Table of Contents Introduction (outline only) Disconnect
Bits: potentially mobile, practically static
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- Cosmopolitanism
Bits: potentially mobile, practically static (Note: I've got a structural issue here. I'd like to present a perception of globalization of bits that's wrong, much as assuming that all goods are made in China or that immigration is at an all-time high. I don't have that killer story, someone announcing that we're linked by a social nervous system - http://www.forbes.com/2009/03/09/internet-innovations-hive-technology-breakthroughs-innovations.html - or have an unprecedented global awareness. So, for now, I'm using a placeholder story: the Mitchco ad from IBM. Far from perfect, grateful for other inputs.) It's dark in the conference room, where stern-faced Japanese businessmen confront an intractable problem: their sole supplier wants too much money for valves! One of the youngest executives, the only man seated in front of a computer, announces that they've gotten a online bid from "Mitchco" for half the price. "Where are they?", asks the boss. The young exec answers, "Texas", and we cut to a dusty machine shop, where Mitch, in his "Mitch & Co." coveralls looks at a screen and announces in a drawl, "Domo arigato." The ad, aired in 2000, advertised IBM's eCommerce division which offered "solutions for a small planet". That small planet is connected not only by the planes and container ships that deliver Mitch's valves to the Japanese factories - it's made possible by the flow of bits that allow Mitch to learn about the opportunity in Japan and bid on the contract. While all ten of Friedman's "ten flatteners" - the factors he believes have brought about a flat world - have an information component, five are explicitly about the flow of bits: the launch of Netscape, the emergence of workflow software, the power of "uploading" to collaborative projects like Wikipedia, the "in-forming" power of search engines, and the ubiquity of mobile data devices, which Friedman calls "The Steroids." As a result, information from all over the world is accessible at an unprecedented level: "Never before in the history of the planet have so many people – on their own – had the ability to find so much information about so many things and about so many other people."lxi Friedman's invocation of Netscape - the now defunct first commercial web browser - is a reminder how rapidly the technical landscape can change. Joshua-Michéle Ross, VP of technical publisher O'Reilly Media, argues that the real transformation is coming from social media: "The rise of 'social' technologies - such as wikis, blogs, Twitter, SMS and social networks - means that the barriers to participation across the planet (in terms of the cost, access and skills required) are rapidly approaching zero. As ever more people get connected, we see an acceleration in the way the Internet is used to coordinate action and render services from human input. We are witnessing the rise of a social nervous system."lxii The international flow of bits invites us to consider a cosmopolitan future, where Texas-based mechanics learn Japanese to conduct business with their new partners and where our social nervous system makes us as aware of protests in Iran as we are of events in our own neighborhoods. But as with the promises of globalized atoms and people, it's worth looking closely at the gaps between the potential and actual globalization of bits. If technological advances have increased the potential mobility of atoms and people, it's utterly transformed the potential mobility of bits. An international phonecall cost $2.43 a minute in 1970. As powerful fiberoptic networks replaced overloaded copper ones and rival providers offered competitive services, that cost fell to $0.14 a minute in 2004, and the volume of international phone traffic rose from 100 million minutes in 1970 to 63.6 billion in 2004.lxiii In more recent years, technology hasn't just made communications cheaper - it's made the previously impossible seem routine. Once a month, I chat with a friend in Budapest over Skype. Using the video cameras embedded in our laptop computers, we show off our children to each other and they babble to each other, separated by five thousand miles but connected by internet connectivity that's too cheap to meter. This sort of ad-hoc, home-based international videoconferencing wasn't just prohibitively expensive - it wasn't possible for even the wealthiest. Twenty years ago, the average citizen had