How Our Technology Continually Expands Our Notion of Us: An argument for globalization

In 1968, this iconic shot of earth was broadcast by NASA. Inspired by this new perspective, earthlings quickly organized themselves differently

"In three remarkable years between 1969 and 1971, Friends of the Earth, the National Resources Defense Council, Greenpeace, and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) were created and the first Earth Day was proclaimed." [from Jamie Metzel's Hacking Darwin.]

What is globalization?

The music you listen to is your own concern. The volume and time at which you listen to it is of concern to your entire apartment complex.

Some issues will always be personal. Your favorite music, for instance. Technology - like a stereo that can play at 100 decibels - can turn personal issues into community issues.

Factories that made enough goods to sell across state lines, trains to carry those goods across state lines, and telegraph lines to rapidly communicate across state lines changed us from a confederation of states into a union. Before Lincoln, nearly all communication stated, "The United States are ..." After Lincoln, it stated, "The United States is ...." Technology changed states' issues into national issues.

Today, container ships have driven down the price of transportation to effectively make ours one global market. The marginal cost to transport one can of beer or soda 3,000 miles is one cent. A sweater is 3.5 cents. The internet lets you have a video conference with someone in Croatia as easily as you would talk to your neighbor. The technology of the late 1800s made us a nation. The technology of the early 2000s has made us a globe.

You will hear - you have heard - a lot of nonsense about globalization from nationalists who want you to believe that those globalists in the apartment complex want to dictate what music you listen to. Nobody cares about your taste in music but they do want to sleep uninterrupted at 2 AM. The fact that you find it exasperating to think about how dependent we are on foreigners and they are on us doesn't mean that it is effective policy to ignore it. Globalization is not about 7.5 billion people dictating how you live; it is about acknowledging how many people depend on you - and how many people you depend on - to live.

It is likely cliche and probably minimally helpful to say that some issues are truly personal, some involve your family, some the folks in your neighborhood, some the people in your state and some are global. Where the proper boundaries lie for determining whose concern those are will shift and be subject to debate. That's true. But what is also true is that just as our space program let us see the earth as a whole, our technology continues to make our world larger, making us increasingly dependent on faraway people. Just as you can't un-see this picture, you can't undo the inter dependencies that define our world. Globalization isn't about creating those inter dependencies; it is about having mechanisms - like the UN and WTO - to address them.

News Warp Up for the Week

I was going to post about the plausible reasons why Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize but my list includes only one item: he got Cheney to leave office without any violence. (It's not hard to imagine a scenario in which Biden would have given his acceptance speech with his skin sprinkled with bird shot.)

Communication major Sarah Palin's comments about the value of the dollar now leap straight from Facebook to the Financial Times. Meanwhile, analysts are scratching their heads about why the traditional media is floundering.

And speaking of journalism that makes you wonder who they have not laid off at these papers, Bloomberg has a headline, U.S. Trade Deficit Unexpectedly Falls as Exports Rise. Given that the trade deficit = Exports - Imports, it would only be unexpected if the trade deficit fell as exports rose. This headline is akin to "Residents Surprised to Find Streets Wet After Latest Rain Storm."

NASA scientists had an interesting idea: turn cameras into high-speed projectiles and aim them at what you want to photograph. Their good idea of smacking two spacecraft into the moon as a means to photograph it did not work too well. Curiously, the crashed cameras have yet to return any pictures. This could still change photography, though. Imagine news conferences in which every photo session looks like the incident in which Muntazer al-Zaidi threw his shoes at Bush. Instead of throwing rice at weddings, guests may just throw disposable cameras at the lucky couple. As if celebrities don't hate paparazzi enough already, just wait until they adopt the latest from NASA.

Rush Limbaugh may buy the St. Louis Rams. [The rich and poor just have different toys, Martina Navratilova says. "The rich guys buy a football team, the poor guys buy a football."] If he does, the team will be easy to defend against. You can hear the defenses they face look at each other before every play, shrug and say, "What do you think? They'll go right again?"

There is a conservative effort to expunge the Bible of its liberal tendencies. In this version, Jesus still heals people but charges for his services.

24 Hour News Channel Now?

When I was a kid, the world was a busy place.

In 1968 ...

Nearly 17,000 Americans were killed in Vietnam – about 50% more than it had been the year before or would be in 1969 and 9X what it had been as recently as 1965.

Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were killed.


Jackie Kennedy - our former first lady - married Aristotle Onassis - a Greek shipping tycoon.

The Black Panthers engaged in shoot outs with Oakland police as one of many deadly racial conflicts across the country.


The ’68 Olympics was rocked when American gold and bronze medal winners raised their fist during the awards ceremony in the symbol of black power. (Did I mention that there was an Olympics?)

Intel was founded.

NASA launched Apollo 7, the first manned space craft and Apollo 8,the first time any humans saw the dark side of the moon or orbited around it.

Yale announced that it would admit women.

Nixon won the presidency.

Does anyone else think that 24 hour news channels were invented about 40 years too late? Given that TV news was one hour back then, the ratio of remarkable events to actual remarks must have been about 386X what it is today.