Another formulation relating space, time and communications technologies might be: how have the printed book or the electronic blog changed our notion of travel and accessibility to other cultures and ideas? In my blog for class, I write about how electronic communications technologies allow for an increased awareness of both location and dislocation because of their capacity for increased connectivity to physically distant and unknown people:
Our subjectivities and ideas of relating to one another have grown paradoxically larger and smaller. We may know more about our online friend in Southeast Asia who we have never met than we do our local politicians or neighbors. Or else we might conceive of global community as something exclusive to a certain group of people (by this I mean the Muslim concept of “umma” in the Steger reading. Or we might never leave Manhattan but spend all day trading stocks on the international market via the Internet.
Before making any generalizations about electronic media, however, it is important to emphasize that much of the world’s population who do not have access to computers, let alone the Internet and browser capability. Additionally, many people are still illiterate and cannot make use of these new forms of communication that still require reading and writing skills. Any study of the consequences of blogging and the socio-historical aspects of interactive communications technologies should bear these contexts in mind.
The awareness, perception, or mentalité, depending on which historical or phenomenological framework I am choose to use, relates to temporality, the Internet, World Wide Web and acceleration of information and material transactions: we can access real-time information on weather, news, blog entries and commentary all over the world. The convergence of communications platforms such as mobile phones, GPS satellite data, databases and networked computers allow for synchronous communication with people next to us or in remote areas, akin to Anderson’s imagined community of the nation, that we will probably never meet. The nation, however, is not the entity that is used to describe the space of these events – instead the metaphors we see and hear are ones associated with the “world” or global entities, such as the “World Wide Web” or to use an earlier term that we have encountered in class, Marshall McLuhan’s idea of the “global village” in the electronic age. Some of the geospatial visualizations and technologies available to us as business or educational tools, or voyeuristic opportunities, are both local (Google Street Maps/View) and global (Google Earth/remote sensing satellite images).
Using a combination of technologies such as the Web, the personal computer, mobile phone, and blogging platforms, we can read, write, and edit while moving from one place to another, and see feedback from our posts, if our blogs are popular, and respond within moments. We are able to communicate with these technologies in a way that decontextualizes our physical location, if we choose to remain anonymous. Alternately, we reveal our location and ideas, intentionally or unintentionally, to people using local idioms and references. When we publish our blogs, we anticipate our main audience to be speakers of our language; however, how are we to know that our readership is not limited to our friends and family or our local networks? We may not know this unless we choose to publicize our blogs (or have others do so to our knowledge or ignorance), tag entries appropriately, and track the demographics of our readership. One can argue convincingly that the exchange global goods, services and ideas is more readily available to people with portable purchasing, publishing, authoring and searching technologies than to prior readers and writers of the printed book or newspaper. Manfred Steger describes the sense of compressed and elongated notions of space and time that has characterized periods of world history in his definition of globalization:
“a set of social processes that appear to transform our present social condition of weakening nationality into one of globality...movement towards greater interdependence and integration..an uneven process...with four qualities or characteristics:
1) the creation of new, and the multiplication of existing social networks and activities that cut across traditional political, economic, cultural and geographical boundaries
2) the expansion and the stretching of social relations, activities and interdependencies
3) the intensification and acceleration of social exchanges & and activities
4) globalization processes do not occur merely on an objective, material level but also involve the subjective plane of human consciousness.”
Part of me wants to avert generalizing the experience of using high-speed communications technology, since there are so many issues of financial and geographical resources and timing that make communication possible on the networks that we use; however, the experience of using these technologies and learning from them is real for many of us at Teachers College, as evidenced by the computer-based demands of this particular class and the kinds of feedback and exploration afforded by our course wiki and individual blogs. Blogging, like book-writing and reading, is becoming a normalized practice in the everyday life of people who have access to these technologies and use them for information, entertainment, education, or therapy. Recent statistics from a Pew Research Center survey report that 33% of Internet users read weblogs and over 12% of Internet users maintain a blog (Smith, “New numbers for blogging and blog readership”). Maintaining a blog or wiki to elaborate one’s ideas with colleagues, students, or members of the public has become, in many parts of the country, an important part of collaborative academic work and to some extent, normalized in our day-to-day life.
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