New Zealand as Middle Earth: Local and Global Popular Communication in a Small Nation

Abstract

The shift of the research gaze from First World concerns and research questions to the different imperatives of a small nation such as New Zealand enables scrutiny of many conventional assumptions made about globalizing processes, children's evolving public spaces, and commodified culture. New Zealand provides an invaluable site to explore the processes creating the postmodern cultural experiences of globalized popular communication. Children in New Zealand respond as joyously as children in San Jose and Sheffield to the pleasures of global popular communication, but we argue that the global can only be tracked in the ways it emerges in a variety of local/ities. Researching the particular experiences of children in a small South Pacific nation also highlights the range of challenges faced by public intellectuals in a period of rapid global technical, economic, and cultural change.