15 thoughts on “Against Global Communication”

1. You make good points. In fairness to the commentator, it sounds like he meant connected in terms of having some vague understanding of the world system as a whole.

   That understanding would certainly suffer if global communications collapsed, even if there would be some benefits to reduced connectivity.

   I would never have been able to see this manifesto, for example. But I think that’s a different sort of communication than what you refer to.

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2. Hello,
   “What do I mean by a meaningful encounter? One which is enjoyed for what it is, rather than as a means to anything”
   What about those of us who enjoy encounters with others, journeys, tasks, or any other thing, when it is in pursuit of something? Is our enjoyment less valid?
   “I can’t be “globally connected”. To connect to even a fraction of the 7 billion people on this planet is inconceivable.”
   It depends how you define connection. You are connected globally by the web of effects of your actions. The products you choose to purchase, and their sources, for example, connect you to hundreds or thousands of people who you will never meet or exchange a word with.
   Connection and communication are not synonymous. But to discuss communication – there is, now, a greater opportunity for communication with people across the globe then there has been at any previous point in history, and this will continue to be the case, and continue to increase, for some years, at least. This opportunity creates possibilities which did not previously exist.
   My mother is a science fiction fan. As a child, she read stories in which people had communications devices that let them talk, instantly, to any one else, anywhere else. There was one house in her street that had a phone, she couldn’t even communicate with her relatives even in the next town at will. She lives in a different country to me, now, and we talk, email, share photos on facebook, and send each other text messages. It strikes me that, unless you can come up with some specific criteria for ‘isolation’ (and I think that personal isolation – a sense of isolation from the world generally lays outside the scope of this discussion, unless I’ve utterly misunderstood your post) there is significantly less isolation in the world today.
   I think that global connection between individuals, globe spanning communication, global dissemination of information can lead to a more global consciousness – more awareness at an individual level that the world is not infinite, that problems can’t simply be pushed away, at least, not without being pushed on to someone else. The fact that we can and are discussing these ideas is evidence of that.

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3. Yes, ill-thought-through phrase of mine. What I had in mind was the particularly global linkages our tech helps us achieve. For example, I’m on a list now where I’m talking to people deeply passionate about climate change communication; those people are mostly in America. Without the interwebnets, that wouldn’t be possible. It was also kind of a slightly sarcastic parroting of the idea that interwebnets = birth of a new gaian consciousness / epoch of connected human understanding. It equally might be a new form of tyranny and swarm-spawned falsehood, as several people have argued.

   We could do with particular language to talk about the different kinds of encounter we have (of which my encounters with Americans just mentioned counts.) Not sure if you ever got round to reading it, but the bits of research I’ve done into how language structures, stories and productivity have been entangled makes clear humans have never been isolated. The thing that makes us human – our ability to communicate (err… talk!) – may well have evolved alongside a dense, self-organising network that tied us directly to the land as well as each other – and tied the stories we tell directly to the way we made the land ours. So, no, people were never ‘isolated as ever’ in that sense.

   There’s also another key sense of isolation that doesn’t get talked about very much, and its the reason I argue for keeping long-distance trade links going at all costs, however minimal: the liberal peace hypothesis. Nations who trade don’t fight. The EU started after WW2 as a completely conscious attempt to use coal and steel trade links to end war, with a people the constructors knew were far too entrenched in nationalism to directly enter into any sort of compact that would last. It worked spectacularly. A global trade in ideas may do just as well, but I doubt it.

   (Of course you could argue nations who trade are often colonists, but I don’t think that’s necessary to it.)

   Isolation then might mean a retrenchment of all trade links, a re-emergence of narrow nationalism and everything that goes with it. Slightly soppy though it is, the series Jericho does that very well: a small US town, post-nuclear attack, completely cut off from the rest of the world, unable even to know why the bombs dropped. It ends up being under attack from a better-armed, neighbouring town jealous of its land resources.

   So there, of course, you can have a people amazingly united, enmeshed, as one – and yet maybe that makes them more likely, not less, to attack a neighbour.

