A few years into
the twenty-first century, globalization has captured the public and scholarly
imagination. For many, globalization epitomizes the sense of rupture with the
past that pervades the public perception, as well as whatever future lies
ahead. Globalization, some think, will take us beyond modernity with its
projects of rationality, nation state dominance, and industrialization. Others
object that globalization is little more than ‘globaloney’, an inflated
catchword for abstract, imprecise, and erroneous accounts that cite everything
that can be linked to some transnational process as evidence for a global age.
In what follows I shall develop an analysis of a global sphere that attempts to
avoid abstractness and imprecision. I do not wish to address globalization as a
general process that crystallizes into a world society, molds the whole world
into a single place, or knits together world-spanning economic interests and
groups. I maintain that the notion of ‘world’ as a natural container of
globalizing processes of many sorts is itself problematic; what a global world
involves as a presupposed and factual context will differ in various areas of
global practice, and needs to be investigated rather than assumed. The
phenomenon I want to examine is that of global currency (or foreign exchange)
markets, which by all accounts—participants, economists, and, very rarely,
social scientists—are genuinely global markets. As collective disembodied
systems generated entirely in a symbolic space, these markets can in fact be
seen as an icon of contemporary global high-technology culture. Yet we know
very little about these cultures. They raise important questions for
economists, who consider exchange rates to be a significant catalyst of global
markets with far-reaching effects on the income, wealth, and welfare
This
chapter draws in part on Karin Knorr Cetina, 2003. ‘From Pipes to Scopes: The
Flow Architecture of Financial Markets’, Distinktion
7: 7-23. The parts are reprinted with the permission of the journal. I am
heavily indebted to the managers, traders, salespersons, and analysts whose
activities I studied together with Urs Bruegger, my coauthor on other papers,
and who so generously shared with us the information we collected. Research for
this chapter is supported by a grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.
An earlier version was presented at the conference ‘Economies at Large’, New
York November 14-15, 2003.
of communities.1
These cultures also raise important questions for sociologists, not the least
of which is how we are to understand the global social systems embedded in the
respective economic transactions. And it is important to realize that we are
indeed confronted with global social systems here. Traders are the major
operators in international currency markets, and they are interconnected by
high-technology communication in real time, passing on their ‘books’, when
accounts are not closed in the evening, from time zone to time zone, following
the sun. This situation has to be distinguished from that of dispersed
brokerage communities in major exchanges, in which members do not exhibit
high-frequency dynamic interaction with one another across countries and
exchanges. Traders in interbank currency dealing do not broker deals but trade
for their banks’ accounts via direct dealer-to-dealer contact or via electronic
brokerage systems (EBS) disengaged from local settings.
What,
then, does globalization involve in a concrete case, that of global currency
markets? What is the architecture of this smooth-running system that has the
highest average daily turnover in all financial markets (US$1.2 trillion in
2001, Bank for International Settlements 2002) and spans all time zones? What
are the nuts and bolts of its construction, and what sort of ‘world’ is
implied? The answer I shall develop entails something of a ‘discontinuist’
interpretation of global developments. By this I mean that genuinely global
forms are in some respects unique—global currency markets, for example, are
distinct in design and mechanism from previous incidences of financial markets.
To capture the nature of the discontinuities involved I draw a distinction
between two types of markets: those based on a network architecture, where
social relationships carry much of the burden of specifying market behavior and
of explaining some market outcomes, and markets that have become disembedded
and decoupled from networks and exhibit what I call a flow architecture.2
Economic sociologists have recently tended to view markets as embedded in
social relations and social networks, the structures they see as defining
markets and framing economic action (e.g. Baker 1981; White 1981, 2002;
Granovetter 1985; Burt 1992; Swedberg 1997; Uzzi 1997; Baker, Faulkner, and
Fisher 1998; DiMaggio and Louch 1998; Podolny 2001). Global currency markets, I
maintain, and other financial markets like them, are flow markets rather than
network markets; they differ substantially from a market that is mainly
relationally structured. Though flow architectures may include networks, these
networks are not the salient structuring principle of today’s global markets. I
use the notion of a flow in this context to specify a second discontinuity,
that between the spatial or physical world we usually conceive of, and that of
a timeworld. Most of our world notions imply that the world is a place (however
extended) or perhaps a totality of objects (e.g. the physical universe)
‘wherein’ we live, and ‘in’ which factual (e.g. globalization) and symbolic
processes can be said to take place. The defining characteristic of this sort
of world is that it is given or presupposed. In its presupposed nature, it cannot
be made intelligible by the things that happen ‘in’ the world; the world has a
distinctive structure of its own that differs from the things that happen in
it. In a timeworld or flowworld of the sort I will specify the content itself
is processual—a ‘melt’ of material that is continually in flux, and that exists
only as it is being projected forward and calls forth participants’ reactions
and contribution to the flux. Only ‘frames’, it would seem, for example, the
frames that computer screens represent in a global financial market, are
presupposed in this flowworld. The content, the entire constellation of things
that pass as the referential context wherein some action takes place, is not
separate from the totality of ongoing activities.
All
this will become clearer below. What still needs to be addressed here is what
happens at the points of transition between a network architecture and a flow
architecture of markets. My answer is that global scopic systems emerge,
projecting market reality while at the same time carrying it forward and
allowing it to flow. The crucial element, then, in the flow architecture of
global currency markets is the scopic system that sustains them. The term
‘-scope’, derived from the Greek ‘scopein’, to see, when combined with a qualifying
notion, means an instrument etc. for seeing or observing, as in ‘periscope’.
Social scientists tend to think in terms of mechanisms of coordination, which
is what the network notion stands for; a network is an arrangement of nodes
tied together by relationships which serve as conduits of communication,
resources, and other coordinating instances that hold the arrangement together
by passing between the nodes. Cooperations, strategic alliances, exchange,
emotional bonds, kinship ties, ‘personal relations’, and forms of grouping and
entrenchment can all be seen to work through ties and to instantiate sociality
in networks of relationships. But we should also think in terms of reflexive
mechanisms of observation and projection, which the relational vocabulary does
not capture. Like an array of crystals acting as lenses that collect light,
focusing it on one point, such mechanisms collect and focus activities,
interests, and events on one surface, from whence the result may then be
projected again in different directions. When such a mechanism is in place,
coordination and activities respond to the projected reality to which
participants become oriented. The system acts as a centering and mediating
device through which things pass and from which they flow forward. An ordinary
observer who monitors events is an instrument for seeing. When such an ordinary
observer constructs a textual or visual rendering of the observed and televises
it to an audience, the audience may start to react to the features of the
reflected, represented reality rather than to the embodied, pre-reflexive
occurrences.
