The continued relevance of physical space in the postmodern global village

'Round about now, my sister is driving along the coast of Oregon or maybe Northern California with her new boyfriend, which is not what she is supposed to be doing. What she is supposed to be doing is recuperating from having just run the London Marathon. You already know why she's not in London. One of the many disruptions of the big ash cloud of 2010.

(As a side note: Sort of strange how the world media covered the event. At first it was all, "huh, this is kind of weird." Then increasingly it became, "MONEY IS BEING LOST HERE. SOMEONE DO SOMETHING!" And then, "Fucking pussies who won't go up in the fucking air with their fucking big jets. Fucking losers.")

Long time ago, Marshall McLuhan observed that the world was becoming a "Global Village." As is the case with pretty much everything that McLuhan ever wrote, the idea is both useful and also capable of leading us completely astray. To be sure, the modern media have allowed us to connect more easily with people living vast distances from us, and this has caused profound changes in how we interact with both those distant others and the not-so-distant others who share our physical space. It has changed how we think of ourselves, how we construct our social identities. And it has allowed for the near-instant transmission of some kinds of information, a feature of modern life that in turn has been essential to the rise of global markets.

But we can, and we do, take it too far. What media can't do is that they cannot transfer the large packets of information that we call human bodies. And since it is these packets that, in the end, most concern us--although we sometimes manage to forget, or ignore that--the effect of all these transmissions of electronic bytes is not exactly what we imagine it to be. Other things that cannot be sent over fiber optic cables--steaks, tulips, onions, magazines, automobiles, t-shirts, sneakers, living room sofas, video cameras, iphones. The modern world has actually not made distance disappear, or even made it irrelevant. It's just made our experience of it different. It's always good to have these sort of disruptive environmental events take place at unpredictable times to help us see that the new world we've been so busy building for the past 50 years has actually not managed to overcome certain fundamental realities of human existence. You can buy your plane ticket and reserve your hotel room and surf to find the best place to eat in Porto but if the pilots strike, or an earthquake tears up the runway, you're not going anywhere, buddy.

The continued relevance of space--and of embodied experiences--is why most people, if they have the choice, still opt to live in places like Manhattan and Paris and Prague instead of Tulsa, Oklahoma, or Estevan, Saskatchewan. Those latter spots are wired: you could order up some genuine Chicago-style deep dish and get it delivered to your door in a day or two if you really wanted. But somehow it just wouldn't be the same.

Modern media discourse ignores this obvious point because it needs to sell us on the bogus notion that the networked world is making the world "flatter," making every place the same, thus making opportunities increasingly equal for all. The battle against the takeover of our lives by people in places far away from us requires that we periodically remind ourselves of what a crock of shit this has always been, and remains.