   No easy answers. Still think God might be having a laugh. That’s the problem with being an atheist: it’s tricky being angry at something I don’t think exists, yet I still am.

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4. Also: yes, I’ve met that resistance to being labelled a node before. But it’s curious. I read your quote from Illich and think – well, that’s nice. Perhaps I speak in a different language to you, and this is your response? To tell me that, if I don’t conform to the way you want me to speak, you’ll just ignore me?

   I’m a (nascent) modeller, and I have a language that comes from that. I think that language can be rich, curious, full of twisty meanings. I have a lot to say about it. If anyone spoke to me like you say Illich did here, I’d think they were being pretty insulting. My language is my language; what should I think of someone who had no interest, who in fact dismissed me out of hand, for using what they considered incorrect terminology?

   One might respond: well, Illich is hardly attacking a persecuted minority; he’s resisting a language of power, of enclosure. It’s never that easy, though, is it? Words themselves can be colonised, annexed, set free, re-occupied by opposing forces. I just get a sense of being denied the right to speak on my own terms when I read this Illich quote.

   Perhaps that’s an overreaction – maybe he was fighting to keep communication human, flowing from his suspicion of the alienating power of technology. I don’t know. I’m just, y’know, expressing my feelinz n shizzle.

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5. The dangers of becoming a self-facilitating media node are outlined starkly here:

   http://thegestalt.org/simon/cunt/

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6. More seriously … this is an interesting developing discussion. I suppose that I, like most people, have always vaguely assumed more global ‘communication’ (I’m going to keep using the word for want of a better one) to be broadly a good thing. Here we are, after all, all speaking to one another on a website that has readers and writer on various continents. The Dark Mountain Project could not have existed in its present form a decade ago, and much of the work that Dougald does would not have been possible, as he says.

   But this is interesting because global communication/connections are assumed by our society to be a good thing per se: in other words, their existence in itself is thought to be a natural expression of progress and development. Two thoughts spring, slightly unformed, to my mind in response.

   One is that communication/connection can be very good or very bad, or much inbetween.It depends on what they are used for. How much, for example, has the internet really broadened human understanding, and how much has it simply allowed people to communicate with people who are much like them, in much the same way they communicated before? (And how much, we might asked, has it simply provided a massive porn and online gaming repository that dwarfs all other uses!)

   The internet is an outgrowth of people and thus of their cultural desires and assumptions. It can be both liberating and colonising. It can be used to plan political revolutions, but also, as Dougald implies, to enslave individuals to an idea of the necessity of permanent connectivity. This latter is what I see all around me more and more in this overdeveloped society: people addicted to being online; people sitting in pubs with their heads in their Blackberries; people answering pointless emails just because they can; people prioritising online communication over real, face to face conversation. It’s an obvious downward spiral of addiction and the overuse of technology.

   My second observation goes back to what I said under a previous post about people always having travelled. Perhaps we overestimate the vitalness of today’s networks, and also underestimate the strength and reach of previous ones. Reading and researching a lot about Anglo-Saxon England over the last year, for a book I’m working on, I’m struck by the connectedness that existed even during the so-called ‘Dark Ages.’ There is a word in Old English for ‘negro’(aelmyrca), for example; and the recently-discovered Staffordshire Hoard, which I spent four hours queueing to see a few weeks back, contains jewellery made from materials from several continents.

   I understand Dan’s point, and I appreciate the idea of God’s sick little joke too (I recommend reading R S Thomas for more of that, and for plenty of grim reflections on the power of ‘the Machine’ also: he wouldn’t have been surprised by where we are). But what if it were to fall – if peak oil or climate change were to constrict international travel, if the internet were to go down – we would be forced back to connecting in the old ways: as fast as a horse and cart can go. Maybe no bad thing. One of the many problems with our civilisation is surely its sheer speed. Enforced slowness could give us room to breathe.

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7. Again, thanks to all for this discussion.

