case, the idea to grasp it as a post-modern, cultural dominant ‘’conception which allows for the presence and the coexistence of a range of very different, yet subordinate features’’ is sympathetic, but still not totally designable for the cultural context of the 21st century. The reason lies in the decoding of the definition
‘’center’’, because the post-modern idea that ‘’ as the center dissolves, our society is
increasingly becoming a conglomerate of societies’’(Grenz 19), is still designed on the basis of multiplication of centers of power compared to their dynamic to the center. Frederic Jameson, for example claims that this dominance is American. He writes, ‘’A whole new wave of American or military or economic domination throughout the world’’(Jameson 5). Subsequently, Frederic Jameson’s ‘’Americanization’’ argument and the wider post-modernist perception of a diverse world as whole with ‘’smaller units that have little in common apart from geographic proximity’’(Grenz 20), demonstrates a problem when applicable to economic and cultural objects such as Google .It is true that post-modernism promotes the ethical idea of ‘’centerlesness’’, the limited pressure to follow the modern trends rejects the common standards to measure lifestyle choices.
Generally, that is what the Google culture embodies: a centerless, diverse world distant from any kind of cultural agenda, emancipated enough to accept any kind of lifestyle. A global, juxtaposed world, in which anyone creates a sense of belonging, by switching identity and language in a button. In this sense, Google is a post-modern product but the economy it reflects, could not easily adapt to the post-modernist standardization. I personally think that, on the one hand the post-modernist idea applicable to Google celebrates the diversity, but on the other hand it incorporates geographical barriers in a dominance hierarchy, linked with the argument of nation-state power, as Frederic Jameson’s ‘’Americanization’’ argument. Indeed, if we imagine Google’s general operations, its core is the United States but the way it spreads among geographical regions is not profoundly operated from the center. But how can we take
into account such argument when the geographical barriers in technology don’t exist or are strictly limited? How do the products of cultural economy transform and adapt to the technological borderless space?
The space of Google as a ‘’universal fragmented space’’ moves to the direction of a homogenization theory. However, the homogenization of culture argument is often identified with the cultural and economic theory of ‘’Americanization’’ and results to a totalizing, simplified and standard cultural model. Therefore, Globalization is described as a magnitude force, transforming local to global. According to Frederic Jameson ‘’The standardization of world culture, with local, popular or traditional forms driven out or bumped down to make way for American television, American music, food clothes and films, has been seen from many as the very heart of Globalization” (Jameson 2000:53).
The ‘’Americanization’’ argument can be described as the easy and profound ‘’dark’’ passage to Globalization, as America is regarded as one of the main global exporters of cultural practices and behaviors. On the first level, “’Americanization” and commodification that cultural capitalism endorses can be reflected in Google translator and advertiser as the American based company, yet in a monolithic way of manifestation. The transformation of cultural objects under Globalization’s unpredictable and transformative economic
vocabulary, stresses the need to avoid emphasizing on dominant, core ‘’centers’’, when technology becomes a borderless, unpredictable, diasporic decentralized project. Even if post-modernism logic was ‘’centerlessness’’ , the post-modern space was defined according to Jameson and other theorists under a highly homogenized direction, while Appadurai in opposition, argues that ‘’Global flows of commodity, information, finance, and the world-wide diffusion of technology have made metropolises lose their previous centrality”
(Appadurai 1996: 1). Moreover, Globalization scholars emphasize processes that transcend individual societies and nations and operate on a global scale, more or less detached of this
personal local settings (Van Elteren 180). The theoretical perception of the “world as a whole” and its interconnectivity and the classification of its primary focus on economic, political, institutional or cultural factors, and second whether the emphasize on homogeneity and heterogeneity’’ (Steger 2002), is a standardized theorization, which stills conveys ambiguities .
2.2. Arjun Appadurai: global and ‘’fluid’’ spaces
On the contrary, Appadurai theorizes global flows in a chaotic way, and replaces cultural-economical models, by disposing their capitalistic equitation in a fluid and unpredictable classification. Appadurai, in terms of a disorganized capitalism, perceives cultural economy as a complex fluid system underlined by disjunctive ‘-scapes’ ‘[…] not objectively given relations which took the same from every angle of vision, but rather that they are deeply perspectival constructs, infected very much by the historical, political and linguistic situated-ness of different sorts of actors: nation states, multinationals, diasporic communities, as well as subnational groupings and movements(whether political, religious or economic), and even intimate face to face groups such as villages, neighborhoods and
families’’. (Appadurai 296). Subsequently, Google analyzed services are a reflection of the new global, cultural economy that is understood as a ‘’complex, overlapping, disjunctive order’’, which cannot be yet “understood in the traditional models of periphery-center models or surpluses and deficits in terms of trade modelling”(Appadurai 1990). Analyzing Google Outside of a network of interdisciplinary models allows to rethink spaces because the multidimensional conditions of the contemporary cultural and economic interrelations are acknowledged. I critically engage with Apparudai’s suggestion of the need of a
multidisciplinary model, as well as Frederic Jameson’s Post-modernism and cultural capitalism in terms of its focus on corporate values. Yet while cultural objects such as Google are also transformative, as culture and economy in terms of globalization, some of
their arguments have some implications. The implications derive as a result of a redefinition and a new understanding of Geography and boundaries within a chaotic ‘’web’’ space with differentiated boarders, populations and mobile goods.