In
the financial markets studied the reflexive mechanism and ‘projection plane’ is
the computer screen; along with the screen come software and hardware systems
that provide a vast range of observation, presentation, and interaction
capabilities sustained by information and service provider firms. Given these
affordances, the pre-reflexive reality is cut off and replaced; some of the
mechanisms that we take for granted in a lifeworld, for example, its
performative possibilities, have been integrated into the systems, while others
have been replaced by specialized processes that feed the screen. The technical
systems gather up a lifeworld while simultaneously projecting it. They also
‘appresent’ (bring near, see Schutz and Luckmann 1973) and project layers of
context and horizons that are out of reach in ordinary lifeworlds—they deliver
not only transnational situations, but a global world spanning all major time
zones. As I shall argue in the section on ‘The Mirrored Market: “GRS”
Illustrated’, they do this from trading floors located in global cities (Sassen
2001), which serve as the bridgehead centers of the flow architecture of
financial markets. Raised to a level of analytic abstraction, the configuration
of screens, capabilities, and contents that traders in financial markets
confront corresponds to a global reflex system, or GRS, where R stands for the
reflexively transmitted and reflex-like (instantaneously) projected action-and
other capabilities of the system and G stands for the global, scopic view and
reach of the reflex system. For the present purpose, which is that of
distinguishing between forms of coordination relevant to understanding
markets, the term is intended to denote a reflexive form of coordination that
is flat (nonhierarchical) in character while at the same time being based on a
comprehensive, aggregate view of things—the reflected and projected global
context and transaction system. This form of coordination contrasts with
network forms of coordination which, according to the present terminology, are
pre-reflexive in character—networks are embedded in territorial space, and
they do not suggest the existence of reflexive mechanisms of projection that
aggregate, contextualize, and augment the relational activities within new
frameworks that are analytically relevant to understanding the continuation of
activities. With the notion of a GRS system, I am offering a simplifying term
for the constellation of technical, visual, and behavioral components packaged
together on financial screens that deliver to participants a global world in
which they can participate on a common platform, that of their shared computer
screens. On a technological level, the GRS mechanism postulated requires that
we understand as analytically relevant for a conception of financial markets
not only electronic connections, but computer terminals and screens—the sorts
of teletechnologies (Clough 2000: 3) that are conspicuously present on trading
floors and the focus of participants’ attention—as well as the trading floors
themselves, where these screens cluster and through which markets pass.
Providing
the teletechnologies, and to a significant extent the activities of ‘gathering
up’ and televising a global world, are the tasks of provider firms which own
and distribute the equipment and feed the screens. What from the viewpoint of
the phenomenology of the everyday world are historical and evolutionary
processes that constitute ‘the’ world as always prior to our current ways of
living in it, are here corporate processes of technological and semantic
as-it-happens world construction. The ‘world’ of these financial markets is in
the care of corporate specialists to whom it has been outsourced. This was not
the case historically; as detailed below, the firms that now provide the GRS
and its content originally took over and delivered only small tasks like that
of collecting and displaying price quotes that had been an integral part of
trading long before any computerization. As more functions and contents were
added, and traders learned to take what became ready-to-hand on ever more
screens as their essential points of reference, ‘worldliness’ emerged in the
sense of an on screen referential context wherein everything takes place.
Reuters, Bloomberg, and Telerate, the three most important provider firms
today, do not of course deliver this global financial world as a kind of
finished product. The world still must be seen as an emergent reality that
opens itself and takes participants into its presence from the materials and
capabilities that the firms provide. Participants co-constitute the screen
world as they operate in the constellation of equipment, practices, and
concerns which they share. They also quite literally contribute to it. Not only
do Reuters, Bloomberg, and Telerate feed the screen, but traders do as well;
they input deals and reference observations, and they act as informants for the
provider industry that builds its world pictures partly in consultation with
market participants. The whole universe is doubly reflexive, first in the sense
of the GRS mechanism that continually projects financial reality as it emerges,
and second in the sense of immediate market participants’ contribution to the
projection.
The
whole universe is also informational. What discloses itself to participants in
the mass of materials on their financial screens is not the presence of objects
but the presence of information. What we are really dealing in, traders say, is
information. This does not just mean that in doing deals, traders buy and sell
information, which they also do. Rather it means that they act in a universe
that continually ‘frees’ information as traders recognize and respond to the
things that come up. As Dreyfus (1991: 338) has argued, for modern man,
starting with Descartes, reality is such that we encounter objects to be
controlled and organized to satisfy our desires. We may even experience
ourselves as objects to be augmented and improved in the assumption that this
will enhance our life. Traders do not encounter finished, preexisting objects
that can be made intelligible scientifically and that serve as resources for
technological projects of transformation. What shows up on their screens are
not ‘beings’ at all but rather moments of opportunity to act that pass quickly
and that, as others to whom these moments also disclose themselves respond,
occasion the next set of opportunities. Thus traders find themselves in a
succession of shared informational situations or ‘clearings’. The mundane
economic meaning of an informational reality that opens itself is that it
discloses opportunities for investment and speculation. The mundane meaning of information ‘freeing’ and emergence is that
disclosure may require (interpretative and other) work, the sort of thing that
is illustrated by the native vocabulary of information ‘extraction’.
Using the notion ‘world’ necessarily raises the question of what
its materiality consists of. I answered the question by claiming that this
materiality is constituted of information. This answer is consistent I think
with a world that is temporal not only in the sense that it moves, as a time
context, across physical space, but also in the sense of the transient,
decaying character of its material content. The key to the notion of
information is not truth in the sense of a correspondence with an independent
reality but news: the material on screen can disclose itself as information only
in as far as it is new compared to earlier material. The new is ‘presenced’
as-things-happen and vanishes from the screens as newer things come to pass.
This sort of reality is inherently temporal, which is what I shall also
indicate by ‘flow’.
To
make things more concrete now, I begin in what follows with an analysis of
global currency markets as focused upon computer screens, the centerpieces of
a GRS form of coordination. I will also briefly sketch the historical
innovation and emergence of the relevant systems in the 1970s and 1980s and
point out how they led to a replacement of network markets. In the section that
follows, I address the temporal features of the global markets studied. A flow
architecture, I shall argue, results from the combination of these temporal features
with the GRS form of coordination.