   Where hackles have been rising around ‘communication’, this seems an understandable reaction to one of those words that has been hijacked to hollow out a genuine human need (for meaningful connection with others, through language and other means), and sell it back to us as an exchange-value commodity (which you can only have if you buy the latest iPhone, etc). As Dan says, though, the word itself is not to blame.

   Paul: you raise some really valuable points in questioning the intrinsic value we attach to global communication. It’s good to come back to the basic recognition that technologies are just tools: the good or bad uses to which they are put depend on the human beings who use them. We also adapt around our technologies: we become dependent upon them in ways both good and bad. While I share your worries about Blackberry addicts and the like, it’s still always worth pondering how (where) to draw the line, and who draws the line, between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ tech use.

   The post-collapse dilemma we seem to be circling around here is: if we are forcibly deprived of our current resource- and infrastructure- heavy global communications networks, how far will we (be able to) go in finding other ways to meet the dependencies they have created? I’m thinking of what most of us would agree is the good, worthwhile stuff: the ability to discuss issues with like-minded citizens on the other side of the world, to visit friends and family in far-flung places (or at least Skype them), to keep abreast of global events, to maintain international trade networks as a route to peace. I completely agree that we don’t need elaborate industrial technology to travel widely and exchange goods and ideas with others, as past ages of human history amply demonstrate. And we will doubtless maintain international connections in some form, no matter what the future holds. But the adaptive shift between being able to sit in my living room in Germany and email my friends in the USA, and then having to rely on boats, legs and the wheel if I want to communicate with them, is a pretty drastic one.

   Can we let go of some of these dependencies gracefully, or will we feel robbed? Which are really necessary to survival – by which I include cultural as well as physical survival? Are we assuming an ‘instant collapse’ scenario which would indeed leave a gaping hole in our demands and expectations, or are we more likely to pass through gradual shifts that we many not even notice, and which will see some dependencies fade away and be replaced by others more attuned to what future resources will support? Or, likelier still, a jumble of both and further kinds of experience.

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8. Thanks Catherine.

   Here’s something that strikes me. Regularly we are treated to studies put together by organisations like, for example, the New Economics Foundation, which purport to show both that having loads of stuff does not make us happy, and that societies or cultures with less stuff but more grounded and practised human values – community, family, place-belonging and the like – are often happier ones. To me, these studies seem to fit with what I see around me in the world. It seems pretty clear that whatever other advantages it may confer, instant connectivity of this kind does not lead to contentment or happiness.

   What I’ve never seen though, is any kind of study of what happens to a society when it moves – is forced to move – from having lots of stuff to having less. If you’ve never had something, you don’t miss it. if you have it and then lose it, you are likely to feel cheated or deprived. Growing up as a child, I had no access to superstores, the internet, cheap air travel, mobile phones, computer games or even video recorders. Now I have access to all these – take them away from me and I will feel poorer, more deprived. i will feel as if things have gone backwards.

   This is our dilemma. We can live quite well – very well – without receiving emails on the move, without Skyping people in Canada, without cheap skiiing holidays, without most of what the internet gives us. Insofar as their loss would open up opportunities to look around at what these things have taken from us, I would argue that their loss would mostly mean we could live better. But a phrase you use – ‘demands and expectations’ points to the problem. We are a society of expectant, demanding, largely unreflective consumers. We are also neophiles. We assume Steve Jobs’ latest tool must automatically be life-enhacing. We do not use technology wisely, but largely unquestioningly. We reject old forms for new ones simply because they are old. We don’t think ahead. We’re like a kid with a box of chocolates. We eat and eat and then we throw up. Then we cry and expect our parents to clean up.

   I doubt we can let go gracefully. Having said that, I’d consider a stumbling collapse over a fairly long period more likely than some sudden catastrophe. If we lose air flight due to oil prices or carbon restrictions it won’t happen overnight. If the internet shrinks it won’t happen overnight either. What might happen is that we are forced to start making distinctions between what we want and what we need. Personally I find this idea thrilling. For me, modern life is over-complex and over-insulated. I would love to strip it to the bones. I would love to be forced to by circumstances. But I reckon I’m in a minority. It won’t be pretty.

