Bridging Borders?
It seemed like I was standing on the top of the world. Before me, sloping down from the mountains and spreading west toward the horizon in a haze was my first glimpse of Chile. Behind me, a rusty metal sign was bolted into the rock announcing the eastward expanse of Argentina. The road from Mendoza was a spectacularly winding ascent that left the vineyards of the lowlands and the green foothills of the Andes in the distance as it clung to the sides of ever growing mountains. Right before the border we passed the highest mountain outside of the Himalaya, Mt. Aconcagua. At nearly 7000 meters, its peak was covered in snow in the middle of summer. The air got remarkably colder as we reached the Chilean border. Despite the signs marking the territory of these countries, all I could see in any direction, however, were mountains.
Despite sharing the longest border in South America, the trade between Argentina and Chile is remarkably low. Recently only around 6% of Argentina’s exports and 4% of her imports have been with Chile. While there are several reasons for this lack of neighborly exchange, a prominent one is the enormous Andean mountain range that divides these two countries. As trade has traditionally depended on transportation, the difficulties posed by this geological wall have kept transportation to a minimum. The high pass I was standing on was watched over by a huge statue of Christ with a cross clutched in his left arm and his right lifted high into the thin air. There was an abandoned old car, a coffee shop and a few people taking pictures. Despite being one of the most important passes between Argentina and Chile, however, noticeably missing is any railroad link. Today, as trade in information is growing, bits and bytes can zoom across mountains, seas and plains. Even the mighty Aconcagua is unable to stop this digital traffic. From its inception, the internet has prompted people to claim that borders were being erased. People in one land can, in moments, be connected with other people in distant places they have never stepped foot in. Through the magic that is technology, people are supposedly being brought closer together.
But is technology really bringing people closer together? Is it really taking down borders and uniting people from different places and cultures? Or in some way is this technology facilitating the building of virtual barriers? In “The Daily We,” Cass Sunstein warned of the dangers of personalization through technology. (http://www.bostonreview.net/BR26.3/sunstein.html) While offering the promise of transcending limits of geography, the Internet has in many ways had the opposite effect. People now can personalize their music, their news, their entertainment options and even their network of friends. People can choose what and who they want included in their virtual universe – and likewise what and who they don’t. This creates a phenomenon of specialization and fragmentation, he argues, that can be just as dangerous as it is beneficial. While people may have the technology to unite, they are using it to post signs saying, essentially, keep out. Now the American in Idaho can make sure he gets news relevant to his life – he need not be bothered by reports of what is going on in other parts of the world. The Canadian in an internet café in Buenos Aires can sip cappuccinos while chatting with her friends back home about the tango she watched – she need not worry about trying to meet people in the strange country she is visiting. And the Chilean LLM student at Harvard Law School can be comforted by his virtual friendster network of Chilean friends across the globe. It seems a natural consequence of personalization that people will choose to surround themselves with the familiar and comfortable, rather than using the opportunity to reach out across borders and barriers to diversify. Sunstein calls this “group polarization.”
Perhaps, then, what is happening is that this technology is creating borders rather than destroying them. By polarizing groups and allowing people to tailor their surroundings the internet may be pulling diverse people apart rather than together.
posted by Brad Carrick at 11:59 PM
2 Comments:
As the 20th century progressed, technology changed the way we lived our lives, especially the way we were entertained. Radio and television were ways that we could use our mastery of science for entertainment. Both of these phenomena had the effect, however, to greater insulate individuals from other individuals, or in other words, to personalize entertainment. The days of entertainment though social engagement and civic organizations were gradually replaced by days watching TV at home alone.
The 21st century has seen this isolating trend intensify. IPod's, Personal DVD players, the world wide web, and instant messenger services (like MSN messenger), have turned entertainment into something you do by yourself. With the rise of internet services like Ebay, Amazon.com, and peapod.com, this trend can be taken to a whole new level. No malls, no supermarkets, just millions of isolated consumers.
Whether the internet and similar technology will create borders or bridge borders in the long term, we will not know for some time. We should all be mindful, however, of its isolating effects and its potential to drastically change the way we live for the worse.
I do not know about the rest of the World, but my experience and knowledge in Latin America is that technology, but especially internet, are helping to bring people together. It is true, it is not bringing all people together , as we cannot ask for internet and technology to carry out that task for us human beings. But is bringing people together that in other ways will be apart and alone. This is impacting not only the life of the Canadian tourist or the Chilean LLM, but also the lives of very poor people.
I know latin america well, not only because of studying it but because I am an LLM candidate from Argentina here at Harvard. In Latin America distribution of income is very unequal, and poverty affects around 50% of the population. Despite this, levels of basic literacy and education remain relatively high. Many of the poor people live in the cities or their margins, where access to technology and communications tend to concentrate. Because of the political importance of these few but very powerful cities, this concentration is very present in the minds of all people which conceive themselves as part of a Latin American country.
In this context, internet is helping people express, communicate and organize. As internet is expensive for massive private household consumption (with the cost of a computer being around $ 800 and internet about $ 50 per month), but with relatively low marginal cost for private massive provision of the service, in cities and towns there are many shops from which for $ 10 cents you have one hour access to a computer with internet. The immense amount of poor migrants from the country to the cities and from one country to another has also influenced to expand knowledge about internet, since these people have a huge demand for cheap communication that helps them keep regularly in touch with their families and communities.
The level of organization of these immigrant communities and the solidarity laces that they establish with other communities and groups in a likely situation, such as peasants, illegal workers, among other, has resulted in an expansion of the use of internet by so called social movements, who through it organize and share. There are literally thousands of web sites that have been created by very local, very poor and very apart groups of people that otherwise would had never known about their mutual existence. The amount of information production and exchange is really amazing. Of course, this usually happens even in the very margins of the powerful google, so you have to really search to find the entry points of a network similar to a parallel universe ;).
Despite this fact being an example of polarization, in the sense that access is somehow restricted to people who are not part of the specific group or community, I think this phenomenon is very important in terms of construction of democratic citizenship, since it is helping define more specifically the different constituencies and their desires. Through it, society more clearly shows its diversity, putting obstacles to totalitarian syntheses.
So I think Brad really is aiming correctly in his exploration about the impact of technology in latin American societies, when, for example, in past comments he says that the power of the internet and communications technologies for social organization is just becoming realized . Precisely, by allowing people to tailor their surroundings , internet is helping persons to define their own realities, familiar, collective, individual, in their own terms, instead of some people defining reality for all of us, apart or together.
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