The difference is that Jameson, as a Marxist theorist standardizes and equates economic capitalism with cultural capitalism, when Appadurai ‘’ not only offers multiple flows and scapes but insists, on their empirical and analytical separation’’. (Heyman and Campbell 134). Applied to Google advertiser and Google translator ‘global’ thinking, Appadurai’s model is ‘’particularly helpful in opening up multiple approaches, to the study of motilities , and certainly it is stronger than single-dimensional approaches, whether pure culturalism or mechanical Marxism’’ (Heyman and Campbell 134). Therefore, his theory discredits
geographical and nation-state global capital relationships and allows to rethink globalization by subjectively given relations as well as introduces the crucial definition of fluidity. In fact, Appadurai’s understanding of a fluid metaphor that flows challenges the distinction of spaces and their interrelationship because ‘’boundaries come and go, while relations transform themselves without structure’’ (Beck 25). Then social space behaves like a fluid (Mol and Law 1994: 643). In the case of Google the described ‘’fluidity’’ is performing in different levels. Although Google advertiser and translator, are designed as distinctive spaces
simultaneously they are intercommunicating in a fluid manner. All the users have access to switch different spaces for different reasons, fact that allows their fluid spatial design understanding as ‘’translocality’’, as ‘’they are spaces whose dimension of every day life constantly refers and links to more other places’’(Spiegel 21). Google spaces as
‘’translocalities’’enable a fluid transmission of different global flows in the form of information and build ‘’a general condition of the organization of space in the age of
globalization’’ (Spiegel 21). Google’s translator and advertiser practically unrelated to each other, coexist in one place: Google’s platform. This spatial production of Google enables the
understanding of Globalization as ‘’a process in which the ‘own’ and the ‘other’ are becoming co-present in one place, in which they mix and interact in often paradoxical and unpredictable ways’’(Spiegel 21).
Such argument signifies Google as a diverse space of heterogeneous interactions, as Jameson’s logic of post-modern capitalism argued, defined by a simultaneous circulation of fluid global flows, as Appadurai remarks. However, the understanding of Google as a fluid social space, begs the question of ‘’whether networks and flows as social processes can be so independent of national, transnational and political-economic structures that enable, channel, and control the flows of people, things and ideas”(Beck 25). In other words, in cultural research , ‘’there is a lack of institutional powers’’(Urry 2000). Appadurai’s theoretical approach redefines the center-periphery model using subjective and unpredictable relations. Especially, in terms of the purely economic aspect of ‘’corporate branding’’ as a
‘’financescape’’, I personally claim that Appadurai’s different ‘’scapes’’ exist as disjunctive and interconnected, however as not equally distributed ‘’scapes’’. The penetration of
complex notions of cultural flows to Google advertiser and translator are overshadowed by, ‘’The financial capital, the most abstract expression of capitalism’’, which ‘’has
demonstrable power to impact global society in a greater scale that do the other types of flows, proposed by Appadurai’’(Heyman and Cambell 113).
As a result, the constructed theoretical framework of Analysis that I selectively use for my web- Object, uses Appadurai’s ‘’scapes’’ of Global flows. In terms of the transformative character of cultural economy’s new vocabulary, I critically think that the selective
perception of different cultural models and their contrastive inter-reference could be a more fruitful analysis tool for such broad services as Google’s. As a result, I will emphasize on the ‘’financescape’’ condition as a dominant global, magnitude force, more dominant that the other ‘’scapes’’, using Jameson’s idea of a capitalism,’’ though not in the direction of global,
cultural homogenization but toward a kaleidoscopic blending that cuts cross geographic units or erases any specific geographic referent’’ (Heyman and Cambel 137). Appadurai’s idea of a chaotic space of global flows is defined by diverse populations who are capable to negotiate and challenge their identity demonstrated in his definition of
‘’Deterritorialization’’ , could be applicable in the sense of constantly heterotopic and transformative web space of intercultural transactions. Google’s web design of language translations and advertising and its accessibility for anyone is an indicator of disappearing boarders or of Appadurai’s ‘’Deterritorialization’’ argument. The stressed ‘’
Deterritorialization ’’ term is ‘’one of the central forces of the modern world, because it brings laboring populations into the lower-class sections and spaces of relatively wealthy societies[…]’’ (Appadurai 37-8). The de-teritorialized users are capable to experience in high speeds different goods through their ‘’imagined presence’’ in different spaces. Additionally, the argument of deterretorilization challenges the idea of Globalization in terms of time and space: ‘’The more television but also the mobile phone and the Internet, become part of the fittings of our homes, the more the sociological categories of time and space, proximity and distance change their meaning’’(Beck 31). This argument indicates that the fluid global flows disconnect social practices ‘’from exclusive and discrete geographical spaces’’ (Spiegel 20). Subsequently, as Google attracts even more users -or better clients- the coordination of time and space becomes questionable. Because the virtual space of Google gives the potential to make ‘’those who are absent present, always and everywhere’’ (Beck 31). In other words, the ability to grasp places that the Google user doesn’t inhabit in the particular moment is the result of web’s coordination of time and space. But the manner that Google takes advantage of the web-space speed and fluidity and the diverse users in order to construct its own Globalization narrative is caused by a new definition of capital relationships, which will be further analyzed in Google advertising and translating. In other words, in my opinion,