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9. Thanks Paul

   Basically, I’m right with you on a willingness (at least in theory) to strip away a lot of the over-complicated trappings of modern life. Guessing we’re about the same age, I also grew up without a lot of the stuff I now commonly treat as indispensable, and I credit this generational lag with what capacity I have to use e-technology in moderation, and do without it for a spell if I want or need to. But I guess I’m nagged by a possibly futile and unanswerable concern as to how those rude and annoying Blackberry addicts can be brought compassionately into this conversation. Also that yes, we can live perfectly well and probably more richly without constant email access or ski-ing holidays, but when the same resource / infrastructure breakdowns and limitations will mean some folks losing contact with close family on another continent, or having to alter our political horizons because we can no longer connect to human rights campaigns in, say, Palestine or Burma, then it’s a much tougher call to adjustment. But like you, I’m inclined to think this will be a longish, slowish, uneven process, so although tales of sudden catastrophe do exercise our imaginations, we’ll likely have a longer span in which to adapt and survive.

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10. Catherine,thank you for pointing out a dimension of globalisation that I often struggle with. It has forced and enabled people – depending on circumstances – to make a life far away from their physical roots. I am one of them – by complete choice, out of curiosity, desire to experience the unfamiliar, a nomadic streak, a certain ability to put down meaningful roots in a new place. I like many people now live in another country than my close family and am married to a man who has also left his homeland and most of his family on a different continent. As most things, this aspect of globalisation has two sides, the one of displacement, transcience, rootlessness, but also the one of exchange, increased understanding, bonds and bridges between cultures. Technology and infrastructure let us stay in touch with our families, connected to each other in the crazy web of the modern world.
    I guess, people have always moved around and migrated by choice like I have. Then it was just a much more profound decision, made in the knowledge that you would loose contact and possibly not see your family ever again. So in a way, the modern world turned the desire to leave ones home into an easier option, another privilige granted by civilisation.

    I, like Catherine, am not bothered about a ski holiday or hooking up to my email all the time, or having “entertainment on my finger tips” at every moment. But not being able to speak to my elderly parents every week or to my husband’s family in a village in Kenya on their mobile, or not to be able to go and see them on short notice if they needed us – all that would be heartbreaking.

    I am also entirely with Paul when he says that he would love for things to be stripped to the bone and to be forced by circumstances. But I am painfully aware that this would not just mean the loss of things that I know I can do without anyway – although I would miss even some of those. But it would require of me, and people close to me, a way to deal with the true loss of things we value deeply. And it’s not just about communication and travel, but even worse scenarios such as someone I love no longer being able to get medication they need to survive because infrastructures have broken down.
    These are the realities all of us who may be longing for some uncivilisation need to sit with and be clear about. For me that means an acceptance that civilisation has given a lot of us in privileged societies many frivolous, pointless and destructive things, but also many valuable things which we could stand to loose. It means an honest look at my sense of enitlement as human beings on a very profound level.
    I am glad that the discussions on this site are being had. Thank you to Paul and Dougald for starting this space. I just wanted to point out, it won’t be pretty even for those of us who welcome a stripping to the bones.

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11. Daniela,

    You are right to highlight this. For me, it gets to the heart of things. None of us knows what is likely to happen as decline sets in: how far it might go, how bad it might get, but now is certainly the time to try as hard as we can to be honest and clear-headed about what is worth saving. It is easy, as you intimate, to look forward excitedly to the end of celebrity magazines and motorway traffic jams. This stuff is easy. But what are the bottom lines?

    For me, probably the most obvious unalloyed good of modern civilisation is healthcare and hygiene. There are plenty of excesses – nobody needs cosmetic surgery on the NHS, and plenty of pharmaceutical drugs are a corporate con – but none of us would willingly give up life-saving medicines or operations. Neither would we want to be without sanitation and sewage services, for example (in urban areas at least) or vaccines.