access to a few broadcast television channels, each of which was broadcast from a transmitter within a few hundred kilometers. Now, armed with a small satellite dish, an interested viewer in Ghana can tune into programming from dozens of nations. An aficionado of international news twenty years ago frequented newsstands in major cities, waiting for stale copies of Le Monde or the Times of India. Those newspapers are now available online, instantaneously, for anyone with internet access and the inclination to access them. Newspapermap.com offers links to more than 10,000 newspapers from more than 100 countries, accessible online and machine translated from more than a dozen languages. And access to information online goes well beyond newspapers. As thousands of Americans discovered during the January 2011 Tahrir Square protests, Al Jazeera English is available online, as are streaming video services from Japan's NHKWorld, France24, Russia's RT and dozens of others.lxiv If the global flow of atoms is constrained by trade restrictions and by taste, and the flow of people by employment opportunities and immigration laws, the flow of information is constrained by our interest and attention. Much as we imagine a flat world of migration visiting Dubai or a flattened supply chain in the aisles of Walmart, looking at the richness of news available across international borders invites us to imagine a world where we're deeply connected to information and perspective from around the world. The reality is more complicated. The Times of India has a print run of 3.1 million copies, giving it the largest circulation of any English language daily newspaper in the world. The online edition of the paper has an audience of roughly 9.1 million users in an average month. 1.1 million of those users are in the United States, and advertising firm Doubleclick estimates that 0.4% of all American internet users visit the website for the Times of India over the course of a month. It's fair to assume that the advent of online newspapers has dramatically increased the US readership of the Times of India from the days when reading the paper required it to be flown in from Mumbai. Americans generate about 800 million page views a month to large international news websites like the Times of India. In a theoretical "flat world" with attention distributed equally between all corners of the internet, like the one Jeffrey Frankel proposes we consider in terms of trade, Americans, who represent only 11.2% of the Internet's users, would get 88.8% of their news from other countries. In practice, we get a lot less. Doubleclick, an online ad company that's become part of Google, publishes statistics for the month web traffic and "reach" - the percentage of internet users in a country who visit a particular site in a month - for tens of thousands of news sites. Because Doubleclick tracks traffic in more than sixty countries, and because they categorize sites by topic, it's possible to ask what 100 news sites are most visited by Americans or South Koreans, and whether those sites are domestic or international. Americans consume a lot of British news - the BBC is the 8th most popular news site in the US, and UK papers The Guardian, The Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Times and the Sun all have substantial US audiences. The Times of India ranks #94th in popularity with US news readers, and is the first non-UK, non-US source on the list of news sites popular in the US. Of the 9.87 billion page views Americans generated to those top 100 news sites in July 2010, 93.4% of page views were to sites hosted in the US, while 6.6% was to international sites like the BBC and the Times of India. One possible response to this statistic is to conclude that Americans are notoriously parochial and less likely to read international news sources than their cosmopolitan brethren in, say, France. Quelle suprise! 98% of traffic to the top 50 news websites in France goes to domestic sites, 2% to international sites. In China, the first non-Chinese site to appear on a list of top news sites is Reuters.com in 62nd place, followed by the Wall Street Journal, in 75th and the BBC at 100th. Of the ten nations with the largest online populations that AdPlanner checks, the US ranks as one of the least parochial nations, and no nation looks at more than 8% international content in their top 50 news sites. (Nigeria now ranks 10th in terms of total internet users, but Doubleclick doesn't provide data for Nigeria, so our set includes South Korea, #11.) 