Web-global flows travel virtually through the subjectively imagined and unpredictable different ‘’scapes’’, yet driven by a dominant but decentralized ‘’finanscape’’, in a socially and geographically virtual and borderless space
1.2. Google as a brand
As I referred to a‘’continuous’’ reproduction of a new culturally applicable
vocabulary for Google’s globalization narrative, I think it would be fruitful to refer shortly to Google’s ‘’reproduction’’ business operations. From August 2009, Google was the most visited site on the Internet and during the same period Google was one of the top ten most visited web-sites in almost all countries (Lee 43). The key definitions to understand the company’s global operational strategies lies in the definitions of ‘’networking’’, and
‘information’’1. The company has been introduced to the public as a web-search engine but it
managed to expand beyond web search ‘’introducing new services developed in its own labs and absorbing market-leading companies that it acquired, the company has managed for the most part to maintain an appearance for benign innocence’’(Stross 2). The company’s systematic expansion towards almost every screen in the world is closely linked to the process is closely linked to the process of regionalization to globalization, ‘’where the process moves from local to regional and global’’(Segell 16). Indeed, Google is a hybrid, post-modern product and it monopolizes the web by absorbing local services. The way Google constructs the hybrid monopoly though, is not operated on the basis of geographical regionalization. However, it would be the easy gateway for such a conclusion, especially when someone switches countries, while the Google web-space is automatically converting to Google NL or Google GR. But what we fail to consider, is that Google’s operational
1 Information is becoming a strategic resource that may prove as valuable and influential in the post-industrial era as capital and labor have been in the industrial age (Segell 32). The proper application of advanced information systems, improves the efficiency of activities but also disrupts old ways of thinking and provides alternatives. Moreover the advanced networking information technology-as Google embodies- makes it possible to rethink people and databases as resources on network (Segell 32)
practices take advantage of the emancipatory character of information, which runs in the web spaces. But what are the dynamics that constitute Google a superior brand? How is the post-modern diversity displayed in Google’s web space?
The post-modern celebration of diversity is a result of Google’s superiority and reliability as a brand. Under the logo Google one can decipher, the diverse places of Google NL or Google FR, or any other regional space. However, the user tends to be in a state of confusion in order to distinguish between NL or Google NL. This state of confusion, could be described with the definition of ‘’imagined presence’’ (Urry 2000). The digital architecture of the world is usually linked to transnational imagination as in ‘’imagined communities’’ or ‘’imagined words’’ (Beck 31), which are all constituted by the network user ‘’imagined presence’’ as ‘’dialogic imaginations presuppose, among others, imagined presence of geographically distant others and worlds’’ (Beck 31). Subsequently, the company benefits from the process of ‘’networking’’ and celebrates a diversity, which in the virtual context is utopic in the sense that it is ‘’fixed’’ and promoted by a multinational logo. The dynamics of the company to entice the user the new dictum ‘’Act locally, think globally”, is linked to the web-information capability to encourage ‘’a vivid awareness of the cultural diversity of our planet’’ (Grenz 18), which reflects the adoption of ‘’A new pluralist mind-set” (Grenz 18). Moreover, the question that derives is not how the pluralistic, post-modern mind-set manifests in Google but in opposition, the question is the global dynamics that construct it. If we consider, how Globalization was generated the initial association would be the capital. Indeed, besides the various globalization theories in diverse fields, globalization generally is ‘’normally discussed in terms of “large-scale changes in the new economy such as the new international forms of production, marketing, sales and distribution and the concurrent development of a single integrated financial market”(Segell 16). This argument displays beyond the cultural or social spheres and stresses the significance of the financial dimensions
of Globalization. It is true that globalization transmutes to many different forms but the promoted diversity is designed under the new economic social shifts. In order to comprehend such argument, on a first level, we must understand ‘’Google’’ as a corporate brand.
Corporate branding, an essential aftermath of the corporate capital, is financially and culturally designed in order to give a sense of belonging and not only a sense of
differentiation. For instance, Google corporate branding resides in the alignment of strategic vision, organizational culture and stakeholders images(Hatch and Schulz 2001). Strategic vision and organizational culture incorporate the central ideas, the heritage of the company and embody the future visions of the company. On the other hand, stakeholders images are ‘’the outside’s world overall impression of the company including the views of customers, shareholders, the media, the general public and so on”(Hatch and Schulz 2001). All These influential brand’s identity specific features are prominent even in the page description, and decoded in the key-definition of diversity. The paradox in this case is that Google adopts as a core value the word ‘’diversity’’, which seems compatible with the post-modern, discursive values of Globalization. In the web-page description ‘’Organizational culture” is translated to Diversity of Google “from our benefits to our Employ research group, find what out what we do in the name of making Google a great and inclusive place to work-for all”.