    It comes down to thinking about what is worth saving, and how it can be saved in a time of contraction, in some form at least. I’ve had inter-continental relationships myself in the past, but I’m afraid I think they’re something of a luxury of the jet age. Doubtless ‘global communication’ will still be possible in fifty or a hundred years time in some form or another; I’m sure we won’t lose the internet or the phone network, at least in some form. But the idea of hopping on a plane to see parents or lovers on a different continent may well seem an absurd outgrowth of the past age of excess. We’ll all have to make decisions.

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12. I’m so bad at keeping up with all the great discussions which happen on here! Sorry, everybody.

    A couple of things:

    (1) I’d like to carry on this discussion face to face with those of you who are coming to UNCIVILISATION. I’m going to add a discussion about this to the timetable for the pre-festival Dark Mountain Camp.

    (2) Dan – I realised after I posted this that it read more harshly than it was meant. It wasn’t intended as an attack on your earlier comment, but as a line of thought provoked by it. Also, I was writing in the context of the many conversations we’ve had over the years about this kind of thing, but that’s not obvious in a public forum like this.

    (3) Tim – “What about those of us who enjoy encounters with others, journeys, tasks, or any other thing, when it is in pursuit of something? Is our enjoyment less valid?” No, of course not! That’s why, in the second half of the sentence you quoted, I talked about how I think practical activities may become more meaningful. (And I’m not trying to offer a final word on what constitutes a “meaningful encounter”, or anything else – all of this is just my own attempt at a definition that’s helpful for me, shared on the basis that others might also find it helpful.)

    More generally, the point I don’t think I made clearly is that this whole way of thinking about ourselves in terms of “communication” is astonishingly new and different to the way people have thought about themselves over time. For people of Illich’s generation, this was a new and strange vocabulary, borrowed from technology, which seemed to distort our understanding of what it means to share time with each other, to talk together, to experience the presence of another person.

    Whether or not Illich was right to challenge people using this way of talking, it’s worth recognising that this vocabulary is very recent, wasn’t obvious to people who had grown up pre-1960s (or so), and implies a certain way of looking at the world which has rapidly become so normal that we think of these terms as ahistorical and obvious. For me, questioning the ways of looking at the world implicit in particular ways of talking is one of the forms of cultural enquiry which Dark Mountain invites us to.

    I’m still not expressing this very clearly, I’m afraid. I’ll come back to it again – but I really hope some of you are able to be there to carry on these conversations face-to-face in Wales.

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13. I have recently moved to a place I don’t have television reception and into a shared house. For this reason I talk more meaningfully to the people around me than I was often in the habit of doing before. This is good, and is one of the reasons I feel much calmer, less psychic pollution to where I used to live. I also meet a lot of people in my work. This too feels pretty good. It is face to face contact and it feels like face to face contact, and so, on this score, I certainly understand what Illich means.

    I have two concerns with the internet and more distanced forms of communication. One is that these people don’t fully form themselves in my mind. I can feel affection for them, respect, “linking” of all varieties, but I find it is somehow contingent, not enduring as it would be if I had met them face to face, even if I had had less stimulating conversation. Too often, I find myself acting in uncharacteristic ways. I find I can be more sarcastic, facetious, distant. This is almost certainly down to quirks of my own character rather than or as much as the form of communication itself, but still, I do feel that such contextual frailties may not be so uncommon, and that such communication is not as meaningful.

    This need not be a problem. Not every encounter need be meaningful, just as not every conversation need not be about world problems or serious topics. The problem is that I find too, and in this I am certainly not alone, that such communication can nevertheless be addictive and can, like Dougald’s ever-growing inbox (something I think we can all relate to), seem to demand more and more of our time, at the expense of others.

    The greater problem, then, is that the more we can choose to choose our friends and acquaintances, and the more we can, for example, literally tick boxes to find potential mates (must have brown hair, must not smoke, must like rabbits but not chinchillas), with friends in other countries, the less connected we will be to those physically around us. A form of community that must be the basis of civilised life, as far as I am concerned, dies out, with the result that fewer and fewer people are in Dougald’s privileged position of meeting so many people face to face every day. The result is decommunalisation. The result is terrifying.

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