Erasmia Velli

MA Thesis Comparative Cultural Analysis

University of Amsterdam

Google’s economically driven Globalization narrative

Rethinking the transnational space of Google advertiser and translator

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1. Introduction

I would first like to begin my introduction with a very simple phrase: ‘Google it’ that

provided the basis for my thesis idea. Within a few short years Google has become ‘’the top

search engine in the world and has earned the most esteemed privilege in contemporary pop-

culture –it has become a verb’’ (Piper 2004). If a search engine has become a verb, is safe to

assume that it’s not just a multinational company but something of a phenomenon.

Additionally, the new word ‘’Google it’’ communicates ambiguous semantic codes and has

constructed a new vocabulary, which is closely linked to the broader phenomenon of

globalization. And while Google is considered one of the most contemporary and massive

mass communication medium it has been profoundly affected by globalization but

simultaneously it has also affected the process of globalization, by creating its own

globalization narrative.

In order to comprehend this narrative, it is useful to observe the nature of Google or in

other words to attempt to define the company, but it is a difficult task. And the difficulty lies

in Google’s multidimensionality and hybridity: it is considered simultaneously a

multinational company, a brand, an institution, a search engine, a communication medium,

an advertising company, which is gradually becoming a social discourse itself. This social

discourse communicates notions of globalization, that are usually associated with easy

information access and fast idea exchange within the diverse web-space of Google.

Paradoxically, I hypothesize that in Google’s case the narrative is celebrated as a progressive

process that unifies successfully the constantly shifting populations. Diversity is celebrated in

many different ways and in the intercommunicating spaces of Google in which a utopian,

interconnected and globalized society is mirrored. Google, subsequently, becomes the

idealized, globalized medium where technology celebrates globalization.

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However, the innocent passage towards globalization hides some ‘’dark’’ aspects as

Google’s narrative of Globalization encompasses economic factors, that are not easily

grasped. The convenience and speed and the multiple services that Google offers, particularly

within the free, borderless libertarian web-space have switched the focus to analyze the socio-

economic operation in terms of a capitalistic model. ‘’Capitalism’’ a product of modernity

has transformed to many forms so far, affected cultural behaviors and lifestyles and created

master narratives and metaphors in the same manner or sometimes in parallel with

Globalization narratives. But, what can we understand from the broad project of the

economic forces of Globalization is that they occur historically in periodic waves and they

are driven by different factors. In addition, in order to interpret the economic aspects of

Globalization in a contemporary object and take a specific position, we have to take into

account the historical conditions under which it arises. I will attempt to theorize Google’ s

components by adopting specific parts of theoretical context in order to deconstruct the

mistakenly confused emergence of Google’s Globalization narrative as the post-modern

framed ‘’Americanization’’ argument, or the modern perception of ‘’capitalism’’, which

matches with past historical contexts. Incorporating an understanding of time within speed

web-spaces allows to rethink my object operations in a different basis and thus allows to

eliminate some past cultural and economy relationships, responsible for the misinterpretation

of Globalization theories.

Furthermore, as Google operates in the web-space the rhythm of global flows reproduction

occurs in incredible speeds. In my opinion the confusion of globalization is a result of speed

of change because there is a tendency to treat ‘’time’’ and ‘’space’’ as separate concepts

(Schmidt 11). Technology’s ability to transform time in high speeds has created ‘’spaces’’ we

can’t understand. Google has created such ‘’undefined’’ spaces of a cosmopolitan diversity,

where Globalization seems to be a very productive process and diversity takes place in a fully

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harmonized and balanced mode. Every user has free access to various ‘’spaces’’ either as an

information searcher, an advertiser, a translator, simultaneously in Google India or in Google

France. These spaces are strategically designed under a very powerful and useful model of a

business Globalization, because they address the bright, celebratory and utopian side of it.

However, Globalization is an ongoing broad process and generates bipolar relationships in

economic and cultural objects between the local and the global, which I find disharmonious

and problematic. On the one hand, Internet spaces are global in their reach and decentered

from regional and geographical contexts. On the other hand, the transformation to local in

terms of language and culturally diverse populations applied to Google services, is

comprehensive in the transnational space, that global capital produces. Global flows are

reproduced and treated separately but they still follow a dominant force: capital forces.

In order to translate this economic-driven narrative though, we must focus on the

company’s different but interrelated operations linked to their spatial production and

capitalistic values. Precisely, the reference point for my analysis for this broad project named

Google is the global advertiser webpage description: “Use Google’s online tools to help you

research and find new markets, target your ads and expand your reach to international

customers” and “Use Google’s online tools to translate your website and ads and offer

localized customer support by communicating with your customers”( Ads." Global

Advertiser). I would like to further investigate how these two sentences are articulated in

Google translator and advertiser, and furthermore how they communicate Google’s

Globalization narrative in relation to their hidden economic scopes

Subsequently, in the first chapter I will negotiate the historical and theoretical context

of the homogenous and heterogeneous binary system of Globalization in order to examine the

aspects that could adapt to Google’s content. I find it crucial to stress that Globalization

occurs differently and is somehow a relative quality depending on the objects context on

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which it is interpreted. In the broad project of Google’s case global forces and local voices,

technological facts and cultural groups are juxtaposed in a mysterious, de-teterritorialized

global world. However this juxtaposition of different factors adapts to different objects in a

distinctive manner thus it creates difficulty to approach the ‘’correct’’ theoretical boundaries

in order to adapt them to various cultural or technological objects. I personally find this

standardized dualistic approach- homogeneity and heterogeneity- challenging , because it

discredits major factors and it lacks in flexibility. Additionally, because of these distinctive

difficulties, I selected to negotiate them in terms of Google translator and advertiser, which

incorporates and contests so many different cultural, economic and technological

components that appear to be distributed equally. Google has created its own web-

Globalization narrative, a narrative, in which every aspect visibly and sometimes invisibly

communicates strong economic values, redefined by business Globalization strategies.

Additionally, the global capital performativity displays in the diverse,

intercommunicating spaces of Google, mutates to spatial performativity and simultaneously

creates two contrastive arguments in terms of the phenomenon web-globalization: the

homogenous and the heterogeneous perspective. Globalization as a fluid world of a whole,

promoting a homogenous cultural environment in opposition to a new articulated bipolar

relationship of the local with the global. On the one hand, the universalistic, homogenous

narrative assumes that technology ‘’affects people and cultures in predictable and inevitable

ways’’ (Ribak and Turow 2). The predictability lies in Internet’s easy accessibility and its

browser system, and its competence to exist everywhere and to link millions of users in a

single system and thus stresses limited value to the local context. The universalistic narrative

implies homogeneity and addresses a global culture as whole, distant from any local or

regional distinctions. On the contrary, the relativist narrative, which positions the users in

‘’actual time and places’’ (Ribak and Turow 2) , acknowledges local communities from

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heterogeneous perspectives and examines the interplay of the local with the transnational.

Generally both perspectives’ core dynamics are translated to many different Globalization

models and depict the tensions between cultural homogeneity and cultural heterogeneity, but

what they underestimate are the economic values. Meanwhile, contemporary perspectives on

the Globalization of the Internet ‘’don’t recognize negotiations about its meaning that take

place in many societies, causing the web to be defined simultaneously in terms of local

cultures and world markets’’(Ribak and Turow 1). Generally, I believe that web

Globalization is a very complex and ambiguous process related to the simultaneous

definition of cultures and markets and generally discussed in their interrelated conditions. But

the interpretation of global flows in technological objects such as Google in both

universalist-relativist scenarios, are sketched as mutually exclusive, while they are not.

In the first chapter, In order to comprehend Google’s business Globalization narrative, I

will begin to analyze the economic and cultural relationships using firstly, Frederic

Jameson’s theory of cultural capitalism, demonstrated in ‘’Postmodernism and the Cultural

Logic of Late Capitalism’’ and secondly Arjun Appadurai’s ‘’Disjuncture and Difference in

the Global Cultural Economy’’. I expect to demonstrate that Google shares some post-

modern features but its operative dynamics in the economic sector are beyond the modern or

post-modern logic of capitalism. The dominant powers are no longer visible in a non-

institutional context and it’s not only capitalistic networks or the industrialized society that

affects cultural practices. In fact, the way that the web globalization is culturally operating in

Google is economically driven, but ‘’it’s clear that the economic component of our ‘’cultural

dominant’’ is no longer that particular brand of ‘’post-modernism’’ or ‘’late

capitalism’’(Nealon 15). In other words, I critically think that Google’s cultural and

economic globalization is processed outside of governmental institutions and geographical

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barriers, because under certain conditions , the national is no longer the national, but it has to

be rediscovered as the ‘’internalized Global’’(Beck 23).

Moreover, even though post-modernist theories attempted to give definitions to the

project of ‘’web-globalization’’, either culturally, either economically –or either both-, I am

personally engaged with Globalization theories that acknowledge the fluidity and chaos of the

present cultural, global, conditions, such as Arjun Appadurai’s ‘’Disjuncture and Difference

in the Global Cultural Economy”. However, while my object is designed under very complex

interrelations it becomes hardly applicable with all the suggested conditions in a specific

theory. Subsequently, I am conducting my research using two opposite globalization

theories that take into account the global cultural economy conditions. I hypothesize, that

web Globalization applied to the selected theories, can’t be totally framed by particular

theories as the new vocabulary should be in a continuous reproduction due to the fast ongoing

global shifts.

The main reason for this transformation is that the complex relationships of cultural

production in the context of web-globalization are rapidly transforming and their theories can

be easily applicable. As a result, the solution is to construct a new vocabulary for this project

of web globalization in the present moment, ‘’where capitalism seems nowhere near the point

of its exhaustion” (Nealon 15). Mainly, because within the web-context, the boarders are not

visible and the corporate mechanisms and strategies operate in a relatively free space, and

replace ‘’capital’’ with ‘’information’’, as in Internet ‘‘language’’: “clicking’’ instead of

‘’buying’’. Information is evaluated by the user’s ability to flow in different spaces of cost-

free transactions, designed by a specific company. As a result, capitalism shifts its relation to

nation state or multinational companies and emphasizes on the diversity of the global users.

The corporate power is no longer a homogenous logo or a nation-state but the cultural

diversity of the user. The company takes advantage of the user’s diversity for its own

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benefits, as globalization is also related to localization. As a result, I translate the emergence

of the user’s cultural diversity in Google translator and advertiser, part of a business

globalization strategy decoded in the definition of arbitrage. The ‘’arbitrage’’ is a strategy

known also as ‘’glocalization’’ and strengthens the company’s economically driven

Globalization narrative, while the local is juxtaposed with the global in a very conflicting and

mysterious way.

2. Historical and theoretical context

Google is one of the most contemporary multi-brand, a corporation that has penetrated

every aspect of daily life, making the brand name a symbol of innovative tech-culture but

simultaneously endorsing its own culture; the Google culture. However, the construction of

this reframed and new culture was based on many historical and cultural transitions. In order

to begin the analysis of the brand’s services it is fruitful to highlight the chronology of the

theoretical framework and its relationships with the capital in order to comprehend and

highlight the mechanisms that are applicable to Google. Because ‘’Globalization is far from

a novel phenomenon; it has occurred in periodic waves, whether driven by free trade,

population migrations, military conquests or religious conventions’’(Noris and Inglehard 6).

