Despite having left my academic days far behind me (such leisurely undertakings as reading, studying and following one singular train of thought at a time make a rapid exit at the entry of children), I had a flashback to McLuhan’s theory of the ‘global village’ and a relative understanding of it, at least in a South African context.
So, many years ago we were running rampant through undeveloped fields or velds, depending on where we lived. We had acquired the basic skills necessary to get by and had rudimentary means of transport, and figured out what we generally could and couldn’t eat. We were tribal beings living in rural areas and had very simple ways of life. “Work” was probably in the field or veld just down the way from the hut, or at the cattle shed behind the hut. We didn’t have to go far to get there, didn’t have the stress of daily commuter-type travel.
As time went by we went through a few hundred years of urbanisation where we all flocked to the cities, to where ‘it was all happening’, to where the money was to be made. Some people moved their families with them, others left their families in the rural areas and visited them when they could. Today not many of us want to stay in the city.
Now that we have cast our concrete hand on the areas known as towns and cities, and literally bled them dry, the novelty has worn off. How we as a South African community have responded is to bring the city to us. We now perform those functions, formerly reserved for the metropolitan web of cities and towns, inside of our comfort zones. Is this a return to what we, after centuries of modern evolution, originally fled from? Did we swop the urbanity of primal life for the sophistication of the cosmopolitan? Yes and no. it is here that we begin to see a split. Has the convenience of home-run business operations come at the cost of our comfort zones? We have managed somehow to ‘let in’ the modern evils that your average cluster compound has been created to inhibit.
And yes, while McLuhan’s global village is also concerned with the omnipresence of communication technologies and the faster connections between people from all corners, it is also a reference to the pervasion of the capitalist spirit in every sphere of life. While the Blackberry and the laptop are arguably physical extensions of modern man, extensions of the sensory potential of the human being, they are also intrusions. People who work from the home environment will tell you about how much more convenient everything is, how much more flexible everything is. That is only because things that may not have been entirely acceptable at the office, are now completely within limits at home. The shape-shifting of boundaries and the emotional displacement of the human spirit are not very stable or stabilising factors when played with together.
Did pre-urbanised man worry about his crop of mielies when he was sitting in front of his fire with the family around him? Probably. Did this cause him stress-induced insomnia, road rage or weight gain? Probably not; our social development into the value affixed to family time was completely different then. He was probably a patriarchal arsehole of an Alpha Male and didn’t share his fire or thoughts with anyone.
Ok, so maybe we can’t compare properly, but the point is that we have come around full circle and Mcluhan’s theory of the global village is developing at a rapid pace in South African society here lifestyles have been become ‘clustered’ and estates have morphed into self-containing ecosystems which function without completely autonomously- little worlds existing within their own frames of reference. One globe of villages.
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