Globalization, Globality and the Media: A Comparison between Hong Kong and Mainland

AbstractDespite volumes of writings on the concept of globalization, much has been left inadequately explored—especially at the individual level. Even though Robertson and Giddens put forth the term “globality,” issues of how to define it at the individual level and what to be considered as the major attributes of individual globality are unsolved. This study attempts to establish a conceptual framework of individual globality and examines some of the key attributes of globality and their relationships with the mass media in the context of Hong Kong and mainland China. It investigates the attitudes of subjects in the two localities toward globalization, their global consciousness, and their global experience in both physical global contact and “imagined elsewhere” as represented by the media through a random sample of 2500 respondents. It finds that subjects in both places share strongly such universal political ideals as democracy, freedom and equality and have positive attitudes toward globalization’s role in such areas as environmental awareness and protection; that Hong Kong citizens are negative about the role of globalization in Hong Kong’s cultural and economic development, while the Chinese have mixed attitudes; that they have different levels of global mobility; and that they engage in activities in the “imagined elsewhere” in different patterns. Through several regressional tests, the study finds that of such socio-status factors, education, income and English proficiency are the most outstanding and universal predictors of Hong Kong people’s attitude toward globalization, global consciousness, and experience in global contacts and in imagined elsewhere. But in the Chinese context, education, locality and English proficiency are found to be the strongest and most common predictors of Chinese people’s globality at the individual level.The above findings can serve as a benchmark against which the development of globality in the world’s most populous country can be monitored and measured. They can also serve as the stepping stone for further efforts to construct better and more sophisticated measures of the rather elusive concept of individual globality. The most interesting and probably controversial concept in this study is “imagined elsewhere,” which has been measured by people’s media use multiplied by their interest in global issues. Conceptually, it makes sense because the ubiquitous mass media, especially the interactive Internet, provides most of the images of the “elsewhere” that is out of individuals’ physical reach and a place for people to conceive and live in “imagined elsewhere.” This concept may help us turn the equation around and examine the mass media in a theoretically meaningful way as a dependant variable – not as a predictor whose usual weak explanatory power has always been a source of frustration for scholars of the mass media.