While Globalization occurs in periodic waves, it also transforms in periodic waves. And this

transformation is a result of the chronological development of technology, generated from the

capital. During the last centuries and especially after the stigma of industrial revolution, that

‘’modernity’’ was created there was an emerging need to formulate social and cultural

definitions such as “modern” and “post-modern” within the “bourgeoisie”, “capitalistic” and

technology-oriented society in order to theorize and analyze various cultural objects.

Technology’s speed has created complicated and transformative objects underlined by fast

and shifting modes of production. The production and consumption of these objects and their

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complex interrelations with economy and culture, made their analysis a very difficult and

chaotic task.

Modernity was marked by the presence of the “innovative” individual subject that resists

and questions the traditional norms. Modernity is the triumph of the individual against the

normative traditions, while tradition is ‘’ the group’s hold over the individual’’(Gable 108).

Subsequently, the broad term of ‘’modernity’’ in opposition to ‘’tradition’’ enables the

individual resistance to industrialized production but allows the simultaneous generation of

capitalism. Capitalism a corporate driven definition creates values ‘’against’’ the individual’s

ethics and morals, and reveals some cultural contradictions. Daniel Bell stresses one of the

contradictions of the modern society: “On the one side, the values traditionally demanded by

capitalism for its motivational basis, such as the work ethic, are being undermined by the

cultural values being produced by post-industrial society, which encourages anti-achievement

and hedonistic values” (Delanty 42). Modernity’s generation of an ideological

‘’incompatible’’ capitalism as well as the contradictory character of modernity didn’t give

space for cultural renewal. The modern society realized the importance of the hedonistic

values of consumption, by participating in capitalistic activities of production , which

required technological construction and innovation. Transport technology enabled to move in

‘’new’’ places, photography produced “new’’ perception of the self-image, industrial

factories became the place that one could accomplish the ‘’new’’ dream. The fulfillment of

these new ideas became in exhaustion, there was an urgent need for the reconstruction of a

new anti-modern cultural framework.

One step further in post-modernity’s logic was the deconstruction of the “make it new”

idea, that modern created. First post-modernism denoted the new style of architecture, then it

became a broader philosophical concept, and eventually it was used to reflect the broader

cultural layers within society in any form. Even though scholars disagree among themselves

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the only objective criteria about the definition of postmodernism could be the following:

Postmodernism and its aftermath ‘’deconstruction’’ is a gateway against the rationality of

modernity and ‘’entails a rejection of the emphasis on rationality characteristics of the

‘’modern era’’’(Grenz 12). Moreover, postmodernism in the business world means ‘’a shift to

the centralized technique of modern control to the new model of ‘’networking’’(Grenz 18).

And I would like to emphasize on the crucial term of ‘’networking’’, because it involves all

the semantics that are linked to Google, thus it is mapping Google’s cultural economy.

According to these general interpretation of postmodernism in global economy, Google

entails all these features in order to be defined as a postmodern product. Especially when

information technology blurs time and space, the world gets smaller and it is brought

together in a manner never before possible. ‘’The make it new’’ idea of modernity to use

innovative technology and travel relatively quickly is replaced by the ‘’post-modern

capability to gain information from almost anywhere in the world almost

instantaneously(Grenz 18). Moreover, Frederic Jameson in his book ‘’Postmodernism and the

Cultural logic of late capitalism’ underlines, how it is the mission of these celebratory and

ambitious theories to demonstrate ‘’that the new social formations, no longer obey the laws

of classical capitalism, namely the primacy of industrial production and the omnipresence of

class struggle’’(Jameson 3).

2.1. Frederic Jameson: postmodern‘’fragmented’’ spaces

According to Jameson, these theories articulate a whole new type of society, namely one

that is ‘’post-industrial’’, ‘’information society’’ or ‘’consumer society’’. Indeed, the

metamorphosis of modern to post-modern culture has a strong link to corporate capital but

its analysis is still conducted in terms of dominance and periphery capitalistic powers. In

other words, in order to interpret global economy in social reality, according to Jameson’s

perception of post-modern capitalism, we must examine the core in its peripheral,

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interconnected relationships. Applied to Google’s case, the idea to grasp it as a post-modern,

cultural dominant ‘’conception which allows for the presence and the coexistence of a range

of very different, yet subordinate features’’ is sympathetic, but still not totally designable for

the cultural context of the 21st century. The reason lies in the decoding of the definition

‘’center’’, because the post-modern idea that ‘’ as the center dissolves, our society is

increasingly becoming a conglomerate of societies’’(Grenz 19), is still designed on the basis

of multiplication of centers of power compared to their dynamic to the center. Frederic

Jameson, for example claims that this dominance is American. He writes, ‘’A whole new

wave of American or military or economic domination throughout the world’’(Jameson 5).

Subsequently, Frederic Jameson’s ‘’Americanization’’ argument and the wider post-

modernist perception of a diverse world as whole with ‘’smaller units that have little in

common apart from geographic proximity’’(Grenz 20), demonstrates a problem when

applicable to economic and cultural objects such as Google .It is true that post-modernism

promotes the ethical idea of ‘’centerlesness’’, the limited pressure to follow the modern

trends rejects the common standards to measure lifestyle choices.

Generally, that is what the Google culture embodies: a centerless, diverse world distant

from any kind of cultural agenda, emancipated enough to accept any kind of lifestyle. A

global, juxtaposed world, in which anyone creates a sense of belonging, by switching identity

and language in a button. In this sense, Google is a post-modern product but the economy it

reflects, could not easily adapt to the post-modernist standardization. I personally think that,

on the one hand the post-modernist idea applicable to Google celebrates the diversity, but on

the other hand it incorporates geographical barriers in a dominance hierarchy, linked with the

argument of nation-state power, as Frederic Jameson’s ‘’Americanization’’ argument. Indeed,

if we imagine Google’s general operations, its core is the United States but the way it spreads

among geographical regions is not profoundly operated from the center. But how can we take

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into account such argument when the geographical barriers in technology don’t exist or are

strictly limited? How do the products of cultural economy transform and adapt to the

technological borderless space?

The space of Google as a ‘’universal fragmented space’’ moves to the direction of a

homogenization theory. However, the homogenization of culture argument is often identified

with the cultural and economic theory of ‘’Americanization’’ and results to a totalizing,

simplified and standard cultural model. Therefore, Globalization is described as a magnitude

force, transforming local to global. According to Frederic Jameson ‘’The standardization of

world culture, with local, popular or traditional forms driven out or bumped down to make

way for American television, American music, food clothes and films, has been seen from

many as the very heart of Globalization” (Jameson 2000:53).

The ‘’Americanization’’ argument can be described as the easy and profound ‘’dark’’

passage to Globalization, as America is regarded as one of the main global exporters of

cultural practices and behaviors. On the first level, “’Americanization” and commodification

that cultural capitalism endorses can be reflected in Google translator and advertiser as the

American based company, yet in a monolithic way of manifestation. The transformation of

cultural objects under Globalization’s unpredictable and transformative economic

vocabulary, stresses the need to avoid emphasizing on dominant, core ‘’centers’’, when

technology becomes a borderless, unpredictable, diasporic decentralized project. Even if

post-modernism logic was ‘’centerlessness’’ , the post-modern space was defined according

to Jameson and other theorists under a highly homogenized direction, while Appadurai in

opposition, argues that ‘’Global flows of commodity, information, finance, and the world-

wide diffusion of technology have made metropolises lose their previous centrality”

(Appadurai 1996: 1). Moreover, Globalization scholars emphasize processes that transcend

individual societies and nations and operate on a global scale, more or less detached of this

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personal local settings (Van Elteren 180). The theoretical perception of the “world as a

whole” and its interconnectivity and the classification of its primary focus on economic,

political, institutional or cultural factors, and second whether the emphasize on homogeneity

and heterogeneity’’ (Steger 2002), is a standardized theorization, which stills conveys

ambiguities .

2.2.Arjun Appadurai: global and ‘’fluid’’ spaces

On the contrary, Appadurai theorizes global flows in a chaotic way, and replaces

cultural-economical models, by disposing their capitalistic equitation in a fluid and

unpredictable classification. Appadurai, in terms of a disorganized capitalism, perceives

cultural economy as a complex fluid system underlined by disjunctive ‘-scapes’ ‘[…] not

objectively given relations which took the same from every angle of vision, but rather that

they are deeply perspectival constructs, infected very much by the historical, political and

linguistic situated-ness of different sorts of actors: nation states, multinationals, diasporic

communities, as well as subnational groupings and movements(whether political, religious or

economic), and even intimate face to face groups such as villages, neighborhoods and

families’’. (Appadurai 296). Subsequently, Google analyzed services are a reflection of the

new global, cultural economy that is understood as a ‘’complex, overlapping, disjunctive

order’’, which cannot be yet “understood in the traditional models of periphery-center models

or surpluses and deficits in terms of trade modelling”(Appadurai 1990). Analyzing Google

Outside of a network of interdisciplinary models allows to rethink spaces because the

multidimensional conditions of the contemporary cultural and economic interrelations are

acknowledged. I critically engage with Apparudai’s suggestion of the need of a

multidisciplinary model, as well as Frederic Jameson’s Post-modernism and cultural

capitalism in terms of its focus on corporate values. Yet while cultural objects such as

Google are also transformative, as culture and economy in terms of globalization, some of

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their arguments have some implications. The implications derive as a result of a redefinition

and a new understanding of Geography and boundaries within a chaotic ‘’web’’ space with

differentiated boarders, populations and mobile goods.

The difference is that Jameson, as a Marxist theorist standardizes and equates economic

capitalism with cultural capitalism, when Appadurai ‘’ not only offers multiple flows and

scapes but insists, on their empirical and analytical separation’’. (Heyman and Campbell

134). Applied to Google advertiser and Google translator ‘global’ thinking, Appadurai’s

model is ‘’particularly helpful in opening up multiple approaches, to the study of motilities ,

and certainly it is stronger than single-dimensional approaches, whether pure culturalism or

mechanical Marxism’’ (Heyman and Campbell 134). Therefore, his theory discredits

geographical and nation-state global capital relationships and allows to rethink globalization

by subjectively given relations as well as introduces the crucial definition of fluidity. In fact,

Appadurai’s understanding of a fluid metaphor that flows challenges the distinction of spaces

and their interrelationship because ‘’boundaries come and go, while relations transform

themselves without structure’’ (Beck 25). Then social space behaves like a fluid (Mol and

Law 1994: 643). In the case of Google the described ‘’fluidity’’ is performing in different

levels. Although Google advertiser and translator, are designed as distinctive spaces

simultaneously they are intercommunicating in a fluid manner. All the users have access to

switch different spaces for different reasons, fact that allows their fluid spatial design

understanding as ‘’translocality’’, as ‘’they are spaces whose dimension of every day life

constantly refers and links to more other places’’(Spiegel 21). Google spaces as

‘’translocalities’’enable a fluid transmission of different global flows in the form of

information and build ‘’a general condition of the organization of space in the age of

globalization’’ (Spiegel 21). Google’s translator and advertiser practically unrelated to each

other, coexist in one place: Google’s platform. This spatial production of Google enables the

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understanding of Globalization as ‘’a process in which the ‘own’ and the ‘other’ are

becoming co-present in one place, in which they mix and interact in often paradoxical and

unpredictable ways’’(Spiegel 21).

