Chapter 6 Forward Thinking, Composing Cyberspace

Forward Thinking about Chapter 6

    In the 1960s, Canadian media theorist and communication professor Marshall McCluhan coined the term global village to describe how instantaneous communication made possible by electronic technologies could unite the world on a global scale. In the 1980s, then-Congressman and future U.S. Vice President Al Gore first used the term information superhighway to refer to the developing web of communications networks, computers, and consumer electronic appliances. In the 1990s, with the explosive growth and use of the Internet, both terms have gained widespread currency -- and the Paul Duginski cartoon in "Composing Cyberspace", p. 256, extends and relates these metaphors by suggesting that the on-ramp to the "Information Superhighway" leads to a place called "Global Village."
    What Duginski emphasizes, of course, is who might be left behind on this journey. As with many real-life U.S. freeways, some obviously homeless people live under the overpass, and Duginski makes it clear why these characters won't be making the trip to the Global Village: They lack access to the necessary equipment and training. McCluhan, who was thinking more about TV than the possibility of something like today's Internet, did not think his global village was necessarily a desirable destination for humankind. Nevertheless, the term has come to describe a kind of utopian ideal that combines the future and the past. Using ultramodern technology, it's implied, we can return to some idyllic state of village life that presumably existed before modern civilization alienated people from society. This utopian global village must be to some degree a nostalgic, even romantic idea, given the realities of village life in today's developing or Third World nations, where basic human needs for food, shelter, and health care go so commonly unmet. Indeed, the majority of the world's people -- illiterate, living in substandard housing, or suffering from malnutrition -- live metaphorically under the overpass with Duginski's cartoon characters.
    Yet the early promise of electronic communication to transcend international borders, racial and ethnic divisions, inequalities based on socioeconomic class, and other traditional human barriers is very compelling. Further, it's been argued that these new technologies are "trickling down" much faster than did older technologies that had the potential to increase social justice or distribute knowledge more equitably. For example, print and book technology took hundreds of years to pass from elite classes to a developing middle class, while use of the Internet has been doubling every year since the early 1990s.
    Many of these tensions embodied in the term global village -- itself an oxymoron of big and little, worldwide and local -- are explored further in this chapter. Richard Rodriguez implies that the Bayshore Freeway in Silicon Valley divides the information Haves and Have-nots, with its "exits to cyberspace" only miles from impoverished communities, and he suggests that new, multicultural religious coalitions forming under those overpasses may be the actual global village of the future. John Hockenberry uses the example of the Palestinian intifada resistance movement to argue that a digital revolution is helping to destroy international borders and empower, not impoverish, ordinary citizens. Dale Spender, by contrast, finds the notion of a digital revolution ludicrous if it means simply equipping everyone with computers and ignoring social justice in other, more important areas; moreover, she argues that social issues in cyberspace have been defined and decided by an elite group of mostly white, American males. Perhaps exemplifying some of Spender's points, Rory J. O'Connor reports on the extreme state of information access and electronic infrastructure in sub-Saharan Africa, "the unwired continent." And finally, in "Birth of a Nation in Cyberspace," John C. Rude writes about the inspirational way in which a group of dedicated Eritrean citizens and refugees has helped sustain and shape their war-torn, newly independent country by using the Internet to create a "virtual nation."
    Before you read these selections, you may want to consider the following questions based on your prior reading and personal experience:
    1. Does it seem to you that the world is getting more similar or more diverse? How do you think various electronic technologies, such as TV and the Internet, affect this process? What other forces are responsible for large-scale cultural and social change?
    2. What do you think would be the advantages and disadvantages of giving more people access to information and direct communication all around the globe? What might be the advantages and disadvantages of a decrease in the importance and influence of international borders and separate nation states?
    3. In your experience, how are Africa (or another Third World area) and its people usually portrayed in the media, especially in comparison with affluent nations? If you have experience on the Internet (or can ask someone you know with such experience), what's your impression of the global diversity of the Net's participants?
    4. If you have access to a computer lab, classroom, or networked computers equipped with electronic discussion software, discuss with fellow readers one of the issues raised here, such as the apparently paradoxical meaning of global village.

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