Stakeholder’s images are translated to ‘’diversity on the web’’, “helping users of all
backgrounds and experiences make the most out of the web”, and strategic vision translated to “diversity of the future” because “there is not enough diversity in Computer Science today”. While corporate branding is translated to a corporate identity, Google’s brand is not only a strong medium of cultural meanings but the brand itself also “becomes a strong referent shaping economic activities among consumers and producers’’(Askegaard 7). If we rethink this argument, Google brand creates narratives for life-style behaviors and mind-sets: diverse users exposed to an interconnected, pluralistic, post-modern virtual
space with “transcultural values, which are constantly promoted by brands and which enables their discourses to cross cultures and frontiers. Moreover, all these cross-cultural discourses, shaped in many different layers, create narratives of globalization, which are constructed in the basis of economic capital. As a result, Google’s brand process to convey cross-cultural discourses reveals “that the nature and task of the state within the global economy is
changing’’(Segell 16) .The difference in the way capital powers occur globally stands beyond the traditional and governmental powers. In what Google innovates, is a model of authority control which surpasses the climax of traditional power institutions ‘’taking advantage of the early ungovernable days of Internet, a libertarian space free and open to all voices,
unconstrained by the conventions and norms of the real world and certainly beyond the scope of traditional powers of the state’’ (Vaidhyanathan 14). Google’s mission to ‘’organize the web and make it universally accessible and usable’’ (Dai 434) weakens the nation states autonomy: ‘’The autonomy of the nation state declines due to the fact that Google search reinforces the trend towards economic Globalization’’’(Dai 435). It is likely that the more users the company has the more advertisers will want to buy ‘’space’’ in Google’s sights. As a result Google challenges the capitalism of nation- state as ‘’the process of online search helps make national, geographical and cultural boundaries, which are key features of the territorially based nation-state, less relevant to the flow of information’’(Dai 435).
However, the confusing point is that the applied innovation and knowledge mutated to Google’s advertising and translation services defines economic value in a new context. The brand is far ahead from the structures “Of industrial manufacturing and commercial services sectors, which were previously characterized as ‘’corporate capitalism”(Sinclair 58). I have emphasized the importance of the corporate logo to create narratives to the users, as corporate capitalism historically suggests but it’s remains critical whether Google commoditizes it’s products, as other multinational companies as McDonalds or Ikea does. For Frederic
Jameson ‘’ the key to contemporary capitalism in the multinational character and the fact that multinational cooperation’s (such as McDonalds and IKEA) have greatly increased their range of products transformed to commodities” (Ritzler 49). But Google can’t be analyzed primarily as a commodity. The company’s diversity and powerful logo could be compatible to Jameson’s perception of the late stage of a post-modern, cultural capitalism, that involves ‘’a prodigious expansion of capital into hitherto areas uncommodified areas ‘’(Ritzler 49). Moreover, according to Jameson the “uncommodified’’ areas are identified with three types of capitalistic space “The three historical stages of capital have each generated a type of space unique to it[…] These three types of space I have in mind are all the result of discontinuous expansions or quantum leaps in the enlargement of capital, in the latter’s penetration and colonization of hitherto uncommodified areas”(Jameson 348). But Jameson’s definition of space linked to the phase of late capitalism is characterized by a new conception in the way space is filled. According to this argument, the ‘’new space’’ in that the elements that pass through it, or occupy it, are no longer orderly or evocative of rationality, but they are disorderly and evocative of fragmentality”(Earnshaw 11). But whether the ‘’fragmented’’ postmodern, capitalistic space in the form of heterogeneous collage images could adapt to Google’s virtual spatial fragments remains ambiguous. The abstract, single formation of a global space ordered according to ‘’the transcendental movements and relation of the Capital and filled with various practices articulated according to the diversion and solidification of the capital at a certain point.”(Earnshaw 12).