Such argument signifies Google as a diverse space of heterogeneous interactions, as

Jameson’s logic of post-modern capitalism argued, defined by a simultaneous circulation of

fluid global flows, as Appadurai remarks. However, the understanding of Google as a fluid

social space, begs the question of ‘’whether networks and flows as social processes can be so

independent of national, transnational and political-economic structures that enable, channel,

and control the flows of people, things and ideas”(Beck 25). In other words, in cultural

research , ‘’there is a lack of institutional powers’’(Urry 2000). Appadurai’s theoretical

approach redefines the center-periphery model using subjective and unpredictable relations.

Especially, in terms of the purely economic aspect of ‘’corporate branding’’ as a

‘’financescape’’, I personally claim that Appadurai’s different ‘’scapes’’ exist as disjunctive

and interconnected, however as not equally distributed ‘’scapes’’. The penetration of

complex notions of cultural flows to Google advertiser and translator are overshadowed by,

‘’The financial capital, the most abstract expression of capitalism’’, which ‘’has

demonstrable power to impact global society in a greater scale that do the other types of

flows, proposed by Appadurai’’(Heyman and Cambell 113).

As a result, the constructed theoretical framework of Analysis that I selectively use for

my web- Object, uses Appadurai’s ‘’scapes’’ of Global flows. In terms of the transformative

character of cultural economy’s new vocabulary, I critically think that the selective

perception of different cultural models and their contrastive inter-reference could be a more

fruitful analysis tool for such broad services as Google’s. As a result, I will emphasize on the

‘’financescape’’ condition as a dominant global, magnitude force, more dominant that the

other ‘’scapes’’, using Jameson’s idea of a capitalism,’’ though not in the direction of global,

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cultural homogenization but toward a kaleidoscopic blending that cuts cross geographic

units or erases any specific geographic referent’’ (Heyman and Cambel 137). Appadurai’s

idea of a chaotic space of global flows is defined by diverse populations who are capable to

negotiate and challenge their identity demonstrated in his definition of

‘’Deterritorialization’’ , could be applicable in the sense of constantly heterotopic and

transformative web space of intercultural transactions. Google’s web design of language

translations and advertising and its accessibility for anyone is an indicator of disappearing

boarders or of Appadurai’s ‘’Deterritorialization’’ argument. The stressed ‘’

Deterritorialization ’’ term is ‘’one of the central forces of the modern world, because it

brings laboring populations into the lower-class sections and spaces of relatively wealthy

societies[…]’’ (Appadurai 37-8). The de-teritorialized users are capable to experience in high

speeds different goods through their ‘’imagined presence’’ in different spaces. Additionally,

the argument of deterretorilization challenges the idea of Globalization in terms of time

and space: ‘’The more television but also the mobile phone and the Internet, become part of

the fittings of our homes, the more the sociological categories of time and space, proximity

and distance change their meaning’’(Beck 31). This argument indicates that the fluid global

flows disconnect social practices ‘’from exclusive and discrete geographical spaces’’ (Spiegel

20). Subsequently, as Google attracts even more users -or better clients- the coordination of

time and space becomes questionable. Because the virtual space of Google gives the potential

to make ‘’those who are absent present, always and everywhere’’ (Beck 31). In other words,

the ability to grasp places that the Google user doesn’t inhabit in the particular moment is the

result of web’s coordination of time and space. But the manner that Google takes advantage

of the web-space speed and fluidity and the diverse users in order to construct its own

Globalization narrative is caused by a new definition of capital relationships, which will be

further analyzed in Google advertising and translating. In other words, in my opinion, Web-

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global flows travel virtually through the subjectively imagined and unpredictable different

‘’scapes’’, yet driven by a dominant but decentralized ‘’finanscape’’, in a socially and

geographically virtual and borderless space

1.2. Google as a brand

As I referred to a‘’continuous’’ reproduction of a new culturally applicable

vocabulary for Google’s globalization narrative, I think it would be fruitful to refer shortly to

Google’s ‘’reproduction’’ business operations. From August 2009, Google was the most

visited site on the Internet and during the same period Google was one of the top ten most

visited web-sites in almost all countries (Lee 43). The key definitions to understand the

company’s global operational strategies lies in the definitions of ‘’networking’’, and

‘information’’1. The company has been introduced to the public as a web-search engine but it

managed to expand beyond web search ‘’introducing new services developed in its own labs

and absorbing market-leading companies that it acquired, the company has managed for the

most part to maintain an appearance for benign innocence’’(Stross 2). The company’s

systematic expansion towards almost every screen in the world is closely linked to the

process is closely linked to the process of regionalization to globalization, ‘’where the

process moves from local to regional and global’’(Segell 16). Indeed, Google is a hybrid,

post-modern product and it monopolizes the web by absorbing local services. The way

Google constructs the hybrid monopoly though, is not operated on the basis of geographical

regionalization. However, it would be the easy gateway for such a conclusion, especially

when someone switches countries, while the Google web-space is automatically converting to

Google NL or Google GR. But what we fail to consider, is that Google’s operational

1 Information is becoming a strategic resource that may prove as valuable and influential in the post-industrial

era as capital and labor have been in the industrial age (Segell 32). The proper application of advanced

information systems, improves the efficiency of activities but also disrupts old ways of thinking and provides

alternatives. Moreover the advanced networking information technology-as Google embodies- makes it possible

to rethink people and databases as resources on network (Segell 32)

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practices take advantage of the emancipatory character of information, which runs in the web

spaces. But what are the dynamics that constitute Google a superior brand? How is the post-

modern diversity displayed in Google’s web space?

The post-modern celebration of diversity is a result of Google’s superiority and

reliability as a brand. Under the logo Google one can decipher, the diverse places of Google

NL or Google FR, or any other regional space. However, the user tends to be in a state of

confusion in order to distinguish between NL or Google NL. This state of confusion, could be

described with the definition of ‘’imagined presence’’ (Urry 2000). The digital architecture of

the world is usually linked to transnational imagination as in ‘’imagined communities’’ or

‘’imagined words’’ (Beck 31), which are all constituted by the network user ‘’imagined

presence’’ as ‘’dialogic imaginations presuppose, among others, imagined presence of

geographically distant others and worlds’’ (Beck 31). Subsequently, the company benefits

from the process of ‘’networking’’ and celebrates a diversity, which in the virtual context is

utopic in the sense that it is ‘’fixed’’ and promoted by a multinational logo. The dynamics of

the company to entice the user the new dictum ‘’Act locally, think globally”, is linked to the

web-information capability to encourage ‘’a vivid awareness of the cultural diversity of our

planet’’ (Grenz 18), which reflects the adoption of ‘’A new pluralist mind-set” (Grenz 18).

Moreover, the question that derives is not how the pluralistic, post-modern mind-set

manifests in Google but in opposition, the question is the global dynamics that construct it. If

we consider, how Globalization was generated the initial association would be the capital.

Indeed, besides the various globalization theories in diverse fields, globalization generally is

‘’normally discussed in terms of “large-scale changes in the new economy such as the new

international forms of production, marketing, sales and distribution and the concurrent

development of a single integrated financial market”(Segell 16). This argument displays

beyond the cultural or social spheres and stresses the significance of the financial dimensions

19

of Globalization. It is true that globalization transmutes to many different forms but the

promoted diversity is designed under the new economic social shifts. In order to comprehend

such argument, on a first level, we must understand ‘’Google’’ as a corporate brand.

Corporate branding, an essential aftermath of the corporate capital, is financially

and culturally designed in order to give a sense of belonging and not only a sense of

differentiation. For instance, Google corporate branding resides in the alignment of strategic

vision, organizational culture and stakeholders images(Hatch and Schulz 2001). Strategic

vision and organizational culture incorporate the central ideas, the heritage of the company

and embody the future visions of the company. On the other hand, stakeholders images are

‘’the outside’s world overall impression of the company including the views of customers,

shareholders, the media, the general public and so on”(Hatch and Schulz 2001). All These

influential brand’s identity specific features are prominent even in the page description, and

decoded in the key-definition of diversity. The paradox in this case is that Google adopts as a

core value the word ‘’diversity’’, which seems compatible with the post-modern, discursive

values of Globalization. In the web-page description ‘’Organizational culture” is translated

to Diversity of Google “from our benefits to our Employ research group, find what out what

we do in the name of making Google a great and inclusive place to work-for all”.

Stakeholder’s images are translated to ‘’diversity on the web’’, “helping users of all

backgrounds and experiences make the most out of the web”, and strategic vision translated

to “diversity of the future” because “there is not enough diversity in Computer Science

today”. While corporate branding is translated to a corporate identity, Google’s brand is not

only a strong medium of cultural meanings but the brand itself also “becomes a strong

referent shaping economic activities among consumers and producers’’(Askegaard 7).

If we rethink this argument, Google brand creates narratives for life-style behaviors

and mind-sets: diverse users exposed to an interconnected, pluralistic, post-modern virtual

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space with “transcultural values, which are constantly promoted by brands and which enables

their discourses to cross cultures and frontiers. Moreover, all these cross-cultural discourses,

shaped in many different layers, create narratives of globalization, which are constructed in

the basis of economic capital. As a result, Google’s brand process to convey cross-cultural

discourses reveals “that the nature and task of the state within the global economy is

changing’’(Segell 16) .The difference in the way capital powers occur globally stands beyond

the traditional and governmental powers. In what Google innovates, is a model of authority

control which surpasses the climax of traditional power institutions ‘’taking advantage of the

early ungovernable days of Internet, a libertarian space free and open to all voices,

unconstrained by the conventions and norms of the real world and certainly beyond the scope

of traditional powers of the state’’ (Vaidhyanathan 14). Google’s mission to ‘’organize the

web and make it universally accessible and usable’’ (Dai 434) weakens the nation states

autonomy: ‘’The autonomy of the nation state declines due to the fact that Google search

reinforces the trend towards economic Globalization’’’(Dai 435). It is likely that the more

users the company has the more advertisers will want to buy ‘’space’’ in Google’s sights. As

a result Google challenges the capitalism of nation- state as ‘’the process of online search

helps make national, geographical and cultural boundaries, which are key features of the

territorially based nation-state, less relevant to the flow of information’’(Dai 435).

However, the confusing point is that the applied innovation and knowledge mutated to

Google’s advertising and translation services defines economic value in a new context. The

brand is far ahead from the structures “Of industrial manufacturing and commercial services

sectors, which were previously characterized as ‘’corporate capitalism”(Sinclair 58). I have

emphasized the importance of the corporate logo to create narratives to the users, as corporate

capitalism historically suggests but it’s remains critical whether Google commoditizes it’s

products, as other multinational companies as McDonalds or Ikea does. For Frederic

21

Jameson ‘’ the key to contemporary capitalism in the multinational character and the fact that

multinational cooperation’s (such as McDonalds and IKEA) have greatly increased their

range of products transformed to commodities” (Ritzler 49). But Google can’t be analyzed

primarily as a commodity. The company’s diversity and powerful logo could be compatible

to Jameson’s perception of the late stage of a post-modern, cultural capitalism, that involves

‘’a prodigious expansion of capital into hitherto areas uncommodified areas ‘’(Ritzler 49).

