Consumer Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Globalization

CHAPTER 7

Communications and Cosmopolitanism

Robert Halsall

Aberdeen Business School, United Kingdom

Introduction

The view that certain media, in their technological form, open up possibilities which foster or create a form of cosmopolitanism amongst their users or consumers finds its origin in the media theory of Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan¹ predicted that electronic media would usher in a new age of “electronic interdependence” and recreate the world “in the image of a global village.”² Although he does not use the word “cosmopolitanism,” his metaphor of the global village implicitly contains within it elements of the utopian idea of cosmopolis present since Ancient Greece in two respects.³ First, electronic media transcend space, or as globalization ...