In a 500 word summary, identify at least three key points of agreement between Appadurai and Eckberg. You will post this on our Canvas “Discussion” no later than 10 p.m. Monday, Sept. 11, and comment on one of your colleague’s posts no later than 5 p.m. on Tuesday before class. The importance of available mediums in constructing imagined selves and worlds is best relayed in the convergence of views between Eckberg and Appadurai in their assessment of modernity and the role that technology plays. Eckberg in his assessment of risk theory notes “that perceptions of risk may be influenced by cognitive illusions and heuristics such as an availability bias or optimistic bias.” Hence, Eckberg notes that media triggers contribute to “greater spatial and temporal variability and more disagreement with perceived risks than there is with actual risks.” 1 This is why Appadurai concludes that in this world of modernity, “there is growing evidence that the consumption of the mass media throughout the world often provoke resistance, irony, selectivity, and in general, agency.”2 This agency that media provides, according to Eckberg, allows perceptions of risk to be “amplified or attenuated by their over-or underrepresentation in mass media, which depends on their human impact, signal value, visual impact, their capacity to evoke conflict or their link with existing high profile issues.”3 Appaudarai hence reflects that agencies that constantly and simultaneously construct imagined selves have been provided by “technological changes over the past century or so, in which the imagination has become a collective, social fact… development, which in turn ‘becomes’ the basis of plurality for imagined worlds.” 4 So it should pay no surprise that Eckberg concludes herself that “The risk society thesis succeeds in describing the emergence of a risk ethos, the development of a collective risk identity and the formations of communities united by an increasing vulnerability to risk” 5
given that “collective representation is a social fact”6 to Appadurai’s way of thinking. Technology is a huge part of modernity where “reflexive modernity is configured as a second enlightenment or ecological enlightenment that demands an intensification of reason and deepening of democracy”7 according to Eckberg and this is why Appadurai theorizes that “modernization will universally yield rationality, punctuality, democracy, the free market, and a higher gross national product”for even now Appadurai makes clear that “we can see that that electronic mass mediation and transnational mobilization have broken the monopoly of autonomous nation-states over the project of modernization. 8 Hence technology provides an alternative avenue to achieve greater democratic needs in sharing the efforts of constructing representation. To conclude, it seems clear from Eckberg and Appadurai that media and technology plays a huge part in both influence and agency in constructing risk theory and modernity. This in turn showcases collective representation of community members who seek to participate in the discourses that construct their imagined selves hence paying homage to a more democratic process. Basically, as Appadurai perfectly puts, technologies are “resources for experiments with self-making in all sorts of societies for all sorts of persons” and it leads to greater participation in the democratic process. 9 This is no different for societies prone to risks which is why Eckberg states that “a risk is worth taking because it offers citizens an opportunity to reclaim their competence in making critical judgments about acceptable levels of risk and because it offers an opportunity for citizen scientists to claim their unfulfilled democratic rights.”10
1 Notes Eckberg, “Parameters of Risk Society” 2 Appadurai, Modernity at Large, pp. 1-11 3 Eckberg, “Parameters of Risk Society” 4 Appadurai, Modernity at Large, pp. 1-11 5 Eckberg, “Parameters of Risk Society” 6 Appadurai, Modernity at Large, pp. 1-11 7 Eckberg, “Parameters of Risk Society” 8 Appadurai, Modernity at Large, pp. 1-11 9 Ibid. 10 Eckberg, “Parameters of Risk Society”