Moreover, according to Jameson the “uncommodified’’ areas are identified with three types

of capitalistic space “The three historical stages of capital have each generated a type of space

unique to it[…] These three types of space I have in mind are all the result of discontinuous

expansions or quantum leaps in the enlargement of capital, in the latter’s penetration and

colonization of hitherto uncommodified areas”(Jameson 348). But Jameson’s definition of

space linked to the phase of late capitalism is characterized by a new conception in the way

space is filled. According to this argument, the ‘’new space’’ in that the elements that pass

through it, or occupy it, are no longer orderly or evocative of rationality, but they are

disorderly and evocative of fragmentality”(Earnshaw 11). But whether the ‘’fragmented’’

postmodern, capitalistic space in the form of heterogeneous collage images could adapt to

Google’s virtual spatial fragments remains ambiguous. The abstract, single formation of a

global space ordered according to ‘’the transcendental movements and relation of the Capital

and filled with various practices articulated according to the diversion and solidification of

the capital at a certain point.”(Earnshaw 12).

As a result, in a certain way this totalizing perception of the spatial ‘’uncommodified

areas” linked to Google consists some implications. Undoubtedly, the capital performativity

is obvious in the company’s commoditized logo, but the company doesn’t operate in order to

occupy ‘’uncommodified areas’’. This is easy to observe in the nature of web-space: the user

is already part of a commodified area while participating on the process of networking, which

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makes it hardly impossible to signify Google’s “uncommodified areas’’ within the globalized

web-space. Mainly because postmodernism and ‘’late capitalism’’ present spatial production

is designed by a ‘’fragmentary’’ but juxtaposed single world and it’s relation to capital.

However, I hypothesize that this fragmented conceptualization of a single world isn’t

applicable to the contemporary economic conditions. This totalizing approach stands similar

to Harvey’s approach to capitalistic space. He argues that, ‘’Capital, in short, continues to

dominate, and it does so in part through superior command over space and time, even when

opposition movements gain control over a particular place for a time. The ‘’otherness’’ and

‘’regional resistances’’ that post-modern politics emphasize can flourish in a particular place.

But they are all ‘’too often subject to the power of capital over the coordination of universal

fragmented space and the march of capitalism’s global historical time that lies out of the

purview of any particular one of them’’(Harvey 238-239). Harvey describes the ‘’universal

fragmented space’’, as a series of places under the dynamics of the universal, spatial,

capitalistic production. According to both Jameson and Harvey, the ‘’cultural dominant’’

namely Google is a single world, which determines the way that the space is fragmented.

This hypothesis of fragmented, universal, spatial production is the main indicator of ‘’space

that drive towards homogenization2’’ (Earnshaw 32). Indeed, multinational capitalistic space,

in terms of Mac Donald’s and IKEA was a single system, articulated in different spatial

fragments, that resulted to a homogenization process. The corporate logo have transformed

regional space to globally ‘’commodified areas’’, which offer homogenous experiences and

lifestyles. How Is it possible to fragment borders though, when the capital value is produced

in an even more complex manner in virtual spaces and how can we define the spatial boarders

that global capital produces?

2 The proponets of cultural homogenization argue that accelerating Globalization, in the form of capital media ,

informations systems and huge multinational organizations is eroding local cultures and traditions (Benyon and

Dunkerley 22)

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3. Google Advertiser

Appadurai ’s theorization of global flows poses finanscape as the cultural condition

where capital comes into existence and deals with the ‘’movement of megamonies through

national turnstile at blinding speed’’(Appadurai 298). Indeed, when someone signifies

Google advertising the first association is commodity and capital, a company that absorbs

hegemonic other brands in order to monopolize. Such case of, hegemonic absorption reminds

a capitalistic model of ‘’monopoly”’, analyzed during the last century but its ‘’such a new

phenomenon that old metaphors and precedents don’t fit the challenges that the company

presents to competitors and users’’ (Vaidhnynathan 20). In fact, Google advertiser has

reconfigured the late capitalistic model of traditional advertising that conveys advertising

information to potential buyers. The reason appears to be very simplistic but very effective:

taking advantage of the ‘’free’’ space, the model of web-dominance has been built on the

attention of its users because ‘’there has never been a company with explicit ambitions to

connect individual minds with information on a global-in fact universal scale’’

(Vaidhynathan 16) . This argument indicates the company’s capability to interconnect

diverse minds, using sometimes invisibly different complex processes of web- Globalization.

Particularly, the way that the user goes “ global with Google” according to the company’s

web page description is by using marketing tools and free translation tools “to help you

communicate with and to sell audiences everywhere in the world”. But how does the

company manage to rearrange the capital values in Google advertiser narrative?

Even if, Google is not commonly considered an advertising company, but more as a

search engine, advertising compromises the majority of Google’s revenue as it a commercial

site and it is dependent economically on advertising revenue and a vast number of users.

Basically, Google besides its function as a search engine, it is ‘’the most successful supplier

of web advertising’’(Vaidhynathan 16) as it enables linking people to information based on

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their individual preferences to potential vendors of good and services that reflect those

tastes. The pluralistic, diverse information experience that the company offers enabled the

Googlization of almost any available information. This ‘’Googlization’’ of information

determines the number of advertisement placed in Google sites as the more users click the

Google pages, the more advertisement will project on the screens as, ‘’ Advertisers are

charged by the number of clicks that have been received on Google’s search site and this

model of pricing is known as cost per click (CPC).’’. In fact even though advertising pop ups

don’t appear in the users screen , “all of Google’s revenues come from its ‘AdWords’

programme, which provides advertising space for advertisers worldwide’’(Dai 434). When

the user enters a key word in the web-search process, the AdWords program matches the

key words with compatible services or products, while ‘’ At the same time as when the

search results are displayed, the matching advertisements, which are also text-based, are

displayed on the right hand side of the computer screen’’(Dai 434). It is expected that a

person searching for information containing key words related to the Google-selected

advertisements, might also click on one or more of the advertising links. As a result,

Google’s AdWords adopts another approach than traditional advertising strategy’s building

audience and simultaneously clients emphasizing on the user’s search interests.

Subsequently, Google advertiser can be seen as the embodiment of the ‘’finanscape’’yet

distant from the fundamental corporate capitalism idea of powerful brand subjects that shape

market states and move towards ‘’unocommodiffied areas’’ that Jameson remarked.

This argument is comprehensive compared to the differences in advertising operations

during different technological periods. For instance, The virtual advertising phenomenon

during the 90s followed an expansion towards ‘’uncommodified’’ areas “Advertising pops

up almost everywhere and almost anywhere at almost any time in America. It bounds in

conventional print and electronic media and on storefronts and on billboards, on store sides

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and on roadsides [..]’’ (Danna 1). These advertisements were and still are everywhere,

creating semiotics and formulating their own “consumer”, “popular” culture while

formulating Jameson’s Logic of post-modern and late capitalism.

Even if Google operates similar to the now days old medium of Television and

‘’exchanges free content with advertisement’’(Lee 434), I remark that advertising , has two

major differences. Firstly, Google is classified ‘’as an all- in-one content provider advertising

agency and ratings firm ’’(Lee 434) as the company operates in all the necessary advertising

fields, when television is still dependent and related to advertising agencies and ratings

firms. Secondly, ‘’Google sells to advertisers commodities that have no exchange value

outside the Google adds system’’(Lee 2011).Google’s users as receivers of the advertising

messages semiotics, has still the choice of rejection or reception. In Google’s case, which

maintains the number one position as search engine in the world, “advertising is constituting

the core mechanism of the company’s strategy for expanding and increasing power, as the

biggest source of revenue to date has been the sale of web-based advertising”(Scott 129). The

tactics that are used in order to achieve that vary: ‘’it can sell more web-based ads connected

to advertisers worldwide, it also can sell more ads for placement within other kinds of media

such as web-based video and wireless devices and it can diversify the kinds of ads that it

sells, which might open new markets to them’’ (Scott 129).

As global flows travel through the dominant ‘’finanscape’’, the user as a signifier

experiences a modified ‘’consumer fetishism’’ in a large, interactive globalized system. In

this large, interactive system that Google advertiser occurs, millions of worldwide Google

users becomes simultaneously consumers ‘’ transformed through commodity flows (and the

media-scapes, especially of advertising that accompany them) into a sign, both in

Baudrillard’s sense of a simulacrum that only asymptotically approaches the form of a real

social agent, and in the sense of a mask for the real seat of agency, which is not the consumer

26

but the producer and the many forces that constitute production’’ (Appadurai 596).

Appadurai’s reconstruction of a globalized ‘’marxist fetishism’’ demonstrates an altered

version, yet marxist focused orientation towards economy, which strengthens the dominant

but simultaneously disjunctive factor of Google advertiser as a‘’finanscape’’. The

transformation of the number one research engine to the global leader of web advertisement

follows the logic of Jameson’s cultural capitalism, however within the chaotic, disorganized,

ungoverned ‘’world at large’’, decentralized by geographical boarders and spaces .

I am referring to a capitalistic approach while, ‘since it continues to be the top search-

engine in the world based on volume users, it will continue to help the volume of its web-

based ads to grow’’(Scott 129) and ‘’Google creates an ideology that the world’s information

is at the users fingertips, which encourages users to search more, and hence view more

advertisements’’(Lee 2011). As a result, more users will be willing to join the Google

advertising program, as long as it remains the number one, search destination and continues

to place ads on relevant pages of users. “Advertisers want to place their products where there

is the most traffic, and targeting an audience that is most likely to buy their products such as

Google users, would increase their profits”.(Scott 129). Google’s power to go global with

advertisements and spread its own messages to the users globally at great speed, allows

financial capital to be switched from countries at the touch of a button (Segell 17). But in

order to comprehend the transnational space of Google, we must negotiate the space that

Global capital produces

1.1. The global, spatial design of Google

“[…]era[…] seems to be that of space. We are in the age of the simultaneous, of

juxtaposition, the near and the far, the side by side and the scattered. A period, in which in

my view, the world is putting itself to the test, not so much as great way of life destined to

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grow in time, but as a net that links points together and creates its own muddle.[…].In our

era, space presents itself to us in the form of patters of ordering’’.(Foucault 22-23)

According to Foucault’s quote, we in the era of ‘space’ and we define ourselves through

space. Instead of thinking globalized physical identities, we can rethink them as

intercommunicating spaces. And, if those places don’t exist in a material reality, the do in

exist in a virtual reality formulating a virtual space of global information, which contests the

cultural and social order. Such virtual space as Google advertiser and Google translator are

intercommunicating, global as well as a cosmopolitan ‘space’ constructed by different

collages. I critically reflect that, the dominance of the ‘’finanscape’’ condition lies within the

virtual ‘’space’’ context. The borderless virtual space, according to Appadurai is a space

where ‘’ Deterritorialization’’ occurs, in the sense that every Google advertiser user

,regardless of the social class confronts a Marxist consumer- fetishism. The link between the

globalized virtual space and the user’s consumer fetishism enables another understanding of

how ‘’finanscape’s’’ social relationships are reproduced and negotiated. Google advertiser

economic driven and borderless space enables to grasp the emergence of a consumer

fetishism in Google advertiser space, as a Utopian, unreachable space. According to

Foucault’s ‘’In other spaces’’,s patial arrangements run among other places and their

interrelations reproduce social meanings. However in contrast to the ‘’real, effective places,

which are outlined in the very institution of society’’(Foucault 1986 [1967]: 24), which he

names ‘’heterotopias’’ as places of a collective experience of ‘’otherness’’, utopias are

fundamentally unreal places that represent ‘’a society brought to perfection’’(Foucault 1986

[1967]: 24). Such a perfectly designed society reflected in Google advertiser’s social and

cultural borderless space, empowers the ‘’Deterritorialization’’ society to translate ‘’a

plethora of creative and culturally well-chosen ideas of a consumer agency’(Appadurai 596).

