Global Communications and Technology

Migratory and Nomadic Global Media

Audacious approaches increase the risk of proposing historical phases evincing social shaping of global media technologies and carry the immediate responsibility of remembering that none of these phases have ended, but continue to abound throughout this conceptually expanded planet of global media. Furthermore, there were and are occasions where people move to locales to consume or experience media technologies and mediated contents, and our present and (likely) future world presents unparalleled opportunities to experience endlessly a circulatory chaos of global media that proliferate wherever one might be situated on or around the planet. These phases begin with a long-duration epoch, stretching back to at least the last Ice Age and most likely long before, involving the social shaping and consumption of media technologies and mediated messages in migratory, exploratory, nomadic, and exilic contexts. Ideograms, runes, signs, symbols, carvings, and alphabets codified in writing an array of spoken languages. People discovered, on occasion, media technologies and mediated messages (often cryptic, or a challenge to decipher) as they moved about the planet, people relayed media messages via media technologies from one locale to another as they moved about the planet, and people sometimes left a media technology and message at a certain locale as they roamed further, acting on the reasonable possibility that sooner or later other explorers, migrators, nomads, travelers, and exiles would eventually come to the same locale where others had once been and had now moved on. One example of this dynamic of migratory mediated communication is seen in the hajj, and the hajj also represents the continuing trajectory of socially shaped media technologies and mediated messages no matter their historical origins. The annual hajj is now also a major global media event, with voluminous news coverage; informational support for those making the journey; use of a wide range of rapid-response communication technologies to protect and promote basic health, safety, and security needs; and gigantic computer databases organizing and assisting individual and group travel needs such as airline tickets and passport regulations. The hajj—a central tenet of a great religion and a great civilization—illuminates both the past and present of the global praxis of communication technologies and mediated messages, and it continues to do so for the indeterminate future.

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