As a result, in a certain way this totalizing perception of the spatial ‘’uncommodified areas” linked to Google consists some implications. Undoubtedly, the capital performativity is obvious in the company’s commoditized logo, but the company doesn’t operate in order to occupy ‘’uncommodified areas’’. This is easy to observe in the nature of web-space: the user is already part of a commodified area while participating on the process of networking, which
makes it hardly impossible to signify Google’s “uncommodified areas’’ within the globalized web-space. Mainly because postmodernism and ‘’late capitalism’’ present spatial production is designed by a ‘’fragmentary’’ but juxtaposed single world and it’s relation to capital. However, I hypothesize that this fragmented conceptualization of a single world isn’t
applicable to the contemporary economic conditions. This totalizing approach stands similar to Harvey’s approach to capitalistic space. He argues that, ‘’Capital, in short, continues to dominate, and it does so in part through superior command over space and time, even when opposition movements gain control over a particular place for a time. The ‘’otherness’’ and ‘’regional resistances’’ that post-modern politics emphasize can flourish in a particular place. But they are all ‘’too often subject to the power of capital over the coordination of universal fragmented space and the march of capitalism’s global historical time that lies out of the purview of any particular one of them’’(Harvey 238-239). Harvey describes the ‘’universal fragmented space’’, as a series of places under the dynamics of the universal, spatial, capitalistic production. According to both Jameson and Harvey, the ‘’cultural dominant’’ namely Google is a single world, which determines the way that the space is fragmented. This hypothesis of fragmented, universal, spatial production is the main indicator of ‘’space that drive towards homogenization2’’ (Earnshaw 32). Indeed, multinational capitalistic space,
in terms of Mac Donald’s and IKEA was a single system, articulated in different spatial fragments, that resulted to a homogenization process. The corporate logo have transformed regional space to globally ‘’commodified areas’’, which offer homogenous experiences and lifestyles. How Is it possible to fragment borders though, when the capital value is produced in an even more complex manner in virtual spaces and how can we define the spatial boarders that global capital produces?
2 The proponets of cultural homogenization argue that accelerating Globalization, in the form of capital media , informations systems and huge multinational organizations is eroding local cultures and traditions (Benyon and Dunkerley 22)
3. Google Advertiser
Appadurai ’s theorization of global flows poses finanscape as the cultural condition where capital comes into existence and deals with the ‘’movement of megamonies through national turnstile at blinding speed’’(Appadurai 298). Indeed, when someone signifies Google advertising the first association is commodity and capital, a company that absorbs hegemonic other brands in order to monopolize. Such case of, hegemonic absorption reminds a capitalistic model of ‘’monopoly”’, analyzed during the last century but its ‘’such a new phenomenon that old metaphors and precedents don’t fit the challenges that the company presents to competitors and users’’ (Vaidhnynathan 20). In fact, Google advertiser has reconfigured the late capitalistic model of traditional advertising that conveys advertising information to potential buyers. The reason appears to be very simplistic but very effective: taking advantage of the ‘’free’’ space, the model of web-dominance has been built on the attention of its users because ‘’there has never been a company with explicit ambitions to connect individual minds with information on a global-in fact universal scale’’
(Vaidhynathan 16) . This argument indicates the company’s capability to interconnect diverse minds, using sometimes invisibly different complex processes of web- Globalization. Particularly, the way that the user goes “ global with Google” according to the company’s web page description is by using marketing tools and free translation tools “to help you communicate with and to sell audiences everywhere in the world”. But how does the company manage to rearrange the capital values in Google advertiser narrative?
Even if, Google is not commonly considered an advertising company, but more as a search engine, advertising compromises the majority of Google’s revenue as it a commercial site and it is dependent economically on advertising revenue and a vast number of users. Basically, Google besides its function as a search engine, it is ‘’the most successful supplier of web advertising’’(Vaidhynathan 16) as it enables linking people to information based on
their individual preferences to potential vendors of good and services that reflect those tastes. The pluralistic, diverse information experience that the company offers enabled the Googlization of almost any available information. This ‘’Googlization’’ of information determines the number of advertisement placed in Google sites as the more users click the Google pages, the more advertisement will project on the screens as, ‘’ Advertisers are charged by the number of clicks that have been received on Google’s search site and this model of pricing is known as cost per click (CPC).’’. In fact even though advertising pop ups don’t appear in the users screen , “all of Google’s revenues come from its ‘AdWords’ programme, which provides advertising space for advertisers worldwide’’(Dai 434). When the user enters a key word in the web-search process, the AdWords program matches the key words with compatible services or products, while ‘’ At the same time as when the search results are displayed, the matching advertisements, which are also text-based, are displayed on the right hand side of the computer screen’’(Dai 434). It is expected that a person searching for information containing key words related to the Google-selected advertisements, might also click on one or more of the advertising links. As a result,
Google’s AdWords adopts another approach than traditional advertising strategy’s building audience and simultaneously clients emphasizing on the user’s search interests.
Subsequently, Google advertiser can be seen as the embodiment of the ‘’finanscape’’yet distant from the fundamental corporate capitalism idea of powerful brand subjects that shape market states and move towards ‘’unocommodiffied areas’’ that Jameson remarked.
This argument is comprehensive compared to the differences in advertising operations during different technological periods. For instance, The virtual advertising phenomenon during the 90s followed an expansion towards ‘’uncommodified’’ areas “Advertising pops up almost everywhere and almost anywhere at almost any time in America. It bounds in conventional print and electronic media and on storefronts and on billboards, on store sides
and on roadsides [..]’’ (Danna 1). These advertisements were and still are everywhere, creating semiotics and formulating their own “consumer”, “popular” culture while formulating Jameson’s Logic of post-modern and late capitalism.