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These images of consumer agency are responsible for creating a utopian space ’’that

the consumer is consistently helped to believe, that he or she is the best actor, where in fact

he or she is at best a chooser’’(Appadurai 596). Such argument contradicts Marx’s distinction

of conscious ideology and unconscious cultural, material production forces’’ “between the

material transformations of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined

with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, aesthetic or philosophic – in

short, ideological – forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out”

(Marx, 1859). Marx quotation underlines the importance of the distinction between the two

level of capitalistic mode of production and stresses the ideological messages that display

‘’beyond our will”. In Opposition, Appadurai poses the ‘’global’ ’consumer as a ‘’chooser’’,

acting autonomously in his consumption choices in the virtual space. A virtual space of

consuming, is designed on the basis of a technology-driven utopia and utilizes speed in order

to communicate notions of corporate globalism.

The virtual space of advertising mirrors how Google ‘’advertiser’’ driven by the

‘’finanscape’’ coexists as a ‘’technoscape’’. The promotion of the ‘’go Global’’ masterplan,

is articulated in Google advertiser as a “technoscape’’. Technoscape describes the spread of

technologies and their de-territorialized movement “both mechanical and informational’’ that

“now moves at high speeds across various kind of previous impervious boundaries”

(Appadurai 499). The nature of the “technoscape” allows different complicated flows to

travel in high speed in several places, while simultaneously the recreated transnational place

that “global’’ capital produces is negotiated. Even though Appadurai notes that the

“technoscape’’ flows are determined "by increasingly complex relationships among money

flows, political possibilities, and the availability of both un- and highly skilled labor" (p. 34),

I personally think that technoscape flows are driven by the complexity of the new re-ordered

“global’’ capital performativity because the speed of technology creates possibilities for

29

new global business strategies. The key strategy to comprehend such argument lies in the

definition of Google’s “technoscape’’ as an arbitrage, a business strategy to incorporate the

local with the global using technology’s high speed.

2. Google advertiser as an ‘’Arbitrage’’

While globalization and cultural theories are still on the search for a strategy to

negotiate how users can comprehend spaces as Google, in the corporate sphere, strategies

already take place for negotiating such transnational space. The notion of ‘’arbitrage’’, in

strict economic sense, refers to “The way profits are obtained by capitalizing, through the use

of electronic technologies, on price differentials, in markets situated in different time zones

and parts of the world’’ (Abbas 784). The term ‘’arbitrage’’ in a globalized context, also

refers to the expansion of manufacturing practices in different parts of the world, so to avoid

assigning to goods a national provenance. Subsequently, Google advertiser’s’’technoscape’’

flows are an arbitrage strategy “that maximizes profits by setting up operations in a world of

speed and virtuality and thereby, by breaking up the traditional boundaries of time and

space’’ (Abbas 784). ‘’Technoscape’’ is, as Appadurai suggests, a disjunctive factor but

simultaneously interrelated with ‘’Finanscape’’, yet the ‘’technoscape’’ condition reflects on

its core financial driven dynamics. As a result, Google advertiser could become an

‘’arbitrage’’ in the sense that ‘’it consists with a powerful set of strategies for dealing with the

management of transnational space’’ (Abbas 784). The combination of Google advertiser as a

finanscape and technoscape condition constructs the service as an ‘’arbitrage’’, a strategically

selected tool, that negotiates the transnational virtual spaces in order to comprehend

globalisms that are created though different flows.

Specifically, the way that the ‘’arbitrage’’ strategy is operated in Advertiser is in line with the

logic of a developing, global web-customization, as profoundly described in the web page

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‘’Localize your ads & sight’’. The three steps that the company follows in order to achieve

becoming an arbitrage is by following the ambiguously and controversially designed ‘’Act

local, think Global’ tactics: find new markets, connect locally, operate internationally. The

page description is an indicator of the web-site globalization, as the two complementary

processes of web-site internationalization and web-site localization are performed.

Beyond the language translation as a process to ‘localize’ a site, those two processes

blended together address to incorporate the necessary local elements, in order to make web-

sites understandable by internationals customers. In technical terms web site

internationalization “is the process through which back-end technologies are used to create

modular, extendable, and accessible web-site template that support front-end customization

(Singh and Pereira 7). On the contrary, ‘’web-site localization is the process of the front-end

localization, whereby web-pages are adapted to meet the need of specific target markets’’

(Singh and Pereira 7). In order to operate in an international environment, the user must be

informed not only about the international electronic payments, insurance and shipping

restrictions, as well as the local laws, customs and taxation, which means that Globalization

requires first the localization of the product. Characteristically, the web page referring to the

local laws stresses: ‘‘Understand restrictions around import, packaging, and/or any additional

fees in the countries you are operating and advertising in. Because ‘’Localization means not

just translation into the vernacular language, it means also adaption to the national currencies,

measurements and power supplies, and it means more subtle and cultural adaptation’’

(Hutchins 13). For example, any consumer product sold in the UAE must be labeled in

Arabic, while Korea has instituted a ban on the use of PVC shrink wrap due to environmental

concerns. Your shipping and logistics company (say, DHL, UPS, FedEx, or others) can help

you.’ Google’s pages shows that culturally-adapted web content enhances usability,

accessibility, and web site interactivity with the relevant cultural group (Singh and Pereira

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7). Subsequently Google advertiser becomes a highly-localized web-space and includes

relatively high levels of localization providing the specific country based information. Google

Advertiser promises to be global with access to vast, multicultural base underlines the aspect

that displays beyond the strict financial arbitrage related to the ‘’ethnoscapes’’ characteristics.

As ‘ethnoscapes’ build growing, geographically and culturally diverse online population,

their customization needs to be designed distinctively in the global web markets. To appeal to

these culturally diverse customers, web sites must be culturally customized as part of their

larger effort to ‘brand’ their web sites to the various global segments (Singh and Pereira 4).

Unlike the traditional model of cultural capitalism, which celebrated homogeneity in the

form of Americanization or commoditization, the big companies in the web such as Google

address different target audiences simultaneously. While a global consumer interface may

require a certain degree of internationalization and/or standardization to develop and maintain

a global image,[…], the success of a global interface may be achievable when the interface

design reflects the cultural nuances of the target audience’’(Cateora 139). As a result, in

terms of the ‘’ethnoscape’’ condition, as ‘’individual consumer tastes and purchasing patterns

are thus partly determined by their collective values of the local community’’ (Chau et al

139), even if the shifting population is in a fluid and de-territorialized in the web space, the

cultural context of the costumer must be taken into account in order to achieve global

audience. The ‘’technoscape’’ space of Google Advertiser as a global communication

medium reflects another trend related to the rejection of standardization of globalization

models. If the globalization standardized models would be applied to international marketing

terms the ongoing problem between the tensions of cultural homogenization and

heterogeneity, which Appadurai remarks could be also reflected, as the debate over the

approaiateness of standardization versus localization in international marketing continues to

receive attention (Singh and Pereira 4).

32

On the one hand, the first standardization approach argues, that ‘as technology develops

and is globally dispersed, cultural distance will be minimized, leading to convergence of

national cultures into a homogeneous culture’(Singh and Pereira 5), argument that is linked to

Frederic Jameson’s perception of cultural capitalism. On the other hand, the opposite

approach is closely related to the theoretical framework of Appadurai, as research has proven

that ‘customers prefer to shop and interact in sites that are especially designed for them in

their local language’ (Singh and Pereira 5). Such argument allows to rethink globalization,

from a heterogeneous point of reference. As Appadurai points out, an Americanization -

homogenization analysis could no longer become applicable to various cultural objects,

because as ‘at least as rapidly forces from the various metropolises are brought to new

societies, they tend to become indigenized in one way or another’. (Appadurai 102). In the

same pattern, Google advertisers in cultural terms follows an ‘localization’ orientation, by

allowing the user-customer, to various cultural modifications in order to communicate and

indigenize in a culturally appropriate manner. Therefore, if we encounter the cultural

perspective of web pages design, how could Google transform to a ‘’cultural arbitrage’’?

In the previous section, it has been analyzed, how the different but economic driven ‘scapes’

that simultaneously perform as an ‘arbitrage’ strategy, operate in Google advertiser space.

The way that the different scapes contribute in order to shape Google advertisers global

outlook, could be assumed to be an ‘arbitrage’, a technique that helps the users to

comprehend the constantly reconstructed virtual, global spaces. However, the forms that

Google’s ‘arbitrage’ set of strategies has taken so far, questions whether such strategies must

be celebrated or critical questioned. Moreover, I think the main concerns that derive is if we

move beyond the economic spheres and if we rethink how Google advertiser is set up as a

‘cultural’ arbitrage.

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The ‘’technoscape’’ condition signifies that Google advertiser becomes a financial

‘’arbitrage’’ in economic terms but as the global flows continue moving, globalization can be

translated in the other’ ‘’scapes’’. Beyond the ‘’technoscape’’ and ‘’finanscape’’ condition,

Google advertiser transforms to a ‘’cultural’’ arbitrage. Generally cultural arbitrage could be

described as a movement with meanings that travel in a cross-cultural basis. Favorable effects

related to country or place of origins have supplied a basis for cultural arbitrage (Ghemawat

174). For example, the American culture image has long underpinned the international

success of fast-food products, specific brand images such Coca Cola, as in the same way

images of France with parfumes, wines and high culture . Such argument, enables the

possibility to rethink the ‘’ethnoscape’’ condition and to reevaluate how Google’s sight is

designed on the basis of different, constantly shifting and mobilized population. The link to

‘’ethnoscape’’ and ‘’technoscape’’ as a cultural arbitrage applied to the new service of

Google, allows us to consider the international dominance of a corporation that takes

advantage of the ethnoscapes needs, who ‘’flow’’ across the global. The difference is that

even though Google services are owned by an American based company, so a link to

Jameson’s ‘’Americanization’’ argument, could be assumed, on the contrary, Google

advertiser is perceived as a ‘’no country of origin’’, which doesn’t spread either American

culture either European culture, yet a Google culture. Therefore, the exposed images aren’t

American-centric, because ‘’Unites States is no longer the puppeteer of a world system of

images but it is only one node of a complex transnational construction of imaginary

landscapes”(Appadurai 587). Indeed, ‘Americanization’ isn’t applicable to Google advertiser

anymore, because the cultural and economic conditions of Jameson’s analysis of the 80’s

needs to be conducted in a different set up. It must be acknowledged that we are still

experiencing the cultural and economic impacts of that legacy, but ‘’many of the dominant

34

economic, cultural, and political rules of the game have changed dramatically.(Nealon 11-

12). And the dramatical change of advertiser

Thus, If we perceive the service as cultural arbitrage, it could also be related to the posture

known glocalization, ‘’a portmandeu world blending the ‘’local’’ and the ‘’global’’ ‘’(Abbas

784). The term glocalization was invented in order to reveal, how the flows of global culture

are being modified to a local culture. Glocalization means that while there are undeniable

chains of economic and cultural change crossing the globe , each specific local context picks

it up and molds it uniquely. Encapsuled now in the corporate slogan ‘’Think locally, act

locally”, is a top down approach to society, however: a hybrid term, it concludes by

homogenizing the hybrid and the local (Abbas 784). Terms such as Glocalization, have been

introduced in order to balance the theorization of global flows production: ‘’on the one hand

the growing homogenization of societies and their integration into the world arena, on the

other hand the continued quest for local identities and idiosyncrasies’’ ( Van Pieterse 483).

