Globalization and Visual Rhetoric: The Rise of a Global Media Order?

In investigating and discussing the limitations and abstraction of “big data” quantitative measurement as a new capitalistic mode of operation that colonizes people’s perception of the world, the study settles on a qualitative “small data” approach to understand change. Thus, by means of digital ethnographic fieldwork and an alternative media aesthetics framework, assisted by the method of global iconology, the chapter aims to reassess globalization as a visual-ideological phenomenon. Specifically, it investigates how the “reglobalization” of the world is mediated under present conditions of image domination. It does so by focusing on Instagram visual social media cultures and the role that transnational digital media elites play in the destabilization of the imagined multipolar world order we live in. In adding nuance to an understanding of how capitalism is restructured and mediated in the era of computer vision, machine learning, and pattern recognition algorithms, the study will also speculate on the imperialistic role transnational media corporations play and on the possibility that they may, or may not, contribute to the rise of a global media order.