Even if Google operates similar to the now days old medium of Television and ‘’exchanges free content with advertisement’’(Lee 434), I remark that advertising , has two major differences. Firstly, Google is classified ‘’as an all- in-one content provider advertising agency and ratings firm ’’(Lee 434) as the company operates in all the necessary advertising fields, when television is still dependent and related to advertising agencies and ratings firms. Secondly, ‘’Google sells to advertisers commodities that have no exchange value outside the Google adds system’’(Lee 2011).Google’s users as receivers of the advertising messages semiotics, has still the choice of rejection or reception. In Google’s case, which maintains the number one position as search engine in the world, “advertising is constituting the core mechanism of the company’s strategy for expanding and increasing power, as the biggest source of revenue to date has been the sale of web-based advertising”(Scott 129). The tactics that are used in order to achieve that vary: ‘’it can sell more web-based ads connected to advertisers worldwide, it also can sell more ads for placement within other kinds of media such as web-based video and wireless devices and it can diversify the kinds of ads that it sells, which might open new markets to them’’ (Scott 129).
As global flows travel through the dominant ‘’finanscape’’, the user as a signifier experiences a modified ‘’consumer fetishism’’ in a large, interactive globalized system. In this large, interactive system that Google advertiser occurs, millions of worldwide Google users becomes simultaneously consumers ‘’ transformed through commodity flows (and the media-scapes, especially of advertising that accompany them) into a sign, both in
Baudrillard’s sense of a simulacrum that only asymptotically approaches the form of a real social agent, and in the sense of a mask for the real seat of agency, which is not the consumer
but the producer and the many forces that constitute production’’ (Appadurai 596). Appadurai’s reconstruction of a globalized ‘’marxist fetishism’’ demonstrates an altered version, yet marxist focused orientation towards economy, which strengthens the dominant but simultaneously disjunctive factor of Google advertiser as a‘’finanscape’’. The
transformation of the number one research engine to the global leader of web advertisement follows the logic of Jameson’s cultural capitalism, however within the chaotic, disorganized, ungoverned ‘’world at large’’, decentralized by geographical boarders and spaces .
I am referring to a capitalistic approach while, ‘since it continues to be the top search-engine in the world based on volume users, it will continue to help the volume of its web-based ads to grow’’(Scott 129) and ‘’Google creates an ideology that the world’s information is at the users fingertips, which encourages users to search more, and hence view more advertisements’’(Lee 2011). As a result, more users will be willing to join the Google advertising program, as long as it remains the number one, search destination and continues to place ads on relevant pages of users. “Advertisers want to place their products where there is the most traffic, and targeting an audience that is most likely to buy their products such as Google users, would increase their profits”.(Scott 129).Google’s power to go global with advertisements and spread its own messages to the users globally at great speed, allows financial capital to be switched from countries at the touch of a button (Segell 17). But in order to comprehend the transnational space of Google, we must negotiate the space that Global capital produces
5.1. The global, spatial design of Google
“[…]era[…] seems to be that of space. We are in the age of the simultaneous, of
juxtaposition, the near and the far, the side by side and the scattered. A period, in which in my view, the world is putting itself to the test, not so much as great way of life destined to
grow in time, but as a net that links points together and creates its own muddle.[…].In our era, space presents itself to us in the form of patters of ordering’’.(Foucault 22-23)
According to Foucault’s quote, we in the era of ‘space’ and we define ourselves through space. Instead of thinking globalized physical identities, we can rethink them as
intercommunicating spaces. And, if those places don’t exist in a material reality, the do in exist in a virtual reality formulating a virtual space of global information, which contests the cultural and social order. Such virtual space as Google advertiser and Google translator are intercommunicating, global as well as a cosmopolitan ‘space’ constructed by different collages. I critically reflect that, the dominance of the ‘’finanscape’’ condition lies within the virtual ‘’space’’ context. The borderless virtual space, according to Appadurai is a space where ‘’ Deterritorialization’’ occurs, in the sense that every Google advertiser user
,regardless of the social class confronts a Marxist consumer- fetishism. The link between the globalized virtual space and the user’s consumer fetishism enables another understanding of how ‘’finanscape’s’’ social relationships are reproduced and negotiated. Google advertiser economic driven and borderless space enables to grasp the emergence of a consumer fetishism in Google advertiser space, as a Utopian, unreachable space. According to Foucault’s ‘’In other spaces’’,s patial arrangements run among other places and their interrelations reproduce social meanings. However in contrast to the ‘’real, effective places, which are outlined in the very institution of society’’(Foucault 1986 [1967]: 24), which he names ‘’heterotopias’’ as places of a collective experience of ‘’otherness’’, utopias are fundamentally unreal places that represent ‘’a society brought to perfection’’(Foucault 1986 [1967]: 24). Such a perfectly designed society reflected in Google advertiser’s social and cultural borderless space, empowers the ‘’Deterritorialization’’ society to translate ‘’a plethora of creative and culturally well-chosen ideas of a consumer agency’(Appadurai 596).