As a result, Google advertiser adapts to the ethnoscape globalized need and as a ‘’cultural

arbitrage’’ becomes a strategy to negotiate the ‘’globalization’’ dynamics, which appears to

be a micromanagement of the ‘’ethnoscapes’’ hybridity. Google’s ‘’glocalization’’ strategy

emerges as a protest against the homogenization of the ‘’ethnoscapes’’, by being posed as

the connecting point of ‘’globalism’’ and ‘’localism’’. However, even if Google advertiser as

a cultural arbitrage appears to act innocent within the cultural spheres, respecting the local

‘’otherness’’, especially with its highly localized capability, other cultural arbitrages of

multinational corporations have created significant concerns in the way they negotiate

transnational spaces, that global capital produces.

If we consider ‘Glocalization’ marketing operations of world-wide brand corporations

such as McDonalds or United Colors of Benetton, the reference point beyond the corporate

dominance, is no more the imperialistic dynamics of the advertising product, but rather the

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localization or indigenization of the product. Characteristically, the multinational corporation

Benetton has developed an advertising aesthetic that promotes ethnic hybridity by posing

racially diverse bodies this comes a bit out of the blue, while on the other hand Mac Donald’s

food products adapt to the local customs in order to assimilate the local elements and increase

capital profits. However, these multinational corporations and particularly Mac Donald’s

brand is often described first from the unifying and standardizing effects of their Mac

Donaldization syndrom3, while the attention to the cultural impact of the corporation should

be also focused to their disjuncture and diversity. The reason that this emphasis is needed,

derives from the ‘ethnoscape’ population, a definition which includes by nature the term

diversity and disjuncture. Especially, within the Google advertiser, decentralized space

context, when the meaning of different ‘ethnicities’ and ‘cultural identities’ switch with the

press of a button, Google advertiser as a highly globalized and both localized cultural

arbitrage creates serious concerns related to the “ethnoscapes’’ reproduced identities.

Paradoxically, Google advertiser symbolizes a cultural arbitrage not in a purely

national and cultural sense, but in the sense of the chaotic fluidity of global flows, as

underlined by Appadurai’s theory. It is constructed through different ‘’scapes’’ and their

interrelation. The role of Google advertiser as a cultural arbitrage adds to this picture a new

understanding in the manner that intercultural and multicultural exchange interplays with the

ethnoscapes. However, as the definition of this arbitrage strategy derives from business

practices and patterns, the rest of the scapes are driven from their relation to the

‘’finanscape’’ condition and therefore they communicate the notions of a new-reproduced,

mysterious capitalism. When Google culture is not only carrying notions of diverse cultures,

but is also promoting the tools for such intercultural exchange, many implications could

3 According to the sociologist George Ritzer, Mac Donaldization is the process ‘whereby the principles of the fast-food restaurants are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society as well as rest of the world’ (1993: 19). Such process is resulting to homogeneity and it is linked to Frederic Jameson concept of culture capitalism

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follow. The implication lies in the services localization processes manage to overshadow the

‘dark’ globalization results of homogeneity, by building communication bridges to the

‘’ethnoscapes’’ . The local is highlighted as a ‘’commodity’’, which will enhance the

company’s global outlook. Subsequently, the company expands its advertising services

with translation services to widen a plethora of local voices and simultaneously be the all-in-

all information provider. The localization process of advertising reaches its limitations with

Google translator. Even if Google translator can be described as a communication bridge

between the ethnoscapes, and as an innocent passage towards global spheres, how does the

arbitrage strategy affects cultural transmission? How is the Globalization narrative

articulated in Google translator and does it reflect economic values?

4.1. Google translator as a ‘’cultural’’ arbitrageur

Goran Theborn remarks the transition between the universal, social space of humankind

and the new kind of space of sociological imagination, that is “Globality’’(Beck 21) . The

entrance to this new space is described as ‘’an everyday experience and consciousness of the

global’’ (Beck 22). Specifically “Globality entails a turn away from both provincial gaze and

from the exotic gaze of the colonizer (and the colonized). There is no longer any legitimate

center, from which to look out and to communicate with the rest of the world. Vistas,

experiences, conceptualizations, from all parts of the globe, will be brought into networks of

global-intercommunication. Extra-European cultural experiences and language skills will be

important assets here, and new links to comparative linguistics will be opened up […]

(Theborn 51). The focus on two of Theborn’s remarks, ‘’networks of global-

communications’’ and ‘’language’’ act as prophets for the global, operative structures of

Google translator. Based on this argument, Google has created the new space of Globality as

an every experience for intercultural, interlingual exchange, designed under the

‘’ethnoscape’’ need for either corporate communication, either intercultural communications.

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But as these two spheres are interconnected, Google becomes the connecting tool to bring

them together.

As the user uses ‘’online tools to translate your website and ads […] by communicating

in your customer’s language”, he simultaneously uses the Google translator in order to

localize his product. As already remarked, Google as in all-in-all provider and the pre-

requirement for a successful Google advertising is the use of Google translator. But the

problem is how the national signature of language, in other words, how the “national’’ travels

towards Global spheres, as part of the web-localization process. According to Saskia Sassen

‘’that one of the futures of the current face of Globalization is the fact that a process which

happens, within a territory of sovereign state, does not mean necessarily that it is a national

process. Conversely, the national (such as firms, capital, culture) may increasingly be located

outside the national territory, for instance, in a foreign country or digital spaces […]’’(Sassen,

145ff). Indeed, in Google translator ‘’capital’’ and ‘’culture’’ coexist in an unharmonious

blend, outside of national spaces but inside a ‘’centerless’’ intercommunicating network. But

how can a cultural product become successfully localized in such a space?

Since Internet operations run in a global scale, the post-modern requirement for a

pluralist mind-set is depicted in the many different languages used in the cyber-space. Even

though one could assume that the dominant web-language is English, the rate at which the

numbers of users is growing is far less for English, than Spanish, Chinese, Russian or

Arabic.(Taprial and Kanwar 49). Google translator emerged as one of the most used web

translators that someone can use for instant and free translation among 58 languages (Taprial

and Kanwar 49). The ongoing need to move beyond the linguistic dominance of English, is

another argument against the ‘’Westernization’’ or ‘’Americanization’’ of culture and Google

becomes the tool for this transformation. The multicultural and cosmopolitan society that

Google’s space create becomes heterogeneous and micro-manages the ‘’ethnoscapes’’

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hybridity with a respect to ‘’otherness’’, following again the glocalisation quote ‘’think

locally act globally’’. Such an argument could be a productive management of hybridity but

unfortunately the web mechanical translation illustrates a misconception related to the

‘’local’’, ‘’otherness’’, which I will further analyze.

The company couldn’t be less innovative with this global trend and it managed to

dominate by revolutionizing the boundaries of human communications and creating an

interconnectivity between the self and the foreign. But the distinction of the self and the other

‘’overlaps with the worn out dichotomies of colonizer/colonized, center/periphery,

occident/orient, North, South’’(Van Pieterse 186).The postmodern celebration of multiple

identities in Google’s globalization narrative ‘’widens the range of identity

repertoires”(Pieterse 187) as ‘’Multiple identities and the decentering of the social subject are

grounded in the ability of individuals to avail themselves of several organizational options at

the same time. Thus Globalization is the framework for the amplification and diversification

of sources of one self’’ (Van Pieterse 52).

The cultural diversity in terms of language entails the discourse of otherness and

constructs cultural diversity but also presents the binary pair of ‘’the self’’ and ‘’the other’’

on a static position. Globalization in Google has created diversity in the form of multiple

culture, multiple languages and multiple spaces. Beyond the economic scope of the

company’s domination, the utopian space of intercultural linguistic exchange is idealized, but

something very crucial is discredited. Cultural Transformation not only occurs because of the

high speed of technology but also because of the high speed of identity transformation and

reproduction. This argument proves that Google’s management doesn’t display in parallel

with the global rhythm of identity reconstruction. Because as ‘’the self is not what it used to

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be, ‘the other’ is not a stable or meaningful category” (Van Pieterse 187). Linguistic

identities assimilate to the global flows, adapt to new linguistic systems and reproduce, so

their strict linguistic classification entails limited cultural value. The distinction of the self

and the other is a polarized relationship in Google translator and performs through linguistic

classification and taxonomy: 58 languages classified though their simplified linguistic

features of grammar, syntax, and morphology.

Google translator’s reproduction of identities based on linguistic data endorses a very

problematic definition for identity. Language is undoubtedly, integral part of the broad

definition of identity, but in all different cultural and structural linguistic phenomena it

doesn’t emerge in a single analytic level, but operate in different levels simultaneously. The

notions of ‘’otherness’’ that communicate reveal some major concerns, mainly because

Google’ translator service fails to consider the current terminology of ‘’others’’, ‘’reflecting

the awareness that of course they are many kinds of others’’(Pieterse 187). The ‘’others’’

could be translated beyond the official language linguistic data, as it is estimated that ‘’there

are around five thousand languages, only about a hundred of which are national standard

languages’’ (Marmaridou 33). Although, the plurality of unofficial languages indicates

diverse and culturally rich dialects with many semantic and pragmatic aspects, these ,

institutionally unclassified ’others’’ are outside of Google’s framework.

Google’s management of language translation and the further topic of ‘’selfness’’ and

‘’otherness’’ becomes even more problematic, if we think that it was based on a statistical

machine translation‘’200 billion worlds algorithm’’ (Stross 82). Even if globalization debates

demonstrate against standardized models to measure culture, Google translator appears in this

case to highlight a standard model in the simplistic form of an algorithm. Google’s

technological software has created spatial, de-centralized diversities, which in terms of

Google’s translator are not successfully operated, because the company’s transmission of

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linguistic diversity is limited. Simply, because the machine translation algorithm creates

problems ‘’due to the fact that machines are and always will be incapable of grasping the

subtleties and nuances that a human mind can comprehend or a human language can

express’’(Guerra). The reason for this output, is mechanical translation’s inadequacy to deal

with features of human language, such as ambiguity, idioms or lexical mismatches. If we

consider the uniqueness of language and the simplistic understanding of translation, ‘’as the

process by which the meaning in one language is conveyed to another’’(Papastergiadis 5) ,

which ‘’usually involves the discovery of linguistic correspondences between different,

languages, or the transfer of terms from one language to another’’(Papastergiadis 5) even in

strict linguistics terms is very difficult process, because ‘’the similarity that exists between

different languages or the introduction of new terms and new codes does not always entail an

exact replication of meaning’’(Pastergiadis 5). But this algorithm has established translation

tools and free cost translation, in incredible speeds by being implemented as a cultural and

financial ‘arbitrage’ strategy. How does Google translator as an ‘’arbitrage’’ allow us to

rethink the notions of translation and diversity in a global context ?

