everything local has been globalized

==

“We are like sailors who must rebuild their ship on the open sea, never able to dismantle it in the drydock and to reconstruct it there out of the best materials.

Neurath

I’ve written about the effects of globalization several times, today is about how everything local is still local but quasi-shaped by globalization. Let me begin by saying one of the strongest characteristics of local society sis rituals. Every local community has some rituals embedded within. They are things, the words, the behaviors, the events, which, over time, become symbols of the local community. Key to what I just wrote is that you have to standardize before you can ritualize. In the wayback machine when external stimuli to a community was relatively limited, standardization was fairly easy and local rituals embedded themselves fairly quickly. The worldwide web changed that.

Which leads me to technology’s impact on local.

I’m going to flip the logic here and suggest the influence of society, and local communities, is the more important subtle force we should be discussing. While technology distributed ideas and rituals, local communities were the actual distributors. Local sold their ideas, behaviors events and rituals online. It became a farmer’s market of localness – globally. But what simultaneously happened was local issues kind of disappeared into a flux of global issues weaving their way through what everyone used to think of as “what happens here.” Suddenly it ‘didn’t just happen here.’ It was Jacques Ellul who suggested in The Technological Society that the means of exerting action on people must follow three criteria:

– Generality. Every person must be reached in every area of life because everyone is involved. Individual action is unimportant

– Objectivity. Action, since it is a function of society itself, cannot be dependent upon the transient and subjective acts of individuals. The means must be rendered independent of the individual who employs them so as to make them applicable by anyone at all.

– Permanence. Since the technical challenge to people concerns their whole life, mental action must be exerted upon them without letup, from the beginning of his existence to its end.

This is what technology has wrought in the onslaught of localness ‘giving’ into the onslaught of ideas distributed so that other local communities can ‘take in,’ absorb, and reshape their rituals. To be clear, this exchange is often asymmetrical. Just as Ellul points out the local community may freely give up its rituals, but the system will spit back out a variety of mutated rituals with the objective to shape, ‘generality, objectivity and permanence,’ in ways that the local becomes micro-locals and yet feel bigger because they are part of something global. The effectiveness of the worldwide web technology has been exacerbated by the simultaneous decline of another technology – the loss of local news and newspapers. The loss has translated into the loss of rigorous accountability to local government and people. Research shows the decline of local journalism leads to “government officials conduct themselves with less integrity, efficiency and effectiveness, and business misconduct. goes unchecked.” This also undermined local rituals. As local rituals lost their local-driven value they began standing on a quicksand of value. But the real point of the loss of local journalism is it increases local commitment to the inputs of technology. Uhm. If you are committed to technology, then you are compelled to find things for that technology to do regardless if it’s intent or objectives match yours. It also circumvents the traditional harder work needed to become fully informed enough to reshape, and shape, rituals more resilient to localness. In other words, if you want to contest the power of ‘the technological society’, you must have concrete rituals to claim decision-making power locally. In every case where localness wins, or wins in terms of adopting the appropriate global aspects, you will find the hard, unglamorous, thankless work of building local institutions and organizing local communities. It is within that process in which it becomes far less likely to be subverted by unforeseen dynamics of technology with interests different than that of the local interest as that technology meets the unmoving, valued, local rituals.

Which leads me to how localness really gets screwed.

So. If you have been following along you will have standardization and the choice of having technology offer a solution or you seek to create a solution through technology. Call this the triangulation of local hell. Today’s society is always is always getting tugged in a million different directions and local bears the brunt. Rituals are simultaneously being embraced, if not held onto with ragged claws, while being torn apart at the edges. It is villages within villages, communities within communities and tribes within tribes all tethered to something global.

Let me end by pointing out ‘globalization’ is not a new concept and local ideas, thinking and rituals were constantly being challenged throughout time. I would like to remind everyone that it was in 1889 that Nellie Bly went ‘Around the World in Seventy-Two Days.’

• – note: her local editor was in favor, but the global business manager, who liked the concept, wanted to send a man:

“It is impossible for you to do it. You are a woman. There is no use talking about it. No one but a man could do this.”

——

I would like also to remind everyone that wooden ships with big sails <let’s call some of them “East Indies Trading Company”> brought goods, ideas and local learning from around the globe in the 1500’s. All that said. All this global experience impacted local beliefs and attitudes. My point is local has always been impacted by global. It’s just that now there is little time to standardize rituals and local is constantly being tugged, pushed, battered and pampered, by global friends and enemies.

I imagine my larger point is that local and global have always been intertwined, one always informing and influencing the other. This has always been the low-level engine of progress and societal awareness leading to societal change. It’s just that now, with the technological society embedded, the give & take is a bit asymmetrical as well as the fact the technology is adding in dedicated manipulation on top of the informing and influencing. Ponder.