Tags
global intelligentsia, global normative values, intellectual evolution, intellectual history, Internet, political norms, politics
International trade and the Internet have altered the world’s boundaries in many ways, and with associated processes irreversible — some things cannot be turned backward — change in how we think about ourselves and others and our social and spiritual perception may be due.
“Google” has turned out a pretty good name for the past two decades of democratized intellectual exploration.
I’ve been calling “Time the New Space”.
We know what has been bothering (and bloodying) the world from the past: what lies ahead? What can be put ahead, i.e., developed now and placed in the future?
This whole conversation is a miracle.
The New Global Intelligentsia is going to be “new” for a while longer. It may be fragile too — too few where needed most — but perhaps growing peace is what time is for.
Time is the New Space.
When one can call in a pizza, Skype with a Facebook buddy 9,000 miles away, build a library, and fill a closet with one click (often enough), “space” — real space, earth space, physical space — becomes a little bit more recreational space and separate from common intellectual and social operations, including social and political projects.
No matter where one lives on this planet, very practically so, one may have a Great Conversation with countless others.
When the conversation turns to culture and conflict (for fun: add “language and psychology”) and the more callous mudslinging subsides or may be eluded by way of our aggregated and collective choices in conversational partners, watch out: change would seem to be in the offing.
Timeline for transiting from where we are (take a bearing) to where things are “a little bit better”?
Unknown.
Perhaps unknowable.
Nonetheless, whatever the differences may be in our sources of laughter and moans, those with whom we “chatype” online or, perhaps, who stumble across this blog, are traveling together on one blue pearl of a planet now thoroughly wrapped in talk.
Loose Additional Reference
. . . we believe that the internet activism of today is best perceived as informed by the spirit of the EZLN, the ‘Battle of Seattle’, and the diverse amalgams of social movements and subcultures that have matured along with the new media over the last five years. This is the internet as a living, historical force and one of the keys to understanding and shaping the political and cultural life of the present age.
Kahn, Richard and Douglas Kellner. “New media and internet activism: from the “Battle of Seattle’ to blogging.” New Media and Society, Sage Publications, 2004. PDF may be found online.
Before the revolution, the Tsar in Russia had a system of internal passports. The people hated this system. These passports marked the estate from which you came, and this marking determined the places you could go, with whom you could associate, what you could be. The passports were badges that granted access, or barred access. They controlled what in the Russian state Russians could come to know.
The Bolsheviks promised to change all this. They promised to abolish the internal passports. And soon upon their rise to power, they did just that. Russians were again free to travel where they wished. Where they could go was not determined by some document that they were required to carry with them. The abolition of the internal passport symbolized freedom for the Russian people — a democratization of citizenship in Russia.
Because you may have heard this in the background of the video clip on the Family of Man exhibit (a related hardcover became my first book about photography).
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