According to Appadurai’s “scapes”, as global flows are being transmitted in

different ‘’mediascapes’’, ‘’finanscapes’’, ‘’ideoscapes’’, ‘’technoscapes’’ and finanscapes, it

is possible to think a ‘’moment of place and departure (imagined as the original) and a

moment and place of arrival (imagined as copy)” (De Kloet 135). Such a claim addresses the

created implications, when a cultural form as languages travel from a specific from an

imagined locality in an increasingly higher speed to another imagined locality. But what

Globalization theories of Appadurai and Jameson have stressed, even in a different

conceptualization and direction, is that cultural products and objects are influenced in a

smaller or bigger scale and visibly or invisibly by economic values. On a first level, this

argument is not prominent in Google translator, while it appears as it is linked to purely

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cultural transfer and most importantly its availability is free from costs. On a further level,

though Google translator belongs to a network of economic benefits and impacts, fact that

could make its simplistic model explainable. As a result, a new debate begins that involves

the inappropriateness of Google translator as an economically, beneficial global tool for

machine translations. Therefore, translator’s function as a ‘’technoscape’’allows to

understand how machine translation is mistakenly projected as cultural translation definition,

which demonstrates ‘’the ‘’developmental’’ logic of global culture’’(Papastergiadis 5).

Generally, cultural translation ‘’has been adopted as a key conceptual tool to for

understanding the effects of mixture in a broad range of contexts, from colonialism to

multiculturalism, as well defining the key drive for modernity’’(Papastergiadis 2). Therefore,

cultural translation serves as a tool to comprehend the diverse dynamics that shape the

interaction of different cultures. ‘’By highlighting the productive relationship between

dominant and minority partners it has been used to debunk the myths of cultural purity and

absolute autonomy, and has thereby extended the conceptual framework within which a

wider range of influences are recognizing as shaping the imperial, national, and global

spheres’’(Papastergiadis 2).

4.2. Google’s statistical machine translation

In opposition, ‘’Statistical machine translation’’ was the revolutionary artificial

intelligence translation software ‘’based not on linguistic rules manually drown up by

humans, but on a translation model that the software develops on its own as it is fed millions

of paired documents- an original and a translation done by a human translator ‘’(Stross 82).

The software operates in a pattern logic, comparing the words and phrases from language A

and its corresponding sentence to language B. (Stross 82). However, statistical machine

translation even if sometimes in terms of structure quite accurate it strongly contests the

values of cultural translation. Although the software that measures and transmits language

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using statistical data free from costs, it serves hidden economic scopes, which I will further

analyze. Particularly, when scholars and translators are referring to the model of cultural

translation, it is fruitful to rethink its operations in terms of the power conditions of

globalization. And even if cultural translation is not what Google translator embodies, the

discourse of an economically driven Globalization narrative communicates in several ways.

Thus the process of translation must be redefined in financial power institutions context as

‘the process of “cultural translation” is inevitably enmeshed in conditions of power-

professional, national, international. […]’ (Chow 177). Changes to translation studies, in

short, reflect larger power changes. As Bassnet remarks ‘’there is a great deal of confusion

caused by the use of the same terminology to describe translation as a high-status activity,

translation as a pedagogic instrument and translation as hack work for mass market’’(150).

I would like to use a word to word translation in order to critically reflect that the

cultural form that is transmitted as a ‘scape’ is becoming a cultural interpretation of

translation as ‘primarly a process that putting things together […] a real translation is not

only that which translated ‘word to word’ but also that which translates literally, depthessly,

naively’ (Chow 185-6). However the algorithmic, statistical translation even if it is

considered a progressive ‘’technoscape’’ globalization product it doesn’t translate ‘’naively’’

according to Chow’s claim, but in opposition in some cases it transmits naïve meanings. Even

in the primary linguistic performance Google translator has some major problems. Through a

basic semantical, lexicological and idiomatical example, I would like to illustrate that this

kind of virtual space of cultural exchange transmits inaccurate and inadequate translations.

The main term that is associated with linguistic Semantics is ambiguity, namely the

ability of the word ‘’to have one or more meanings’’ (Guerra 96). In the phrase ‘’eating bulls

can be risky’’’, for instance the verb ‘’eating’’ can be either a verb or an adjective. Google’s

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statistical machine translator, doesn’t have enough information to know which to choose, so

the statistical translation is possible to be the inadequate one. Related to lexicology,

lexicological mismatches are also highly possible. Every language has an idiomatic character,

as ‘’idioms are seen as a special category of lexical items which are not only determined

through their structure, but which also show a specific type of behavior in language

use’’(Strässler 10). For instance, if the user types the English idiomatic phrase ‘’costs an arm

and a leg’’, which means that something is very expensive, the matching translation in

German would be ‘’kostet ein Arm und einen Bein”. This expression can’t be understood

entirely by its linguistic performativity or from the meaning of its component words. Due to

the idiomatic expressions capability to ‘’be generally not fixed in form’’(Guerra 97), the

software will recognize wrongly the idiomatic phrase and the transmission of language will

be unsuccessful. Subsequently, the translation system makes a lot of mistakes in the

transmission, which change the meaning of the content.

Subsequently, a word to word translation is travelling through a combination of scapes

that ‘pollute’ it’s meanings and simultaneously are limiting the cultural information of the

‘imagined locality’ to the virtual signifiers. Linguistics, and their subfield models are useful

for a strict structural word to word translation, which fails to consider an accurate perception

of socio-cultural meanings and can be seen as a cultural ‘betrayal’ in terms of globalization,

because translation may produce ‘meanings that remain invisible or unspeakable in the

‘original’ (De Kloet 135). The process of translation emphasizes on language transfer and

ignores social and cultural contexts in which texts and phrases are produced. This process,

somehow, implies a degree of ‘betrayal’ as a linguistic based translation can’t capture the

essence of the language. Therefore, besides the prominent implications of a Google machine

linguistic analysis, that misinterprets the diverse global ‘’scapes’’ within a global network of

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web-Globalization, I would like to further question the linguistic data of Google translators

application in their definition of ‘cultural’ language purity.

I am engaged with the Algorithmic misinterpretation of the company’s definition of

language ‘purity’. Paradoxically, within the global, virtual reality, intercultural exchange

reconstructs the definition of cultural ‘purity’, when Google reproduces the old model of

‘purity’ perceptions by standardizing culture. In opposition to the company’s successful

‘arbitrage’ innovative business globalization or ‘glocalization’ strategies, the translator

cultural ‘arbitrage’ is based on a copy-paste of linguistic data, which makes the ‘’act locally-

think globally’’ an even problematic strategy. If we translate the pluralistic, web-

localization translation process as a manifestation against Frederic Jameson’s

homogenization argument, the conclusion contradicts the company’s anti-homogeneity scope.

The company’s Glocalization strategy is a process ‘’against the dualistic

antagonism’’(Spiegel 20) of homogenous and heterogeneous interactions as it intensifies the

connectivity between different localities. It appears as the linguistic performance of Google’s

translator overlaps not only with the binary model of self/others but also mirrors a ‘’linguistic

homogeneity’’ as translator’s offered global connectivity doesn’t produce ‘’cultural

heterogeneity and hybridity of meaning and cultural repertoires. When new elements are

integrated to local culture, completely new cultural phenomena and identities

emerge’’(Spiegel 20). Because ‘’Apart from theoretical views supporting the view of

linguistic homogeneity, a practical justification is presented for perceiving any language as

homogeneous. National standard languages can only be identified in terms of some kind of

idealization involving shared phonological and grammatical (including Semantic) regularities

that distinguish them from one another’’ (Marmaridou 33). As, Google fails to acknowledge

the linguistic plurality and transmits mechanical translations focused on morphological and

grammatical regularities, in terms of localization processes, there is a major concern to

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reconstruct homogenous languages based on idealized static models and to inhibit the

cultural production of new linguistic repertoires.

The perception of translation as an idealized and conceptualized model becomes a

copy-paste translation technique, which reflects a structural, monolithic perception of ‘purity’

and rejects that, ‘‘the native is infected by the foreigner, just like the foreign is infected by the

native-thereby polluting the origin that has never felt pure itself. A translation consequently

transforms and infects, contaminates as it were-rather than copies-an already and necessarily

impure original’’. (De Kloet 135). Mainly because machine translation is a system and ‘’any

system that has to do with meaning-whether language, belief systems, stereotypes-or cultural

orientations-relies to some extend to an ideal of a perfect containment: the linguistic and

epistemological utopias of a controlled spaced of signification’’(Papastergiadis 5). The main

idea is that Google’s management of language as a globally transmitted cultural product in

the specific algorithmic form, reflects a hybridity which is against the fluid conditions of

Globalization but even more against the described ‘’diversity’’ values of the company . The

‘’technoscape’’ machine translation fails to acknowledge the ‘’ethnoscape’’ hybridity, and

poses translation as a monologue, and not as a productive intercultural dialogue. Translation

is a cultural process based on an intercommunicating language pair, while the two different

languages coexist and create a mutual exchange. As the history of translation is the history of

foreign, the foreign and the original are equally distributed and transformed. The ‘’self’’

should ‘’contaminate’’ the other, as the other never really existed in order to transform and

reproduce new meanings. This is a highly productive and transformative process, which

requires a binary system. Unfortunately Google’s machine translations poses the original in a

static position and only reshapes the meaning of the target language.

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4.2. Machine translation as a ‘’glocal’’ strategy

However, this simplistic form of Google’s machine translation could be explainable if

we interpret it as a commercial strategy, posed as a cultural strategy, which highlights an

‘’imagined’’ diversity. But the diversity is juxtaposed in today’s world and lies in Google’s

machine translation commercial and business importance. Firstly because, as the cultural

flows that travel globally in Google translator through different ‘’scapes’’ they transform to a

‘finanscape’, as such translations are based on ‘web localization’, ‘a process of modifying an

existing website to make it accessible, usable and culturally suitable to a target

audience’(Sandrini 175). This process implies the hidden financial aspects within the logic of

financial web localization, when any company that targets on long term growth must “go

global” by communicating their marketing strategies in the localized language of web-

globalization”. Although, language is articulated as a purely cultural product, in Google’s

case the issue of translation enables the access to different commodities, which benefits the

company’s capital.

However, in order to achieve that- in the same orientation of Google advertiser-the pre-

requirement is the “localization” of the product. In terms of accessibility for instance, ‘’A

customer is more probable to buy a Japanese product, with a manual written in Japanese

(Täuschel 2)’’. In this case, Google’s Globalization’s narrative modifies heterogeneous

cultural parts that in Google’s case language in order to classify them in a homogenous logo

brand. The cultural homogeneity that multinational web-companies promote strategically

such as Google, is underlined by the trend to personalize webpages and advertisement by

using the local language. In such way, the company familiarizes the user with his own

cultural product and simultaneously embraces him to use the given product.

