Reconstructing Self-Identity: Local, Global and Technological Drives

Abstract

Linking the local with the global and the reverse, localizing the global, have become the reality nowadays. Modern technologies have made a tremendous impetus for globalization and, consequently, have set a new political agenda for communication between cultures and languages. Can the local cultures grounded on local values, beliefs, languages, religion, historical heritage act as drivers of innovation and creativity, or will they act as hindrances in the process of self-identity building? On the other hand, is the rapid spread of new technologies and the network society able to initiate any levelling between the diverse cultural mapping on a global scale? The aim of this chapter is to find out the possible interactions of the local and the global cultural influences and to analyse the stages of self–identity reconstruction in the age of pervasive technological development. Is the digital society leading us towards an establishment of the transmediated self? Methodologically the research is based on Ronald Inglehart’s (Am. Polit. Sci. Rev. 65:991–1017, 1977, Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1990, Modernization and Postmodernization: Cultural, Economic, and Political Change in 43 Societies. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1997) theoretical framework of universal value change, Manuel Castells (The Rise of the Network Society: the Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture.Wiley, Oxford, 2010) conceptual paradigm of the network society, J. Sage Elwell’s (Convergence The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 20(2): 233–249, 2014) study on the transmediated self as well as on the theoretical assumptions by Jacques Lacan (The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious response to students of Philosophy concerning the object of psychoanalysis. Seuil, Paris, 2001), Charles Horton Cooley (On Self and Social Organization. University Of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1998) and many others.