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From my unintentional tradition of talking about random Israel related stories from the BBC website, comes this story about the recall of a suspect baby formula.

The real story about the story is the story within the story that goes almost unspoken within the story. The story facade being that a soy based baby formula was pulled off shelves in Israel after two tragic deaths and the discovery of manufacturing shenanigans.

The story substance is how a product made by a German manufacturer for an Israeli company (which is partially owned by Heinz) ends up a niche product on the shelves of Orthodox Jews in America.

The breadth of globalization continues to amaze, but in a perhaps unexpected fashion. We might expect globalization to act as a unifying cultural force. Transnational business ought to extend mass culture across traditional boundaries, erasing difference all the way. Yet globalization may very well allow communities to fracture into progressively minute niches of consumption.

To a certain extent, limited amounts of mass media do form a monoculture of opinion and aesthetics. Yet a truly mass medium like the internet can have an opposite effect. The internet divides and divides and divides demographics down to atoms of opinion.

The ideological “cocooning” we see in media consumption can be a result of this. Given the breadth of choice, media consumers can to easily avoid counter culture be it from left to right or vice versa. Talk radio is not talking one side to the other, its just mumbling to itself.

At the same time, the quasi-ungeographical nature of the internet allows atoms to coalesce into larger, more useful structures. The Moveon.org primary is representative of this phenomenon. More people voted through their campaign than will vote in New Hampshire’s primary or attend the Iowa Caucuses.

The moral here seems to be that sweeping, vague forces like “globalization” have more subtle and far reaching effects than can be easily predicted.

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