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THE MOBILE AGE, PART 2: Globalism
There will be hardly a person who reads this – particularly among those who do so mid-flight – for whom the characterization won’t be immediately familiar. We blend home and away to meet our various needs, so much so that we create an entirely hybrid experience. Travellers on business voyage far afield, some of you for epic stretches of time. Accumulated professional person-years are spent in place-less locations of transition: airports, hotel conference rooms and the like. But come the weekend, there is our road warrior in his or her backyard, barbecuing something nice picked up at the weekend farmers’ market, chatting with friends about new restaurants in Dubai or wherever they’ve been. There is no huge culture shock in this, for either the one who’s been away or the one who has stayed home. We assume these patterns. Tourism may offer even more strident proof, where the heroic has become almost routine. Traffic jams on the way up to Machu Picchu. Wait lists at Everest. And, in either case, summit experiences that may well include a phone call home. That shrinking of the distances will be fairly obvious to most of us. But the hybrid experience of mobility also points to a more significant evolution in the way we experience movement and cultural variation. During the modern era, our nomads and refugees crossed a world on which culture was associated with particular places. Culture might be thought of as having been painted onto the landscape itself. For those in motion, these cultural colours changed (the nomadic ideal). For those stationary, the cultural colour was stable (the holy grail of settlement). In the hybrid settler/nomad experience, however, that relationship between culture and geographic location has been largely decoupled. We combine a more fluid sense of what is home and what is away, yes. But we also do so in an environment where the culture we experience in moving place to place is as unrooted as we are. So we can carry “home” with us when we go “away,” but so too can the away find us more readily in our homes and change our experiences there. To reflect that reality, I suggest that a new dimension be added to the set of possible mobility experiences. It can be visualized easily by approaching our model of mobility types from a different angle (see diagram below). |
