Across the pond

The problem of being a blogger, like the problems of being a daily newspaper journalist, is that quite often when you read what you wrote yesterday you don’t always agree with yourself. That has been my experience today. I don’t want to withdraw anything I said about the Tower of Babel, because computing has become so specialised that computer experts do not know and understand the language that other computer experts are using. And for the billions of non-computer experts computer code is even more difficult to understand than Chinese.

Nevertheless the collective inventativeness of computer experts has made the world wide web possible. And the web is the most important invention in the history of communications since Caxton invented the printing press, way back in 1494. The implications of the web are much greater than the later inventions of the telephone, radio and television and the mobile telephone. The printing press, radio and television made one to many communications possible. The telephone made one to one communications possible, From deepest Dorset I can talk daily to my children in London and Colchester and relatives in New Zealand. I can even talk to George Bush in the White House, if I can persuade his Press Secretary’s secretary, that he might be able to stem the decline in his poll ratings by giving an interview to The Daily Novel.

But the web is the first human invention which is equally good for one to many and one to one communications. Millions of people have set up web sites for family groups, friendship groups, special interest groups of many kinds. The web is equally good for making it possible for anyone who sets up a web site to communicate to the many. As examples like the Drudge Report and the Baghdad Blogger demonstrate, it is possible for one person to get a readership all around the world that is greater than that of Britain’s most successful down market tabloids.

(Such examples are the exceptions rather than the rule. And as I have argued in previous blogs the web is increasingly dominated by the mass media groups, telling us the news they want us to hear, and the giant companies, selling us the products that they want us to buy. But nevertheless it is now possible, which it was not before, for any ordinary citizen to get heard by a mass audience, and without relying on a newspaper, radio or television station to filter his comments.)

How best to characterise this new phonomenon? The Global Village is not the right metaphor. The village metaphor implies that everyone in this community knows each other, which is clearly not true of the web.

A much more appropriate metaphor is the Global City. If you key Global City into Google you will find that Global Cities are those big cities of the world which are international, including the two I know best, London and New York. They are places where millions of people live in close proximity. They could not be more different from the villages, which are small communities which are geographically separate.p>

But human beings maintain their sanity in these huge cities, by making their neighbourhoods, like Greenwich Village in New York and Gospel Oak in London into ‘villages’, where they know their neighbours.

These neighbourhoods have no political reality. Although there is a ward, Gospel Oak, which votes for councillors in local government elections, this includes part of the neighbourhood, ‘Gospel Oak’.
And some parts of the Gospel Oak ward would not identify with the neighbourhood, ‘Gospel Oak’.

The political power over Gospel Oak is rooted in three hierarchies. At the local government level it is exercised by Camden Council, itself a merger of three very different areas, which includes the posh folks of Hampstead as well as the mainly working class folk of Camden and Kentish Town. The next level up, is London, where the reins of political power have just been transferred from a rather left wing Labour leader, Ken Livingston, into the hands of one of the Conservative Party’s new Old Etonian leaders, Boris Johnson. And by a vote ol all the councils of London.

But, of course, many of the decisions which crucially affect the lives of Gospel Oakers are made at the top level, the national government.

Metaphors are useful in jolting the thought patterns. And the Global Village metaphor has been useful in alerting us to radical changes in communication patterns. But it is time to move on

So let’s say instead the web is a Global City. And it gives human beings the opportunity of creating virtual neighbourhoods, with other human beings on the other side of the earth. But this has no political reality.

Citizen journalists and bloggers, thanks to the web, can establish virtual neighbourhoods, and a good thing too. But it does not change the political reality.

Who holds the power in the Global City?

First, comes the big companies, who have the economic power and the techincal expertise to dominate the web.

Second, comes Governments, some of whom are democratic, but many of whom, are not. Who have powerr to limit and regulate the power of the big companies.

Next, come the professionals. Including the journalists, who transmit news from one part of the world to another, and the computer experts, who write the many languages which get the information from the biggest power holders (big companies and governments) onto the computers owned by the multitude.

Citizen journalists and bloggers can publish much more easily than the Poor Peope’s Press and the pamphleteers and story tellers of previous centuries. But the political and economic realities have not changed that much. The Sun, The Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail still sell millions more copies than The Times, The Guardian and the Daily Telegraph. And although the web circulations of the posh papers are much greater, the brute economic reality is that money to pay the journalists is made by the print sales and print advertisements.