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Therefore, Google translator tranforms to an ‘arbitrage’, one of the most powerful globalized

strategies of cultural global flows transmission in the running era. This ‘arbitrage’, appears to

operate within the logic of a new, mysterious global economy mainly because it’s importance

for commercial practices. The machine-translation project illustrates the way Google is

driven by the maxim –‘’more data, is better data’’. Because ‘’in the information business,

completeness-both within a category of information and across categories- is crucial because

ever more data makes the algorithms ever smarter, which in turn serves to increase the

distance between Google’s leading position and its rivals’’(Stross 87). Regardless of the

required authenticity and cultural value that translation should entail, the main

‘’imperialistic’’ task for the company is to acquire all the available post-modern, cultural

pluralism and to transmit it in the most rudimentary version.

In Google translator’s case the ‘’ethnoscapes’’ diversity is translated to a consumerist

culture. As the ‘’global spread of consumerist culture is attacked for destroying ‘cultural

authenticity’. That ‘’which is ‘authentic’’ is being replaced by forms and practices that are

false and shallow’’ (Sommerville 23). Therefore, the lack of linguistic authenticity is

consequence of the ‘’Glocal’’ marketing of Google and the authentic local language is under

attack. Language transforms from local to global in Google advertiser and reminds us how

‘’Global goods are advertised and promoted in local terms, sometimes with comic

results’’(Solomon 1994).

Either it is a sight or a simple phrase modified and translated, Google translator model

according to the previous statement, has been designed as a ‘finanscape’ as well as

‘technoscape’ and ‘ethnoscape’ because the different scapes on the one hand are deeply

disjunctive and unpredictable but on the other hand globally highly interconnected. ’The

global relationship between finanscapes, ethnoscapes and technoscapes is deeply disjunctive

and highly watch out for repetition unpredictable, since each of these landscapes its subjects

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to each own constraints and incentives (some political, some informational and some techno-

environmental) at the same time as each acts as a constraint and a parameter for movements

in the other’’s(Appadurai 298).

Subsequently, according to Appadurai the fluidity and changing rhythm of ‘scapes’ can

be paralleled to the fluidity and evolution of cultures. As Google translator becomes a

‘cultural’ and simultaneously ’financial’ arbitrage, the different scapes that contribute to the

global exchange are highly intertwined. Google translator can become a very interesting

example of the intertwinement of these ‘’scapes’’. Firstly the creation of Google translator

enabled as a technoscape ‘’technology, both high and low, now moves at high speeds across

various kinds of previously impervious boundaries’(Appadurai 297). Such high speed

technology of mechanical translating has been distributed to serve the ‘enthnoscape’ ,

meaning ‘the landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live:

tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guestworkers and other moving groups and persons

constitue an essential feature of the world, and appear to affect the politics of and between

nations to a higher to unpreceded degree’ (Appadurai 297). As a result the ‘’technoscape’’of

Google was built based on the “ethnoscape’ need for intercultural communication in terms of

the ongoing mobility, as Appadurai remarks, ‘as more persons and groups deal with the

realities of having to move, or the fantasies of wanting to move’ (Appadurai 297). The need

for communication enables technology to generate services for such imagined communities.

Google translator as a technoscape manifested new kind of interactions using the power of

technology, but technology is in alliance with finance. ’The odd distribution of technology,

and thus the peculiarities of these technoscapes, are increasingly driven not by any obvious

economies of scale, of political control, or of market rationality, but of increasingly complex

relationships between money flows, political possibilities and the availability of both high

and low skill labour’(Appadurai 297-298). Thus, despite the fact that the translation services

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are free, there is a deeper financial interrelation, which is not applied directly to the customer.

Moreover, the free translation costs as a ‘finanscape’ as well as the easily used fast

‘technoscape’ acts hegemonic –in the same way as Google advertising-by absorbing

individual translation employment and providing insufficient, linguistic translations.

Essentially, translation becomes a mysterious commodity, an export of culture, which is

travelling globally in high speed through these different, disjunctive but interrelated

‘’scapes’’.

4. Conclusion

Firstly, The idea that ‘’whoever has access to the Internet is automatically transformed to a

citizen of the world’’(Beck 39) appears to be extremely optimistic but it also depicts a very

rudimentary and contemporary version of Globalization. And while Google at the present

moment is the dominant player for this evolutionary and optimistic idea, this idea could be

widened to ‘’whoever has access to Google is automatically transformed to a citizen of the

world’’. The main purpose to this research, was to answer in this specific question, while

decoding the semiotics that are hidden from this phrase, which, in my opinion, indicate a

Globalization narrative. Google a consequence of the global communication system fallows

everyone to inhabit the global network world by positioning the user to diverse cultural

experiences. The postmodern pluralism is manifested prominently in Google: A search

engine that offers diverse services such as advertising, translation and search advertising

services to diverse people, using technology as a medium. But in order to understand how

this ‘’globalization’’ narrative in Google company performs, a broader question about the

theorization of globalization and its constitutive forces must be taken into account. As Google

is gradually becoming a discourse, which is highly associated with globalization or web-

Globalization, I tried to bring together the two broad objects of ‘’globalization’’ and

‘’Google’’, by using Google translator and advertiser as an example.

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My theoretical framework was to pose selectively and comparatively different

Globalization theories-Appadurai and Jameson-in order to conclude that the current, digital,

speed of change has created incompatibilities with different Globalization theories.

Generally, Globalization allows to rethink the world as whole, as a pluralistic but single

world constructed from different heterogeneous pieces, which analysis is conducted from a

heterogeneous or homogeneous perspective. I think that Appadurai and Jameson

symbolically reflect these two opposite poles, which however are not applicable to Google, as

the company has managed to create its own ‘’Globalization’’ narrative, based on a

simultaneous heterogeneous and homogenous perspective. On the one hand, Jameson

supports the idea of a post-modern diverse world, while culture and economy mutate to a

homogenous commodity and transmits systematic through core-periphery models. The

argument of Jameson is not totally acceptable, while Google directs towards a ‘’localization’’

path and invests to the different users diversity, the power comes from the user’s distinctive

features as language or cultural habits, which engages with an anti-homogenous logic.

Google doesn’t enforce the users to buy homogenous products or to construct a homogenous

vocabulary, instead it discourages them from this process. What is engaging in Jameson

global theory is the overestimation of the crucial value of capital. The model of ‘’cultural

capitalism’’ sketches not prominent in Google’s Globalization narrative, but it helps for a

new understanding of ‘’capitalism’’ as the nation-state territorial power vanishes within the

pluralistic, information web-spaces , as Google is an autonomous all-in- all provider

dependent on the vast and various users. Jameson focuses on a territorial understanding of

capitalism, while Google’s operations challenge this model and they are based in the de-

territorialized mobility of spaces and populations.

On the other hand, Appadurai follows an ‘’indigenization’’ logic, and contrasts

Jameson cultural commodities and any central-periphery models. The fluidity of global flows

51

is chaotic and given by subjective gives relations: ‘’scapes’’. The analysis of Google’s

services through subjective ‘’scapes’’ strengthens the idea of ‘’decenterlessness’’ and

‘’fluidity’’ but simultaneously appears as an unfinished puzzle. Simply, because in Google’s

narrative in the context of Appadurai’s theory underestimates a significant factor: the

‘’finanscape’’ conditions. The emergence of ‘’finanscape’’ as a mysterious driven and

unpredictable force is translated in Google’s strategy to juxtapose two different views, the

heterogeneous and, the homogeneous in invisible ways. This bipolar articulation of views

derives though, from a business Globalization model named ‘’Glocalization’’ an ‘’arbitrage’’

strategy, which is also articulated in the nature of web-Globalization strategies and it is linked

to the company’s way of obtaining profits. This ‘’arbitrage;’’ strategy demonstrates a new

kind of intensified globalization, the web globalization. Web globalization incorporates

multinational corporations such as Google that are constituting a new kind of cultural reality

and express successfully the narrative of web-Globalization, as ‘’success at web globalization

demands high attention to detail and the ability to look at your web-site through the eyes of

someone else’’(St. Amant 11). Generally, Google operates through the prism of different

others: acts local in languages preferences or markets. Therefore, the Globalization

narratives follows a bipolar (global/local) logic, which moves though beyond territorial

boundaries and breaks the traditional boundaries of time and space.

Even though, this narrative remains complex because of the variety of Google’s

performance in different fields. I attempted to formulate an answer for this narrative by

emphasizing on three key aspects that are interrelated and I consider of significant

importance: capital value, time and space . I attempt to elaborate how these definitions, which

are theorized in various Globalization theories, interplay with Google’s services

Globalization narrative in order to conclude that their magnitude force is the capital. In order

to make this argument more comprehensive, I briefly purposed a distinction between the

52

epochal stages of the theorization of global capital and linked them to my Object in order to

stress that , we cannot base entirely to ‘’epochal stages’’ , as new relationships disappear and

new ones come to replace them. Apparently, Globalization in any complex form can’t be

theorized under specific models but under the detailed analysis of the Objects features.

Subsequently the company’s multidimensionality articulates the Globalization narrative in a

very mysterious and contradictory way. But these new kind of relationships are changing as a

result of a set of conditions linked to the fluidity of “capital’’ and ‘’space’’’. In other words,

Google has created a ‘’Globalization narrative’’, which is economically driven but in

opposition it is projected by the company as the ultimate celebration of Globalization, lost in

a global, borderless space, as above, all Google’s ability to ‘’ transcend national boundaries

in the organization of information flows is a significant contributing fact to

Globalization’’(Dai 441). However, I would characterize this idealistic utopia, a result of the

‘’space’’ it occurs: the web space.

In order to illustrate, the multidimensionality of this economically driven Globalization

narrative, I selected the services of Google’s translator and advertiser. In my opinion, the

transition of advertising to translating not only verifies both processes as Glocalization

strategies, but furthermore it validates the underestimation of authentic cultural practices

such as translation. Translation’s lack of linguistic and cultural performance and its

convergence to a commodity product strengthens the idea of a Globalization narrative driven

by new capital relationships. The two analyzed services, on the one hand might operate

distinctively and communicate different cultural values, but on the other hand their

interrelation and interdependency accomplishes Google’s Globalization narrative. Firstly,

Google has built a transnational system of exchange in a ‘’pluralistic’’ space, with de-

territorialized populations, who use different services and languages. ‘’Diversity’’ becomes

the key value in every aspect and it appears to follow the positive logic of a harmonious

53

local/global blend. Secondly, the spatial production of Google is borderless as it uses the

libertarian, transnational spaces of Internet to intercommunicate its diversity and to

personalize the culturally diverse user’s preferences. However, ‘’diversity’’, is a business

micromanagement of the networking population in the spaces of Google and it is only

celebrated in terms of commercial interactions. Compared to Google translator and Google

advertiser diversity is designed ‘’properly’’ only in the case of advertising. The localization

process is more precise in terms of local business practices than in terms of language

transmission.

54

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