mercurious

Sporting provocative bullet points, this essay may not be new news, but it speaks refreshing truths while standing the test of time.

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This scholarly paper by was originally presented as a talk for the conference Mobile Communication: Social and Political Effects, held on April 29-30, 2003 in Budapest, and is collected in Mobile Democracy: Essays on Self, Society and Politics. We’ve come upon this text during regular research in pursuit of an interesting range of academic treatments concerning critical viewpoints of mobile media and electronic culture. The “Global Nomads in the Digital Veldt” essay stands out in the collection for its succinct expressions that thoughtfully document complex social changes in deceptively simple terms. Despite the arcane literary device in the title, the writing is downright accessible and the core message articulates a cogent framework for thinking about mobile technologies and society.

Meyrowitz’s use of the Veldt to encapsulate his message is regrettable. He plays off Marshall McLuhan’s coinage of “global village,” contrasting it with a reconceptualization of cyberspace as a primordial hunter-gatherer society. We agree with the idea, and we can even visualize the metaphors. But we’re belly-aching on the word-play, the sprechen-spiel. Perhaps it feels hokey and detached while attempting to persuade us with trite McLuhan soundbyte style textual imaging. Our cover image◊ might suggest our frustration with attempts to photo-illustrate the idea of a global nomad in the digital veldt. We also succumb to the tendency to pepper titles and blurbs with metaphors that amuse with clever yet esoteric cultural literacy for readers — something catchy that sums up an idea with a wordy picture.

Even for an academic paper, however, the reference is unnecessarily obscure, and diverts readers away from the simple elegance of his central point. That said, his word choice motivated us to conduct some cursory research into the term veldt, and so we sidebar now in order to reveal subtle ironies that redeem his transgression. Our electronically nomadic research trail begins with the Wikipedia→, jumping off to a copy of the Ray Bradbury short story→ of the same title, off to a quick cheat using a study guide→, and ending up at veldt.com→, which upon closer look, manages to poetically reinforce Meyrowitz’s metaphor. When you perform a View Source on the empty page, you discover the anonymous author’s epitaph embedded as a comment in the HTML source code:

veldt.com is dead.
old, useful content may come back to life, when i find the time.
i may post at veldt.vox.com
but no guarantees.

it’s not been all that fun, blogosphere.

Clearly, the proprietor of veldt.com has wandered on to greener pastures, perhaps disenchanted with the promise of online social networks only to find the veldt a hostile playground of disillusionment rather than the abundant network of social connections and benevolent discourse. There is rewarding irony in this discovery when you connect it linguistically with the use of Veld, the low German form of the word, which means, according to Wikipedia, at retrieval:

[...] a place that is generally overgrown or has gone fallow, such as a thicket or a field that has become overgrown from lack of maintenance.

Comparing the term “Digital Veldt” with the vernacular that emerged through unfortunate force of popular lexicon — “blogosphere” — we can’t decide which is worse. In fact, no one has even come close to coming up with a quality term for describing the electronic human condition, and do it with a pleasing aesthetic and semiotic.

Now this diversion aside, it’s still not clear after re-reading “Global Nomads” why the author selected the Veldt to image the lonely wasteland of electronic communications. Despite misgivings with the literary references, the essay still stands as an important discussion of how electronic media fundamentally alters humanity and its societies. We’ll get over our squabbling and get to the point by quoting the core passage of the essay where Professor Meyrowitz states his uniquely succinct observations:

From “Global Nomads”

A key feature of the electronic era is that most physical, social, cultural, political, and economic boundaries have become more porous, sometimes to the point of functionally disappearing. This seemingly simple proposition has far-reaching significance and implications. The relative products, services, and channels of communications have been leaking into each other. While the key change is literally happening “at the margins” of all social systems, the change is not simply something happening “out there.” As the margins change, the contents of all forms of human organization change. As a result, we are experiencing a dramatic shift in our sense of locale, identity, time, values, ethics, etiquette, and culture.

The increasing functional permeability of boundaries — combined with the continued physical existence of most of those same boundaries — explains the contradictory feelings we have in the early 21st century: Many things still seem the same, and yet everything is somehow changed. In our electronic landscape, we have thinner distinctions:

• between here and there
• between now and then (and yet to be)
• between public and private
• between male and female spheres
• between child and adult realms of experience
• between leaders and average citizens
• between office and home
• between work and leisure
• between business and customers
• between users and producers
• between news and entertainment
• between one field or discipline and another
• between different media genres
• between simulated and real
• between copies and originals
• between direct and indirect experience
• between biology and technology
• between marginal and mainstream

Your thirst for additionally succinct world-changing bullet points will be quenched, as the author delivers another set of bullets that further illustrate twenty-first century living. At least scan for the passage where he connects his idea of global nomads to September 11, 2001.

Response

More than any other essay in the collection, “Digital Nomads” provokes us enough to seriously consider undertaking the multimedia production of photo-illustrating all of these bullet-points, a sort of electronic media peer review. Or at least, we’re interested in annotating the quotation with commentary hyperlinks. We’re not through with this one yet. Too many unresolved considerations remain.

Credits

Essay quotations © 2003 by Joshua Meyrowitz.
Photo by Teseum via Flickr. Photo-illustration by mercurious via Creative Commons licensing.