Unlike
other financial markets, the foreign exchange market is not organized mainly in
centralized exchanges but derives from inter-dealer transactions in a global
banking network of institutions; it is what is called an ‘over the counter’
market (for excellent descriptions of bond- stock- and other financial markets
see Abolafia 1996; Hertz 1998). Over the counter transactions are made on the
trading floors of major investment firms and other banks. On the major trading
floors of the global banks where we conducted our research3 in
Zurich and New York, between 200 (Zurich) and 800 (New York) traders were
engaged in stock, bond, and currency trading involving various trading techniques
and instruments. Smaller floors in Sydney, Zurich, and New York featured
between 40 and 80 traders. Up to 20% of these traders will deal in foreign
exchange at desks grouped together on the floors. The traders on these desks in
inter-bank currency markets take their own ‘positions’ in the market in trying
to gain from price differences while also offering trades to other market
participants, thereby bringing liquidity to the market and sustaining it—if
necessary, by trading against their own position. Foreign exchange deals via
these channels start in the order of several hundred thousand dollars per
transaction, going up to a hundred million dollars and more. The deals are made
by investors, speculators, financial managers, central bankers, and others who
want to profit from expected currency moves, or who need currencies to help
them enter or exit transnational investments (e.g. in mergers and
acquisitions). In doing deals, all traders on the floors have a range of
technology at their disposal; most conspicuously, the up to five computer
screens, which display the market and serve to conduct trading. When traders
arrive in the morning they strap themselves to their seats, figuratively
speaking, they bring up their screens, and from then on their eyes will be
glued to these screens, their visual regard captured by it even when they talk
or shout to each other, their bodies and the screen world melting together in
what appears to be a total immersion in the action in which they are taking
part. The market composes itself in these produced-and-analyzed displays to
which traders are attached.
What do the screens show? The central feature of the screens and
the centerpiece of the market for traders are the dealing prices displayed on
the ‘electronic broker’, a special screen and automated dealing service that
sorts orders according to best bids and offers. It displays prices for currency
pairs (mainly dollars against other currencies such as the Swiss franc or the
euro), deals being possible at these prices. Traders frequently deal through
the electronic broker which has largely replaced the ‘voice broker’ (real life
broker). The price action on EBS (electronic brokerage system) is central to
the prices they make as ‘market makers’ on another special screen (and computer
network) through which they trade, called the ‘Reuters conversational
dealing’. On the Reuters dealing, deals are concluded in and through bilateral
‘conversations’ conducted on screen. These resemble email message exchanges
for which the Reuters dealing is also used in and between dealing
conversations. On a further screen, traders watch prices contributed by
different banks worldwide; these prices are merely indicative, they express
interest rather than dealing with prices as such. Traders may also watch their
own current position in the market (e.g. their being long or short on
particular currencies), the history of deals made over recent periods, and
their overall account balances (profits and losses over relevant periods) on this
or another workstation at their disposal. Finally, the screens provide headline
news, economic commentary, and interpretations which traders watch. An
important source of information which also appears on these screens, but is
closer to traders’ actual dealing in terms of the specificity, speed, and
currentness of the information, are internal bulletin boards on which
participants input information.
Consider now the electronic infrastructures of these trading
floors. All financial markets today are heavily dependent on electronic
information and communication technologies. Some markets, for example, the
foreign exchange market that is the focus of this work, are entirely electronic
markets. As markets of interbank trading, currency markets rely on electronic
technologies that enable the dealer-to-dealer contacts and trading services
across borders and continents. The news and service provider firms Reuters,
Bloomberg, and Telerate wire together these markets, as do intranets that
internally connect the trading room terminals and other facilities of particular
banks and groups of banks in global cities. In the year 2001, Reuters had more
than 300,000 terminals installed worldwide in all markets and facilities, and
Bloomberg more than 150,000. Revenue from leases of their systems amounted to
approximately $2.5 billion each at the end of 2001.4 With the
terminals comes a sophisticated software; dealing and information systems,
worksheet, email and customization capabilities, electronic brokerage and
accounting services, some of which—like EBS—have been developed by the banks
themselves. The connections, and the intricate and expensive hardware and
software delivered by providers and the banking institutions themselves
constitute the material infrastructure of financial markets.
How does this bear on the difference between a network form of
coordination and the reflexive, global form of coordination discussed in this
chapter? First, it will be obvious from the description thus far that the
material infrastructure of financial markets includes much more than electronic
networks, the cable and satellite connections between banks and continents. It
includes trading floors in the global cities that are the financial centers in
the three major time zones: London, New York, Tokyo, Zurich, Singapore, and a
few others (see Leyshon and Thrift 1997; Sassen 2001: ch.7). The trading floors
are the bridgehead centers for a global market that moves from time zone to
time zone with the sun. The centerpieces of the interconnected floors are their
federations of terminals that feature the sophisticated hardware and software
capabilities discussed. When talking about the electronic infrastructure of
financial markets, we should not lose sight of the hardware and software of the
trading floors themselves and the terminal structures that ‘ready’ these floors
for trading. Second, the electronic interconnections which are part of this
federation and link all participating institutions, including the service
provider firms, are not simply coextensive with social networks through which
transactions flow. As electronic networks they correspond to different
construction criteria, involve electronic nodes and linkages irrelevant to
social relationships, and what flows through them frequently does not derive
from social and financial relationships; an example are EBS deals, which are
traders’ responses to anonymous buying or selling offers provided by an
automated EBS. Third and most importantly, the terminals deliver much more than
just windows to physically distant counterparties. In fact, they deliver the
reality of financial markets—the referential whole to which ‘being in the
market’ refers, the ground on which traders step as they make their moves, the
world which they literally share through their shared technologies and
systems. The thickly layered screens laid out in front of traders provide the
core of the market and most of the context. They come as close as one can get
to delivering a stand-alone world that includes ‘everything’ (see below) for
its existence and continuation: at the center the actual dealing prices and
incoming trading conversations, in a second circle the indicative prices,
account information and some news (depending on the current market story), and
further headlines and commentaries providing a third layer of information. It
is this delivery of a world assembled and drawn together in ways that make
sense and allow navigation and accounting which suggests the globally reflexive
character of this form of coordination—and the scopic nature of traders’
screens. The dealing and information systems on screen visually ‘collect’ and
present the market to all participants.
