© Pierre Maré,
2004 - 2007
Offbeat 132
The problem with the global village is that the street addresses are such a very long way away from one another. If you need to go down to the local handyman, for instance to point out a recurring problem that he has not been capable of fixing the last three or four times you have raised the topic, and perhaps shake him warmly by the throat, you need to cross an ocean. At least such was my recent experience with the server farm for a web domain that I administer.
Although the global village brings us all closer together in a touchy, feely electronic kind of way, it’s not just the local idiots who screw things up big time. Now you can meet and work with idiots from places that are far, far away. And there are a lot of uncomprehending, non-responsive blank eyes in interesting places out there. Certainly, the lights were on but there was nobody home in one little town in California when my problem arose.
Perhaps I should have considered hosting somewhere in India. After all, they are good enough to provide cheap, well-written computer code overnight with early morning e-mail delivery for every major software company, everywhere else in the world, and they seem to be more interested in maintaining their common reputation as a software mecca, rather than riding on it.
The idea of a global village is not quite as rosy as it is made out to be. If anything, although we all live there, it is really only practically accessible over the internet. It’s not all that easy to jump on a jet and spend ten hours flying over to hang out with the neighbours, even if they do have a visa lottery. Nor are all the folksy, Zen-like values real. No, we aren’t all on big, friendly, happy family. In fact we are all very different, and sibling rivalry has a way of becoming bloody.
Actually, the global village is more like a huge, suburban sprawl with a lot of different neighbourhoods and some industrial parks in between. There are better addresses, for instance in the vicinity of all the other rich folks. There are less better addresses, for instance where the honest, hard-working folks live, such as most of India. And then there are the trailer parks: think Baghdad and some of the places in Central Africa.
Robert Frost once wrote ‘good fences make good neighbours’. Global village theorists and proselytisers want us to remove those fences. I am not so sure that they are right. I have always appreciated differences.
If we were all the same, I would have 2,5 kids, a couple of cars, three fridges and a TV in every room. My lawn would be one of those manicured affairs and my house would look like all the houses around me. I would talk with a nasal accent and smile approvingly as my children adopted the same set of uniform values. I would not have questions about everything, or write this column.
What I see in the subtext of the global village is a level of insecurity. If everyone conforms to the same standards, then we can dispense with the need to develop understanding and respect, and just take comfort in the fact that if everyone is the same, the only sort of conflict would be small, neighbourly stuff, like who did or did not get invited to a barbecue.
For my part, I am comfortable with the distance between where I live and everywhere else. It may not be the best neighbourhood and, as it is a desert country, the lawns are dried out, but it is the neighbourhood that belongs to me, and a neighbourhood that allows me to be myself.
That being said, the spread of multinational media and culture is removing the differences. We watch the same movies, listen to the same music and in our effort to be different, at least in the kitchen, are adopting the same international cuisine as everyone else. No doubt there aren’t Thai chicken pizzas at the Poles yet, but a pizza franchise is probably on the way.
So in some way, the global village concept will win out. And unfortunately, in spite of the cars, fridges, television and lawn, we will all be poorer.
