Introduction : global-local consumption

Consumption is one of the central themes that needs to be addressed in attempting to understand the central currents of globalization today. We all consume, and for an increasing number of people in the world that consumption comes from elsewhere rather than through local relations or through self-production. Practices and subjectivities of consumption now stand at the intersection of different dominant modes of practice: capitalism (production-exchange), mediatism (communications), techno-scientism (enquiry) and rationalizing regulation (organization). It is not just the content of our consumption that has been increasingly globalized, but also the social forms: from the genres and media through which we read – newspapers, romance-fiction, blogs, advertisements, website pagers – to the basic ontological forms that we largely take for granted – interconnected spaces and modern temporalities. Yes, we now consume time and space. ‘Time is money’ and lived spaces are sold to us as dream homes, faraway tourist destinations, and contracted packages of derived risk (aka toxic debts). In all of this, issues of consumption bring home to us, perhaps more than any other aspect of globalization, questions of how we want to live. What does it mean to talk of quality of life? How are we to negotiate relations of local and global interconnection?