Two aspects of the system need to be emphasized. One is that the
GRS in currency markets assembles not only relevant information about, for
example, political events, economic developments, and prices, but ‘gathers up’
the activities themselves—it affords the possibility of performing the market
transactions and other interactions through its technological and software
capabilities. In other words, the system is reflexive and performative. In
fact, it not only affords these possibilities as an option but has drawn market
activities in completely. With the exception perhaps of situations where there
has been an electronic breakdown, when traders may resort to dealing via the
telephone, nearly all dealing transactions—trades of financial instruments— and
other interactions are performed on computer screens. This system effectively
eliminates the pre-reflexive reality by integrating within its framework all
relevant venues of the specialized lifeworld of financial markets. It also
offers, in addition to anonymous venues of trading through the electronic
broker, relational dealing systems—for example, the previously mentioned
Reuters conversational dealing, where one trader contacts another and deals
with him or her in what natives call a ‘dealing conversation’. This window can
also be used for conversing with a financial market friend connected to the system
about anything of mutual interest; for example, it is used extensively for
soliciting and offering and co-analyzing information. In sum, the GRS of
financial screens integrates within its framework the conduits for building and
maintaining relationships. Should we therefore conclude that this GRS is
nothing more than an electronic facilitating device for markets that run
through networks? Surely not. Roughly 80% of trades, if not more, according to
traders’ estimates, are conducted through the electronic broker, which is an
anonymous dealing system, as indicated. Even if some of these deals involve
parties with whom one entertains a business (or personal) relationship, these
relationships remain interactionally irrelevant since the deal- offering parties
are not disclosed in advance on the EBS. Among the 20% maximum of the trades
conducted through conversational dealing systems, relationship deals are more
likely, but they need not be dominant. Any bank accredited for certain dealing
limits and electronically connected to the system can approach any other bank
through the conversational dealing without a preexisting or ongoing
relationship. Traders also differentiate between ‘their networks’ of contacts,
those dealers and clients with whom they interact frequently and consider a
subset of the market; their circle of closer ‘friends’ comprising perhaps up to
five or ten people with whom they talk almost daily and sometimes extensively
via the conversational dealing system and the telephone, and the market, which
has a large anonymous component. As one trader put it, ‘(the market on screen)
is probably like 99.99999% anonymous’.
The
second aspect to be emphasized follows from the description thus far. The
mirrored market that is comprehensively projected on computer screens acquires
a presence and profile of its own, with its own properties. Traders are not
simply confronted with a medium of communication through which bilateral
transactions are conducted, the sort of thing the telephone stands for. They are
confronted with a market that has become a ‘life form’ in its own right, a
‘greater being’, as one of our respondents, a proprietary trader in Zurich, put
it—a being that is sometimes coherent but at other times dispersed and
fragmented:
LG: You know it’s an invisible hand, the market is always right,
it’s a life form that has being in its own right. You know, in a sort of
Gestalt sort of way ( ) it has form and meaning.
KK: It has form and meaning which is independent of you? You
can’t control it, is that the point?
LG: Right. Exactly, exactly!
KK: Most of the time it’s quite dispersed, or does it gel for
you?
LG: A-h, that’s why I say it has life, it has life in and of
itself, you know, sometimes it all comes together, and sometimes it’s all just
sort of, dispersed, and arbitrary, and random, and directionless and lacking
cohesiveness.
KK: But you see it as a third thing? Or do you mean the other
person?
LG: As a greater being.
KK: ( )
LG:
No, I don’t mean the other person; I mean the being as a whole. And the being
is the
foreign exchange market—and we are a sum of our parts, or it is a sum of its
parts.
The
following quote also gives an inclusive definition of the market which brings
out its life-like depth. The territorial disputes between economics, sociology,
and psychology over market definitions all melt into a sort of ‘markets are
everything in which the focus can shift from
aspect to aspect:
KK: What is the market for you, is it the price action, or is it
individual participants, or?
RG: Everything. Everything.
KK: Everything? The information?
RG:
Everything. Everything. How loudly he’s screaming, how excited he gets, who’s
selling, who’s buying, where, which centre, what central banks are doing, what
the large funds are doing, what the press is saying, what’s happening to the
CDU (a political party in Germany), what the Malaysian prime minister is saying,
it’s everything—everything all the time.
All of these represent the market: who the buyers and sellers
are, what significant actors and observers both in the market and outside it
do and say, all the agents, activities, and contextual events indicated in the
above quote, as well as all of the reactions of market observers and
participants to these events. The quote comes from an experienced trader who
had worked in several countries, including ones in the Far East before coming
to Zurich. Note that his ‘the market is everything’ refers to the manifold
things that one finds on financial screens, the news and news commentary, the
confidential information about what some major players are doing, and the
prices. The screens, or perhaps we should say the availability of a projection
plane for financial markets, appear to have enlarged rather than reduced the
world of this market. It has undeniably enlarged the world beyond that which
ordinarily flows through trading networks, which, as we shall see in the next
section, historically was to a large extent price information.
From
the traders’ perspective, and from the perspective of the observer of traders’
lifeworld, the dominant element in the installation of trading floors in
globally interconnected financial institutions are not the electronic infrastructural
connections—the ‘pipes’ (Podolny 2001: 33) or arteries through which
transactions flow—but the computer screens and the dealing and information
capabilities which instantly reflect, project, and extend the reality of these
markets in toto. They
give rise to a form of coordination that includes networks but also vastly
transcends them, projecting an aggregate and contextualized market. The screens
on which the market is present are identically replicated in all institutions
and on all trading floors, forming, as it were, one huge compound mirroring and
transaction device to which many contribute and on which all draw. As an
omnipresent complex ‘Other’, the market on screen takes on a presence and a
profile in its own right with its own self-assembling and self-integrating
features (e.g. the best prices worldwide are selected and displayed), its own
calculating routines (e.g. accounts are maintained and prices may be
calculated), and self-historicizing properties (e.g. price histories are
displayed, and a multiplicity of other histories can be called up). The
electronic programs and circuits which underlie this screen world assemble and
implement on one platform the previously dispersed activities of different
agents; of brokers and bookkeepers, of market-makers (traders) and analysts, of
researchers and news agents. In this sense, the screen is a building site on
which a whole economic and epistemological world is erected. It is not simply a
‘medium’ for the transmission of pre-reflexive interactions.
