William Freivogel 
SIU Foundation 
PLEASE NOTE THAT THE LOCATION HAS BEEN CHANGED TO COMMUNICATIONS 1021. THANK YOU.
Global Capitalism, Temporality and the Political Economy of Communication
The Global Media Research Center is pleased to sponsor a lecture with Dr. Wayne Hope of the Auckland University of Technology on Thursday, October 2nd, at 4:30 p.m. in Communications 1021.
Fully global capitalism has emerged from the collapse of Soviet Communism and third world liberation movements, the exponential growth of finance capital, the geographical expansion of transnational corporations and the digital convergence of mass and new media (ICTs).
There is now a relentless drive toward real-time flows of inter- and intra-organizational communication. Media organisations, ICTs and the culture industries are now a major sector within global capital accumulation. ICTs have become the neural system for globalizing finance, production and consumption. Furthermore, global modernity is characterized now by a plurality of modernities (e.g. Confucian, Arabic, Islamic, African, Japanese, and Western). Their intermingling constitutes a global present of ëtemporal contemporaneityí, a term I will clarify in my talk.
In my view, political economists of global communication need to re-conceptualize temporality. This is not an attack on space-place theorizations (Moscow, Soja, Castells, et al.), or time-space formulations as proposed by Giddens, Harvey and others. My point is that contemporary global communication can be best understood on the basis of its distinctive temporal characteristics. These can be categorized in terms of the following entrenched oppositions: global modernity vs. global capitalism; temporal contemporaneity vs. the de-temporalized present; processuality vs. simultaneity-instantaneity; reflexive historicity vs. real-time feedback loops; synchronicity vs. de-synchronicization; and coevality vs. occlusions of the ëotherí. I will clarify and discuss these inter-temporal oppositions which, I will argue, represent important new research directions.
Wayne Hope is Associate Professor of Communication studies at the Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand. His areas of research include New Zealand economic and media history, public sphere analysis, the political economy of communication, sport-media relationships and globalisation. He has published on these themes in written and co-written articles for Media, Culture and Society, Time and Society, the International Journal of Communication, Capitalism, Nature and Socialism and the Pacific Journalism Review. Within New Zealand, Wayne is a regular media commentator who has written and spoken against virulent local manifestations of neoliberalism. He is at present writing a series of linked essays on temporality and global capitalism.