These images of consumer agency are responsible for creating a utopian space ’’that the consumer is consistently helped to believe, that he or she is the best actor, where in fact he or she is at best a chooser’’(Appadurai 596). Such argument contradicts Marx’s distinction of conscious ideology and unconscious cultural, material production forces’’ “between the material transformations of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, aesthetic or philosophic – in short, ideological – forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out” (Marx, 1859). Marx quotation underlines the importance of the distinction between the two level of capitalistic mode of production and stresses the ideological messages that display ‘’beyond our will”. In Opposition, Appadurai poses the ‘’global’ ’consumer as a ‘’chooser’’, acting autonomously in his consumption choices in the virtual space. A virtual space of consuming, is designed on the basis of a technology-driven utopia and utilizes speed in order to communicate notions of corporate globalism.
The virtual space of advertising mirrors how Google ‘’advertiser’’ driven by the
‘’finanscape’’ coexists as a ‘’technoscape’’. The promotion of the ‘’go Global’’ masterplan, is articulated in Google advertiser as a “technoscape’’. Technoscape describes the spread of technologies and their de-territorialized movement “both mechanical and informational’’ that “now moves at high speeds across various kind of previous impervious boundaries”
(Appadurai 499). The nature of the “technoscape” allows different complicated flows to travel in high speed in several places, while simultaneously the recreated transnational place that “global’’ capital produces is negotiated. Even though Appadurai notes that the
“technoscape’’ flows are determined "by increasingly complex relationships among money flows, political possibilities, and the availability of both un- and highly skilled labor" (p. 34), I personally think that technoscape flows are driven by the complexity of the new re-ordered “global’’ capital performativity because the speed of technology creates possibilities for
new global business strategies. The key strategy to comprehend such argument lies in the definition of Google’s “technoscape’’ as an arbitrage, a business strategy to incorporate the local with the global using technology’s high speed.
2. Google advertiser as an ‘’Arbitrage’’
While globalization and cultural theories are still on the search for a strategy to negotiate how users can comprehend spaces as Google, in the corporate sphere, strategies already take place for negotiating such transnational space. The notion of ‘’arbitrage’’, in strict economic sense, refers to “The way profits are obtained by capitalizing, through the use of electronic technologies, on price differentials, in markets situated in different time zones and parts of the world’’ (Abbas 784). The term ‘’arbitrage’’ in a globalized context, also refers to the expansion of manufacturing practices in different parts of the world, so to avoid assigning to goods a national provenance. Subsequently, Google advertiser’s’’technoscape’’ flows are an arbitrage strategy “that maximizes profits by setting up operations in a world of speed and virtuality and thereby, by breaking up the traditional boundaries of time and space’’ (Abbas 784). ‘’Technoscape’’ is, as Appadurai suggests, a disjunctive factor but simultaneously interrelated with ‘’Finanscape’’, yet the ‘’technoscape’’ condition reflects on its core financial driven dynamics. As a result, Google advertiser could become an
‘’arbitrage’’ in the sense that ‘’it consists with a powerful set of strategies for dealing with the management of transnational space’’ (Abbas 784). The combination of Google advertiser as a finanscape and technoscape condition constructs the service as an ‘’arbitrage’’, a strategically selected tool, that negotiates the transnational virtual spaces in order to comprehend
globalisms that are created though different flows.
Specifically, the way that the ‘’arbitrage’’ strategy is operated in Advertiser is in line with the logic of a developing, global web-customization, as profoundly described in the web page
‘’Localize your ads & sight’’. The three steps that the company follows in order to achieve becoming an arbitrage is by following the ambiguously and controversially designed ‘’Act local, think Global’ tactics: find new markets, connect locally, operate internationally. The page description is an indicator of the web-site globalization, as the two complementary processes of web-site internationalization and web-site localization are performed.