The market has of
course not always been on screen. The history of foreign exchange markets since
the 1970s instantiates and exemplifies the transition
from a
network market to a flow market utilizing a central, compound space. Let us
start with the breakdown of the Bretton Woods Agreement, which had hitherto
effectively fixed exchange rates. In the 1970s, first the United States
abolished exchange controls (1971), then major European countries, including
Britain by 1979, and finally Japan in the early 1980s, thereby effectively
eliminating the Bretton Woods Agreement of fixed exchange rates in place since
1944. This allowed foreign exchange trading for purposes of speculation. Before
the breakdown, foreign exchange markets also existed: foreign exchange deals
are cross-border exchanges of currencies. Such exchanges were born with the
dawn of international trade and persisted through all ages. But in the 30 years
of the Bretton Woods Agreement, foreign exchange deals reflected by and large
the real requirements of companies and others that needed foreign exchange to
settle bills and pay for goods. When exchange controls were removed, currency
trading itself became possible as a market where exchange reflected
anticipation of price movements. In 1986, the dealing rooms of the world had
taken off, with an average of US$150 billion and as much as $250 billion being
traded around the globe, double the volume of five years before (Hamilton and
Biggart 1993). In April 1998, according to the Bank of International
Settlement’s Triennial Survey (1998), the average daily turnover in traditional
global foreign exchange instruments had risen from $36.4 billion in 1974 to
$1.5 trillion. Two-thirds of this volume derives from speculation, that is,
from inter-dealer transactions in a global banking network of institutions.
Banks had responded quickly to the business opportunities which arose with the
freedom of capital that the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system initiated.
They also responded to an increasing demand stimulated by volatile exchange and
interest rates reflecting various crises (e.g. the energy crisis of 1974) and
to the tremendous growth in pension fund and other institutional holdings that
needed to be invested. Though the volume of trading has since receded to
approximately $1.2 trillion with the economic downturn and the elimination of
some currencies (Bank for International Settlements 2002), the foreign exchange
market is still by far the largest market in daily turnover worldwide.
When
exchange controls were removed in 1971, the current foreign exchange market was
born. Traders, however, had no computers, and trading was a question of finding
and negotiating this market, which lay hidden within geographical space. A
trading room, in the early beginnings, was a room with desks and phone lines
and a calculating machine. It may also have had a central phone booth installed
in the middle of the room, originally serving as a quiet place to take
international phone calls which, early on, still had to be ordered through the
phone company; only national calls could be dialed directly. A most important
device was the ‘ticker’, a device which churned out ‘50 meters a day’ of news
headlines and price pointers, as a former participant put it (see Preda 2004
for its specific history). Activities on the floor centered around ‘finding the
market’, that is finding out what the price of a currency was and who wanted to
deal. In the following quote, a former chief of trading recalls how he
continually chased after the market:
P: So you had to constantly find out what the rates were in
countries.
KK: And you did this by calling up banks?
P: By, yes. And there were also calls on the telex by other
banks who either wanted to trade or wanted to know, simply wanted to know where
dollar-Swiss was. KK: ( )
P: Yes, you were a broker for traders, every morning you had to
fetch all the prices in Europe, Danish crowns, Swedish crowns, Norwegian
crowns, and such, national currencies every morning, the opening rates. You
gave them to traders, they calculated them in Swiss francs, and wrote them down
on big sheets.
B: And you offered two-way prices already?
P: In
Swiss banks exchange rates were determined by negotiation, like in a bazaar
(etc.).
I use the notion presencing (see also Dreyfus 1991: 337) to
refer to the creation of a reality that is inherently a reality in time, a
timeworld as I shall say later. A presenced market requires the transport of
details from different time zones and geographical locations. A partial attempt
at making markets present occurred before the introduction of screens: the
prices written down by hand on the ‘big sheets’ to which P. refers in the above
quote were displayed on wall boards and can be seen as early attempts at market
presencing. When screens appeared, they were at first no more than substitutes
for the ‘big sheets’: displays on which the handwritten price sheets put
together by female clerks were projected on the basis of pictures taken of the
sheets on the floor. This form of present-making rested upon a chain of
activities that was in important respects indistinguishable from the one that
fetched prices in prescreen times: it involved narrowing down where the market
was by calling up or telexing banks, writing down the responses by hand (and
perhaps recalculating prices in national currencies), and making this
information available for internal purposes through a form of central
presentation. Screens began to make present a dispersed and dissociated matrix
of interests more directly only in 1973, when the British news provider Reuters
first launched the computerized foreign exchange system ‘Monitor’, which
became the basis for this electronic market (Read 1992). Monitor still rendered
the market present only partially, however, since it, too, only provided
indicative prices. Nonetheless it did, from the beginning, include news. Actual
dealing remained extraneous to screen activities and was conducted over the
phone and telex until 1981, when a new system also developed by Reuters that
included dealing services went live to 145 institutional customers in nine
countries. The system was extended within a year to Hong Kong, Singapore, and
the Middle East, resulting in a market with a worldwide presence (Read 1992:
283 ff., 310-11). From that point onward, deals could be concluded on screen
within 2-4 s, and dealers could communicate via the screen. Yet even before
this system went live, the first system, Monitor, from its launch onward,
radically changed one aspect of dealing: it answered the question of where the market was, that
is, what the prices of currencies were and who might be ready to deal.
Before
the market-on-screen, prices differed from place to place and had to be
ascertained afresh for every deal through long and painful processes of phoning
up banks and waiting for lines from operators for overseas calls. After the
introduction of Monitor, prices suddenly became available globally to everyone
connected by the system, in a market that functioned between countries and
between continents. Before the market-on-screen, there were dispersed networks
of trading parties entertaining business relationships. After the introduction
of the computerized screen quotes in 1981, ‘the market’ no longer resided in a
network of many places, but only in one, the screen, which could be represented
identically in all places. The economic counterpart to this coming together of
all market fragments in one location was the declining importance of arbitrage.
Price differences between locations made visible on screen, even if they
involve only indicative prices, will quickly be eliminated, as the information
about them is available to all traders connected and traders try to take
advantage of these differences. The sociological counter part of Monitor and
its successor systems is the emergence of the GRS as a mechanism of
coordination. Not only were markets recast with the coming together and
expansion of all their functions and contexts on financial screens, but forms
of social coordination were also reconfigured.
