The “global village” : the Internet’s technological imperialism

A global electronic culture, in one sense or another, can bring about a union of peoples. The question is whether this union only offers a less visible - and therefore more insidious - communal dissociation than was effected by the failed political unions of the past. Recognizing such things is painfully difficult ; how many Yugoslavs in 1990 could have looked into their own hearts and the hearts of their neighbors and descried the conflagration to come? And it may be precisely this sort of recognition that an online culture suppresses more effectively than any external authority possibly could. Many indeed - by their own testimony - have seized upon the Net as an opportunity, not to face what they are, but to live out their fantasies. [1]

Furthermore, expertise - the kind one exports to other nations - is always "embedded in a community and can never be totally extracted from or become a replacement for that community. When one attempts the abstraction and applies the result across cultural boundaries, the logic and assumptions of that technology can prove bitterly corrosive. Worse even, the kind of community from which Western technical systems commonly arise is, for the most part, noncommunity ; especially once typified by the purely technical, single-dimensional, commercially motivated, and wholly rationalized environments of corporate research and development organizations. [2]

Take for example the fact that within our “western” society, food is predominately subjected to technological manipulation. We can produce various artificial foods, supposedly nourishing, and the inevitable temptation is to bring such products to bear upon the problems of hunger in the world. But this meets surprising resistance. “We must not think that people who are the victims of famine will eat anything. Western people might, since they no longer have any beliefs or traditions or sense of the sacred. But not others. We have thus to destroy the whole social structure, for food is one of the structures of society.” [Jacques Ellul, 1990]

The entire technical infrastructure, including the computer networks upon which everything is increasingly founded, enforces an imperial "wisdom" of its own. Even the most distributed networks have in effect a very strong centralizing character, a governing logic, a systematic requirement for interaction, a “natural order of things”. Our rush to wire the world will some day be seen to have spawned a suffering as great as that caused by this century's most ruthless dictators. There is no doubt about what we are up to. Our quest for a global village begins with the implementation of physical networks and accompanying technology. Then, of course, the local communities must adapt to this global, culture-destroying machine they have suddenly come up against. This sequence is vivid proof that the global village has absolutely nothing to do with culture, value, or meaning -- nothing to do with the traditional significance of community, with democratic values, or with anything else that grows up from the healthy depths of the human being. It is, purely and simply, the extension of a technical and commercial logic implicit in the wires already laid down.

In this sense, even if in no other, the global village is a kind of global totalitarianism. And one thing it asks of us is clear : in attacking any local problem we must yield first of all, not to the meanings inherent in the problem, but to the constraining necessity of the global system itself. The village farmers in Nepal may not feel any need of a satellite dish, but they will receive one nevertheless ; it is a prerequisite for "development." [1] And that imposition of technology, destroys the fabric of meaning by which communities are knit together, and hence technological union does not bring together peoples ; it actually breaks them apart, re-educates them to a different, “developed” model, only to bring them nearer again (but not communaly together, in the physical sense) under the evolving global society.

Human life can be sustained only within a sea of meaning, not a network of information. When we disrupt this meaning with our detached logic and unrooted information, we cast the “under-developed that we wish to educate” into the same void that we have been able to endure only by filling it with endless diversions. However, not everyone has access to our diversions ; and many of those who do, are not so quickly willing to sell their souls for inane stimulations. Religious fanaticism, may prove more meaningful. [1]

[1] Stephen L. Talbott, “The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst”, 1995, O'Reilly & Associates

[2] Doris M. Schoenhoff, “The Barefoot Expert”, 1993, AbeBooks