Beyond the language translation as a process to ‘localize’ a site, those two processes
blended together address to incorporate the necessary local elements, in order to make web-sites understandable by internationals customers. In technical terms web site
internationalization “is the process through which back-end technologies are used to create modular, extendable, and accessible web-site template that support front-end customization (Singh and Pereira 7). On the contrary, ‘’web-site localization is the process of the front-end localization, whereby web-pages are adapted to meet the need of specific target markets’’ (Singh and Pereira 7). In order to operate in an international environment, the user must be informed not only about the international electronic payments, insurance and shipping restrictions, as well as the local laws, customs and taxation, which means that Globalization requires first the localization of the product. Characteristically, the web page referring to the local laws stresses: ‘‘Understand restrictions around import, packaging, and/or any additional fees in the countries you are operating and advertising in. Because ‘’Localization means not just translation into the vernacular language, it means also adaption to the national currencies, measurements and power supplies, and it means more subtle and cultural adaptation’’
(Hutchins 13). For example, any consumer product sold in the UAE must be labeled in Arabic, while Korea has instituted a ban on the use of PVC shrink wrap due to environmental concerns. Your shipping and logistics company (say, DHL, UPS, FedEx, or others) can help you.’ Google’s pages shows that culturally-adapted web content enhances usability,
7). Subsequently Google advertiser becomes a highly-localized web-space and includes relatively high levels of localization providing the specific country based information. Google Advertiser promises to be global with access to vast, multicultural base underlines the aspect that displays beyond the strict financial arbitrage related to the ‘’ethnoscapes’’ characteristics. As ‘ethnoscapes’ build growing, geographically and culturally diverse online population, their customization needs to be designed distinctively in the global web markets. To appeal to these culturally diverse customers, web sites must be culturally customized as part of their larger effort to ‘brand’ their web sites to the various global segments (Singh and Pereira 4). Unlike the traditional model of cultural capitalism, which celebrated homogeneity in the form of Americanization or commoditization, the big companies in the web such as Google address different target audiences simultaneously. While a global consumer interface may require a certain degree of internationalization and/or standardization to develop and maintain a global image,[…], the success of a global interface may be achievable when the interface design reflects the cultural nuances of the target audience’’(Cateora 139). As a result, in terms of the ‘’ethnoscape’’ condition, as ‘’individual consumer tastes and purchasing patterns are thus partly determined by their collective values of the local community’’ (Chau et al 139), even if the shifting population is in a fluid and de-territorialized in the web space, the cultural context of the costumer must be taken into account in order to achieve global audience. The ‘’technoscape’’ space of Google Advertiser as a global communication medium reflects another trend related to the rejection of standardization of globalization models. If the globalization standardized models would be applied to international marketing terms the ongoing problem between the tensions of cultural homogenization and
heterogeneity, which Appadurai remarks could be also reflected, as the debate over the approaiateness of standardization versus localization in international marketing continues to receive attention (Singh and Pereira 4).
On the one hand, the first standardization approach argues, that ‘as technology develops and is globally dispersed, cultural distance will be minimized, leading to convergence of national cultures into a homogeneous culture’(Singh and Pereira 5), argument that is linked to Frederic Jameson’s perception of cultural capitalism. On the other hand, the opposite
approach is closely related to the theoretical framework of Appadurai, as research has proven that ‘customers prefer to shop and interact in sites that are especially designed for them in their local language’ (Singh and Pereira 5). Such argument allows to rethink globalization, from a heterogeneous point of reference. As Appadurai points out, an Americanization -homogenization analysis could no longer become applicable to various cultural objects, because as ‘at least as rapidly forces from the various metropolises are brought to new societies, they tend to become indigenized in one way or another’. (Appadurai 102). In the same pattern, Google advertisers in cultural terms follows an ‘localization’ orientation, by allowing the user-customer, to various cultural modifications in order to communicate and indigenize in a culturally appropriate manner. Therefore, if we encounter the cultural perspective of web pages design, how could Google transform to a ‘’cultural arbitrage’’? In the previous section, it has been analyzed, how the different but economic driven ‘scapes’ that simultaneously perform as an ‘arbitrage’ strategy, operate in Google advertiser space. The way that the different scapes contribute in order to shape Google advertisers global outlook, could be assumed to be an ‘arbitrage’, a technique that helps the users to
comprehend the constantly reconstructed virtual, global spaces. However, the forms that Google’s ‘arbitrage’ set of strategies has taken so far, questions whether such strategies must be celebrated or critical questioned. Moreover, I think the main concerns that derive is if we move beyond the economic spheres and if we rethink how Google advertiser is set up as a ‘cultural’ arbitrage.
The ‘’technoscape’’ condition signifies that Google advertiser becomes a financial ‘’arbitrage’’ in economic terms but as the global flows continue moving, globalization can be translated in the other’ ‘’scapes’’. Beyond the ‘’technoscape’’ and ‘’finanscape’’ condition, Google advertiser transforms to a ‘’cultural’’ arbitrage. Generally cultural arbitrage could be described as a movement with meanings that travel in a cross-cultural basis. Favorable effects related to country or place of origins have supplied a basis for cultural arbitrage (Ghemawat 174). For example, the American culture image has long underpinned the international success of fast-food products, specific brand images such Coca Cola, as in the same way images of France with parfumes, wines and high culture . Such argument, enables the possibility to rethink the ‘’ethnoscape’’ condition and to reevaluate how Google’s sight is designed on the basis of different, constantly shifting and mobilized population. The link to ‘’ethnoscape’’ and ‘’technoscape’’ as a cultural arbitrage applied to the new service of Google, allows us to consider the international dominance of a corporation that takes advantage of the ethnoscapes needs, who ‘’flow’’ across the global. The difference is that even though Google services are owned by an American based company, so a link to Jameson’s ‘’Americanization’’ argument, could be assumed, on the contrary, Google advertiser is perceived as a ‘’no country of origin’’, which doesn’t spread either American culture either European culture, yet a Google culture. Therefore, the exposed images aren’t American-centric, because ‘’Unites States is no longer the puppeteer of a world system of images but it is only one node of a complex transnational construction of imaginary
landscapes”(Appadurai 587). Indeed, ‘Americanization’ isn’t applicable to Google advertiser anymore, because the cultural and economic conditions of Jameson’s analysis of the 80’s needs to be conducted in a different set up. It must be acknowledged that we are still experiencing the cultural and economic impacts of that legacy, but ‘’many of the dominant