I now want to
address the flow architecture of foreign exchange markets which has been made
possible by the GRS. The notion of a flow, as I shall use the term, responds to
the aggregate properties the market acquired after being put on screens and to
the processual qualities of this market. To start things off, consider the
continuation of the conversation reported before with the proprietary trader
who defined the market on screen as a life form. He also pointed to the
continuously changing shape of the market:
KK: I want to
come back to the market, what the market is for you. Does it have a particular
shape?
LG: No, it
changes ‘shape’ all the time.
Traders perform their activities in a moving field constituted
by changing dealing prices, shifting trading interests (the indicative prices),
scrolling records of the immediate past that are continually updated, incoming
conversational requests, newly projected market trends, and emerging and disappearing
headline news, comments and economic analyses. In other words, they perform
their activities in a temporal world; the market itself is intrinsically
dynamic and processual and the GRS of financial screens displays, enhances and
accelerates the market process and its dynamic properties. As the information
scrolls down the screens and is replaced by new information, a new market
reality continually projects itself. The constantly emerging lines of text at
times repeat the disappearing ones, but they also add to them and replace them,
updating the reality in which traders move. The market as a ‘greater being’, as
an empirical object of ongoing activities and effects, continually transforms
itself like a bird changing direction in mid-flight, creating the anticipation problem
traders confront. From one point of view, a defining characteristic of a
financial market is its nonidentity with itself. Markets are always in the
process of being materially defined, they continually acquire new properties
and change the ones they have. It is this ontological liquidity of financial
markets that contributes to their perception as a reality in flux. The flow of
the market reflects the corresponding stream of activities and things: a
dispersed mass of market participants continues to act, events continue to
occur, policies take hold and have effects. Markets are objects of observation
and analysis because they change continually; and while they are clearly
defined in terms of prices, news, relevant economic indicators, and so on at any
given moment, they are ill-defined with respect to the direction they will take
at the next moment and in the less immediate future.
Historically, markets were marketplaces, physical locations
where buyers and sellers were able to meet and coordinate their interests (e.g.
Agnew 1986: 18). Likewise, our concepts of an everyday reality tend to be
spatial concepts. We see reality as an environment that exists independently of
us and in which we dwell and perform our activities. The very notions of a lifeworld
and of a world on screen as used in this chapter also suggest spatiality; they
suggest that the idea of a spatial environment can be extended to electronic
domains as these become—for some of us—a place to work and live. The problem
with these notions in regard to time is that they imply that time is something
that passes in these spatial environments but is extraneous to the environment
itself. We relate the existence of a lifeworld, of an environment, or of everyday
reality more to the physical materiality of a spatial world than to any
temporal dimension. We also express, one assumes, the durability of the
physical world compared with the human lifespan through spatializing concepts.
The point is that the screen reality discussed has none of this durability. It
is more like a carpet of which small sections are rolled out in front of us.
The carpet grounds experience; we can step on it, and change our positioning on
it. But this carpet only composes itself as it is rolled out; the spatial
illusions it affords hide the intrinsic temporality of the fact that its
threads (the lines of text appearing on screen) are woven into the carpet only
as we step on it and unravel again behind our back (the lines are updated and
disappear). Thus the screen reality—the carpet—is a process, but it is not
simply like a river that flows in the sense of an identical mass of water
transferring itself from one location to another. Rather, it is processual in the sense of an infinite succession
of nonidentical matter projecting itself forward as changing screen. This is what one may call the flow character of this reality.
This formulation suggests that what I have called the GRS—and
particularly its screen component—is necessary for this flow reality to
emerge: it is through the performative and presentational capabilities of the
GRS mechanism and its information feeds that the market acquires the
properties of an aggregate entity and, while being performed and reflexively
analyzed and projected, takes on the character of a stream of things moving
forward as a whole. We also need to distinguish here between participating
financial flows and the composite reality of a flowing market. Traders sometime
contrast ‘taking a view’ of a market development, which is subjective, with having
concrete information about what they call ‘orders’ and ‘flows’, which is objective,
since orders and flows are constitutive components of financial markets.
Financial orders refer to requests for trades once the price of a financial
instrument reaches a certain level; when an order is executed, it becomes a
flow. Financial flows refer to volumes of a financial instrument changing
positions and accounts; in accounting terms, flows are distinguished from
‘non-changing’ objects in that they must be expressed in terms of a time interval
(Houthakker and Williamson 1996: 9). In foreign exchange, large flows are large
amounts of currencies being bought or sold. The sales may arise from mergers
and acquisitions of firms that require large cross-border payments, from
central bank transactions in support of a particular currency, etc. Advance and
concurrent knowledge of large orders and flows is important to traders because
these orders and flows may ‘move the market’—they may change price levels. They
may also potentially set in motion new market trends and reverse upward or
downward tendencies in currency prices. To participants, orders and flows are
part of the market as an independent reality and they are at the same time
forces that drive the market.
Participants’ understandings of flows can be related to common
notions of flow which we should briefly consider. Social scientists tend to
associate the term flow either directly with (1) things traveling or (2) with
fluidity. The first idea responds to the increased mobilities of contemporary
life (Urry 2000: 15-16, 36-7). It gives expression to the phenomenon that it is
not only people that commute, travel, and migrate in seemingly ever-increasing
numbers, but that messages and information also move. It is particularly the
traveling of communications that underpins the idea of a network society as one
based on flows of information (e.g. Castells 1996). This idea is important, but
it does not quite capture what happens in the case of financial flows. In currency
trading, financial flows refer to payments that imply adjustments of accounts.
No physical transfers of money need take place for this purpose; what flows in
the sense of something being transferred is financial (market-, payment-, etc.)
power as an abstract capacity rather than actual money.
The
payments are important to market participants because they influence price
levels, as indicated. The changes that occur and concern participants in
response to financial flows pertain to the market as centrally composed of
price levels. Also changing in conjunction with large financial flows may be
market stories, commentaries, and analyses, headline news, trend extrapolations,
and the like—all belonging to the level of the market as presented on screen.
This level of the market is what the notion of a flow market as used in this
chapter targets.
