Editorial: Communication and Glocalization: Media, Culture, and Society in the 21st Century

Victor N. Roudometof ^*

• University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus

The advent of the 21st century ICT revolution has been felt in numerous arenas of social life. One of the main issues in the social sciences concerns the relationship between media-driven globalization and culture or cultures across the world. In cross-cultural communication, sociology, anthropology, and related disciplines, the relationship between globalization and the media has been the focus of considerable scholarly attention. Hybridity is conventionally considered to be a key consequence of globalization's impact upon cultures, but this interpretation fails to account for the novelty of ICT-related phenomena. Glocalization has emerged as a far more precise concept that captures these processes and has been evoked in pioneer work on the media and key publications in the field (Roudometof, 2016;Roudometof and Dessi, 2022). This special issue originated with an invitation addressed to one of the editors to guest edit a special issue for the journal. In accordance with the journal's guidelines an additional co-editor was added. The two co-editors never met each other, and all correspondence was done either by email or through the journal's electronic platform. The journal graciously waved the publication fee for a small number of papers. This offered the opportunity to publish accepted papers free of charge; and it thus facilitated overcoming perhaps the most important obstacle in open access publications. Unfortunately, it has not been possible to take full advantage of this incentive, as some potential contributors were overcommitted to other projects and were not able to participate in the special issue.The special issue's objective has been to further explore the varied themes and multiple techno-social relationships between communication and glocalization in the 21 st century. The selection of this topic was meant to further the editors past engagements with the problematic of glocalization and communication (see Musa, 2019;Roudometof, 2023). Glocalization explicitly brings forth the significance of the local as a constitutive and active part of the local-global nexus. In numerous domains of techno-social life, the interplay between global forces and local constituencies offers the opportunity to explore the significance of local agency for shaping the outcome of local-global interactions. The significance and relevance of glocalization for media studies and communication had been further amplified as additional work has been published concurrently with this special issue (see, for example, Salama & Fawzy, 2023& Chen, 2022).The editors felt the need to accept only those submissions that are directly linked to the topic and that in turn has meant that the rejection rate for the special issue has been over 70%. Despite the editors' own efforts, the ultimate goal of obtaining sufficient number of submissions to turn the special issue into an e-book was not met. The editors encountered some issues with their ability to exercise sufficient oversight over the overall process. Eventually, due to the difficulties encountered, one of the two coeditors withdrew. His input in the overall process should be acknowledged.Subsequently, this Editorial is penned by one of the two original co-editors. Moreover, this is partly the reason that this special issue contains only five articles.In her article on the glocalization of death in the digital age Adela Toplean explores a fascinating and relatively under-studied topic. Death and dying is a traditional topic for sociologists and anthropologists and Toplean adds a perspective that illustrates how glocalization reconfigures the social understanding of death. Her perspective builds directly on her earlier work on the same topic (see Toplean, 2024). In his article on premodern glocalization and ancient texts in the 21st century David Inglis explores the relationship among translations and texts in the world's religious traditions. His contribution extends the notion of "media" far into the past: the focus of attention is how ancient texts have been subjected to glocalizing processes in the context of intercivilizational encounters. In his article on digital glocalization, Victor Roudometof expands on theorizing the 21 st century ICT revolution as a prime example of glocalization. This article expands on the author's earlier engagement with the problematic of the relationship between glocalization and the ICT revolution (see Roudometof, 2023). In his article on dialect inheritance and youth identity Zhixing Mei explores via an on-line ethnography the multilingual and multicultural dynamics in 21 st century China. The special issue concludes with Paula Muraca's book review of the Handbook of Culture and Glocalization (Roudometof and Dessi, 2022).Regardless of the various difficulties encountered, the articles included in the special issue make important contributions to topics that have been thus far insufficiently addressed in the literature. There is still a great deal of work that can be done in examining the relationship between glocalization and communication.