From the introduction, I was reminded a lot of Roger Keesing’s “Theories of Culture Revisited” in that hybridization could provide an angle through which anthropologists could still maintain their field of study.  Canclini describes that “The emphasis on hybridization not only puts an end to the pretense of establishing ‘pure’ or ‘authentic’ identities; in addition, it demonstrates the risk of delimiting local, self-contained identities or those that attempt to assert themselves as radically opposed to national society or globalization” (xxviii).  In this way, hybridization deals with both the issue of the coral reef approach to cultural identity as well as the concept of radical alterity that Keesing was concerned with.

The concept of “audiovisual democracy” from page 211 resonated with me.  Canclini defines audiovisual democracy as a phenomenon in which “the real is produced by the images created in the media” (211).  In the reading, Canclini uses the term in the context of electronic technologies stepping in to take the place of what he calls “urban culture,” which is created by direct in-person interactions.  He explains that “mass mediatization” (209) represents a more efficient way of organizing the public than these interactions since it allows information to be spread to from urban to rural areas (and potentially vice versa) through the television.  This causes a shift in individuals’ perceptions of reality from something to take part in and experience firsthand, to something that is to be received.  Reality thus becomes defined as something made up by public opinion polls, and “the citizen becomes a client, a ‘public consumer'” (211).

I can see two very clear applications of this phenomenon of audiovisual democracy today.  The first is in the public opinion polls during the 2016 American election.  Many public opinion polls predicted that Hillary Clinton would win.  Reports of these statistics circulated heavily on television and in the echo chambers of social media to people who wanted to hear such statistics, thus creating an illusory reality in the mind of many Americans that Clinton’s prospects were better than they really were.  Donald Trump’s election then came as a massive shattering of “reality” (granted, Clinton did win the popular vote but her lead was not significant enough to match perceptions created by polls).  The second relevant application of audiovisual democracy I see is in climate change denial.  I learned in one of my classes this past week that 97% of climate scientists agree that global warming exists and that humans are the cause of accelerated warming.  Of the 3% that disagree, 2.8% disagree with the clause that humans are the cause of accelerated warming (not with the phenomenon of global warming itself).  But due to the proliferation of political rhetoric in the media, only 47% of Americans perceive that there is consensus in the scientific community on the existence of climate change.  Both of these examples demonstrate that when the citizen is turned into a mere consumer, the media is granted reign over what is reality (kind of scary!!!).