The second meaning of flow found in the literature is that of
fluidity; it draws on the distinction between liquids and solids. For example,
analysts who emphasize fluidity conceptualize the current stage of modernity as
marked by a transition from more solid forms of order and tradition to structures
that are more liquid and fluid, or that are melting, as in Marx’s famous phrase
that ‘all that is solid melts into air’ (e.g. Berman 1982; Bauman 2000). The
liberalization of traditional education exemplifies this trend, as does the
deregulation of markets, the flexibilization of labor, and the breakdown and
replacement of traditional family relations (e.g. Lasch 1978). This idea of the
‘melting of the solid’ comes closer to the one used here, but the point about
the screen reality as a flow is not that it is nomadic (without itinerary) and
unmarked by the traces of social and economic structure. The point is the
projection and reconstitution of this reality as one that is continually emerging
in a piecemeal fashion. One can compare it to a text that is in the process of
being written simultaneously by many authors, that is composed in the process
of writing out numerous different components, and that reaches no further than
the contributor’s pen. It is the emergence of this market text in episodic
pieces contemporaneously with the agent’s activity and the short duration of
the text that the notion of a flow as used here is intended to capture. I also
suggest that it is possible to retain notions such as that of a world while
remaining aware of the scrolling change of this particular world. The screen
that rolls out the lifeworld in which traders move nonetheless presents such a
lifeworld; it presents a complex environment composed of ‘walkable’ regions and
horizons that ground activities. The ground may be shifting continually and the
lifeworld is ‘in flight’. But traders are able to deal with this flux; their
ways of ‘inhabiting’ it are adapted to the timeworld they confront. An example
of this adaptation is the traders’ tendency to keep pace with their
world-in-flight by following market movements in their trading, and by
developing a ‘feeling’ for these movements. Traders also analyze the short-term
and long-term tendencies of their lifeworld’s movements in terms of stories and
‘big pictures’ that give duration to particular states.
If markets are continually changing processes with variable time
attributes they can also be viewed as time contexts that move across space, or
to be precise, across time zones. Here the global character of financial
markets, particularly of currency markets, becomes important. One can see
these markets as moving in and out of time zones continually with the sun, and
as they do, of taking on different features and updating their positions. As
global entities, markets have their own instrument- and clock-related
characteristics that characterize them in the aggregate. For example, markets
have characteristic ‘speeds’ indicated by the price movements which are at the
center of a changing market process. In currency spot trading, which is the
direct exchange of currencies, prices tend to change within split seconds
during periods of average activity. As a consequence, the currency trading
timeworld moves forward at a breath-taking pace. Another attribute is the
liquidity of a market, which in this context indicates the speed with which a
financial instrument can be bought or sold, without significant price changes. Markets
will be ‘thin’ (have few participants willing to trade) at certain times and
‘deep’ at others, with market liquidity varying over time. Markets also undergo
seasonal variations, for example, periods of low trading volume during the holiday
season in December, when the accounting end of the year draws close. When
markets are conceived as moving across time zones, additional features become
relevant, underscoring their character as moving entities and timeworlds. To
make this character plausible I want to consider the following aspects of
global markets, focusing again on the foreign exchange market as the most
developed global market. A first set of characteristics refers to the temporal
unity of these markets: they keep their own clock and times and they have their
own global schedules and calendars. A second characteristic of these markets is
that they are globally ‘exclusive’ systems that have left behind their natural
embeddedness in local and physical settings. This point will allow me to
address the architecture of these markets as based on bridgehead centers in the
three major time zones. My final point illustrates the working of a flow
architecture as one where such centers play ‘bridging’ and mediating roles in
giving support to a moving market and in updating and forwarding the market on
a time zone trajectory.
A first feature that ties into the view of global foreign
exchange markets as moving time contexts is that they follow their own time,
which is Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). GMT, the time and date of the zero meridian
which runs through Greenwich, England was adopted as a universal standard in
November 1884 during the meeting of the International Meridian Conference in
Washington, DC, United States. This conference drew up an international date
line and created twenty-four time zones. Prior to that, the United States alone
had over 300 local times (see Zerubavel 1982: 12-13 for its interesting
historical origin). Since these markets have no central location, time is fixed
to a particular coordinate of the globe to assure global identification of the
correct transaction date. If this were not the case, a transaction in New York
requiring delivery in Sydney two days later and the receiving side in Sydney
might not register the same delivery date. But this also means that the
respective markets carry their own time reckoning with them. As an aggregate of
positions, orders, flows, and traveling ‘books’ (accounts), they remain
independent of local time zones. A further aspect of the temporality of global
markets is ‘calendars’ and schedules: dates and hours set for important
economic announcements and for the release of periodically calculated economic
indicators and data. These calendars and schedules structure and pace
participants’ awareness and anticipation. They originate in a particular world
region and the respective time zones; for example, the data might be released
in the Unites States at Eastern standard time and they will consist of national
statistics referring, for example, to the United States, or of aggregate
statistics referring to a group of nations, as with European Union data. But
calendars and schedules from all three major time zones are relevant and will
be listed in daily and weekly market ‘schedules’. These schedules ‘anchor’
market developments in national or regional economies’ fundamental characteristics.
Yet as transnationally relevant time points that punctuate and dramatize the
ordinary temporal flow of market events and observations, they also belong to
the disembedded timeworld of global markets.
This disembedding is the second feature I want to discuss. It
too sustains the notion of global markets as moving timeworlds. Giddens uses
the notion of disembedding to refer to the ‘lifting out of social relations
from local contexts’ (1990: 21-9). I use the term to refer to the phenomenon
that the markets observed appear removed from their local context in terms of
participants’ orientation, their inherent connectivity and integration as the
key to overcoming the geographical separation between participants, their rules
of trading practices, their forms of compensation, and the like (see Knorr
Cetina and Bruegger 2002a, b for an overview of these characteristics). To give some
examples, market participants (e.g. traders) are disembedded in the sense that
they are oriented toward one another across time zones rather than toward the
local environment. They remain oriented to the translocal environment even
after their working hours, continuing to watch the market that has moved on to
another time zone through hand-held Reuters’ instruments and TV-channels. An
important feature that points beyond this global orientation is what has been
called elsewhere the reciprocal interlocking of time dimensions among traders
as a means for achieving a level of intersubjectivity in global fields. What
holds participants together across space is a ‘community of time’ rather than a
community of space, as in traditional societies. This community of time comes
about, for example, by market participants on dispersed trading floors watching
the market virtually continuously in synchronicity and immediacy for the
duration of their working (and waking) hours.5 All three aspects are
important here: synchronicity refers to the phenomenon that traders and
salespeople observe the same market events simultaneously over the same time
period; continuity means they observe the market virtually without
interruption, having lunch at their desks and asking others to watch when they
step out; and temporal immediacy refers to the immediate real time availability
of market transactions and information to participants within the appropriate
institutional trading networks. Traders may also see themselves as belonging
to global professional communities and they exhibit similar lifestyles across
continents. Another disembedding feature are the rules of trading practice
which are not covered by national law but correspond to a lex mercatoria holding among
participants on a global level, and reinforced in trading interactions without
recourse to formal law.
Going
beyond disembeddedness and asking what ‘supports’ a market that moves freely
across time zones, one can point to the trading floors in global cities where
the moving market resides during time zone hours, becomes further articulated
and defined, and then moves on to the next time zone. To begin, let me draw a
distinction between a globally inclusive and a globally exclusive cultural
form. A globally inclusive financial marketplace would be one where individual
investors in any country are able to trade assets freely across national
boundaries. Such a system requires, among other things, the computer
penetration of investor locations (e.g. households), language capabilities or
unification, Web architectures, payment and clearing arrangements between
exchanges, regulatory approvals, and national pension and insurance systems
that support individual financial planning. Such systems are in the process of
being created in some regions, but they are far from being in place on a
worldwide basis. On the other hand, in the area of institutional trading
considered in this chapter, a global market of a different kind has been in
evidence for some time. This form of globality is not based upon the
penetration of countries or of individual behavior. Instead, it rests on the
establishment of bridgehead centers of institutional trading in the financial
hubs of the three major time zones: in New York, London, Tokyo, and Zurich,
Frankfurt or Singapore. The moving market ‘rests’ in these centers where it
becomes articulated and revised. The bridgehead centers contribute to the
markets’ continuation by the trading activities of their ‘market makers’ (the
traders who take their own positions in the market), the activities of their
salespersons, and others. These activities support the market, which becomes
anchored in the time-zone-specific GRSs of trading floors. The activities also
change the market, and this contributes to the notion of the market as a flow
in the sense introduced before, and as a moving timeworld. Participants coming
to work in New York in the morning will not be confronted with the same market
they left at the end of their previous working day. They will see an updated
version of this market, one that bears the mark of the events happening in the
intermediate time zones of Asia and Europe. In addition, these markets will
arrive ‘whole’, at every new time zone and take off ‘whole’ to the next one.
This is somewhat simplified, but let us see what one might mean by such a
statement. When traders arrive at their desks in the morning in Tokyo and open
their screens they will find summary accounts of what happened before in the
New York time zone—these accounts are encapsulated in closing rates, index
values, volume statistics, intraday trading trends, etc. They will also find
more qualitative summaries relayed to them by their contacts in the earlier
time zone in their conversational dealing screens. In addition, traders
themselves will make efforts to find out more about market developments in the
earlier time zone by listening to relevant news services at home, calling
friends, or contacting them via the conversational dealing system before and
while they begin dealing. Most major institutional trading floors also have
morning meetings where such information is reported, analysts’ summaries
prepared in another time zone are transmitted over intercoms, and on-floor
analysts and economists relate their assessment of the situation. Similarly, at
Tokyo closing time traders and analysts in this time zone will transmit summary
information to contacts, bulletin boards, and other outlets in the next
(European) time zone, and they may be contacted by those working there via
phone or electronic mail for specific and concrete information. The European
(London, Zurich, Frankfurt) and American (New York) time zones overlap by
several hours (New York institutional trading starts at 8 am, which is 2 pm Central European
Time). In response to the overlap between the European and North American
opening hours, the markets will not ‘move on’ immediately but will trade
simultaneously until Europe closes—the markets tend to get ‘hectic’ at these
times just as they will be ‘silent’ when Tokyo is not yet very active and New
York has closed. When the European closing time approaches, the same sort of
summarizing and forwarding described earlier will take place. The overlap
between Europe and the United States corresponds to a ‘time gap’ between the
United States (New York) and Japan (Tokyo) provoked by the larger time
difference between these cities where no or little trading takes place in both
time zones. Traders in the same institution dealing in the same instrument (say
currency options) may cooperate across time zones when longer-term contracts
are involved (e.g. options) and positions cannot be closed at the end of a
trading day. In this case the market’s move to the next time zone may involve
the transfer of a ‘global book’—an electronic record of all contracts entered,
including those added and structured in the forwarding time zone. Global books
incorporate particular philosophies of trading whose content and adaptation to
time-zone- specific circumstances will be discussed in similar beginning- and
end-of-day global conversations between traders in different zones.
The market ‘flow’
refers to these forwarded features as well as the aggregate positions and
accounts that circle the globe while changing continuously with activities and
events. A flow ‘architecture’ refers to the support systems of these flows,
which I take to be the time-zone-specific trading floor settings with their
GRSs. The GRSs provide for the market’s unity and movement across space. They
also suggest a form of coordination of global fields that is to be
distinguished from spatially embedded network structures. As the above examples
show, the market’s movement across the globe has an accomplished sense; it
cannot be detached from the activities of market participants who sustain the
market in a particular time zone and then ‘compute’ and discursively summarize
a market’s features over time zone intervals as they forward these features to
the next time zone. By the same token, participants provide for the
continuation of global markets, but their activities are not the focus of this
chapter. Also left unconsidered, given space constraints, are the activities
of the information and service provider firms that develop and service the GRSs
and assume much of the function of presencing the market.
1.
So far, however,
economists have not been satisfied with attempts to model the determinants and
movements of these rates (e.g. Koundinya 1997: 185).
2.
For a more
general use of the term ‘architecture’ in relation to market institutions
approached from the angle of a theory of fields see Fligstein (2001).
3.
The study is
based on ethnographic research conducted from 1997 onward on the trading floor
of a major global investment bank in Zurich and in several other banks. For a
description of this research, see Knorr Cetina and Bruegger (2002a). See also
Bruegger (1999) for an extensive description of currency trading in all its
aspects.
4. These figures were reported in Barringer (2002).
5. As Harvey has argued (1989: 239-59), increasing time-compression
is a characteristic of the whole process of modernity and of
post-industrialization. A similar argument had been advanced by McLuhan (1964:
358), who proposed that electricity establishes a global network of
communication that enables us to apprehend and experience media-transmitted
events nearly simultaneously, as in a common central nervous system. To date,
however, few media events are ‘simultaneously’ transmitted across time zones,
and media content is adapted to local cultures and locally reinterpreted. I
argue that many other mechanisms and infrastructures and in fact a secondary
economy of information collection and transmission need to be in place to
create a global social form.
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