It makes sense that linguistically isolated nations like Japan or South Korea would read few international sources. It's more surprising that Indians and Brits don't read more of each other's content, or visit US news sites. A shared language offers no guarantee of interest in each other's media. Spanish-speaking nations in South America show little or no interest in reading each other's news or in online news from Spain. There is often interest in news across borders from smaller nations that share a language and a border with a larger nation: internet users in Taiwan and Hong Kong read a lot of Chinese news, and Canadians read American news more avidly than vice versa. And interest in specific topics, especially technical topics, seems to draw people to read across borders. Aside from the BBC, which shows up in virtually every country's media profile, technical websites like C|Net are the sites most likely to attract international readers. So who are the 1.1 million Americans reading the Times of India? They're an advertisers dream: the majority report an annual income of over $75,000 and 70% have either a bachelor's or graduate degree, which means they are wealthier and better educated than the online audience of the New York Times. And they're very loyal, generating 60 million page views, and visiting the site 11 times a month. In contrast, the Miami Herald's site has a similar monthly audience of 1.1 million, but those readers generate only 16 million monthly page views. The vast majority of these avid readers are members of the 2.8 million strong community of "non-resident Indians", a term the Indian government uses to include Indians living in the US on short-term visas as well as those who've become US citizens. The Times of India example suggests that it's too simple to say that Americans get 6.6% of their news from international news sites. Some Americans, like non-resident Indians living in America, get a lot of their news internationally; these internally focused readers make the rest of us look more cosmopolitan than we actually are. Internet users in the United Arab Emirates seem, on average, uninterested in domestically produced media - more than 50% of internet traffic is to sites outside the country. Many of the most popular news sites for users in the United Arab Emirates are sites that publish in Malayalam, the dominant language of Kerala, India. More than three-quarters of a million Malayalam speakers live in UAE as guest workers, and they're anxious to stay in touch with their home communities by reading newspapers online. Bits that cross national borders aren't always a sign of interest in unfamiliar cultures - they can be a sign of how powerful and unchanging linguistic and cultural loyalties actually are. It's not surprising that the Internet hasn't magically caused most Americans to get their daily news from the Times of India, or that Indian Americans are disproportionately interested in Indian news. We pay attention to what we care about, and especially, to who we care about. While the Internet makes it cheaper and easier to seek information from anywhere in the world, it doesn't necessarily change who and what we care about. Information may flow globally, but our attention tends to be highly local and highly tribal - we more deeply about those we share a group identity with and much less about a distant "other". If the flow of bits is constrained by interest and attention, it raises an uncomfortable question: are we getting enough information about the rest of the world to thrive in a world of increasing connection? We need this information both to thrive in a connected world, landing international business contracts like Mitch or responding to threats like SARS. We need to become digital cosmopolitans. One of the ironies of the globalization Friedman and others celebrate is that it's occurring at the same time as many of us are getting less news from the rest of the world via traditional journalism. Britain's Media Standards Trust analyzed the UK's four largest "broadsheet" newspapers and discovered that the number of international news stories in the papers fell 39% in absolute terms between 1979 and 2009. It's fair to assume that cost-cutting has led to the shutdown of some foreign news bureaus. But newspapers were also responding to what they perceived to be their audiences' needs - all four papers grew dramatically between 1979 and 2009, adding pages dedicated to sports, celebrities and other soft news. The result - international news decreased from 20% of the newshole of these papers to 11%.lxv Television news in the US has seen a similar, dramatic drop in international coverage. 78% of Americans report getting news from local television stations, and 73% from national broadcast or cable new coverage. Studies of American television news in the late 1970s and early 1980s report over 30% of stories were international.lxvi Working with data from the Vanderbilt Television Archive and the Project on Excellence in Journalism, Alisa Miller, a journalism scholar and president of Public Radio International, estimates that 10% of stories on national news broadcasts and 4% of local news broadcasts were international news stories.lxvii Despite the sharp fall in television news coverage in the US, audiences don't seem especially concerned. A survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 63% of Americans believe they're getting sufficient international news, while only 32% saw a need for more coverage.lxviii Respondents wanted more coverage of state and local news, of religion and spirituality, and of scientific discovery. More than half of Americans say they follow international news closelylxix, which is hard to reconcile with data that shows a shrinking newshole for international stories in newspapers and television. Some percentage of Americans are seeking out international news via public radio and via the internet, though our data on visits to international news sites suggests that the population motivated to seek out different stories and perspectives is quite small. Is the internet filling the gaps in international coverage caused by shrinking newsrooms and discontinued foreign bureaus? Or do we just imagine that it is? Are we unconcerned about a shrinkage in international news because we imagine ourselves as more informed, connected and cosmopolitan than we actually are? We would not be the first to do so. It's always been easier to declare ourselves a "citizen of the universe" (Κόσμος - universe, Πόλις - city) than to actually live in a wide world. Cosmopolitanism For a guy who could travel only by foot or ship, Diogenes the Cynic managed to see a large fraction of the world known to the ancient Greeks. Exiled from his native Sinope (on the Black Sea coast of contemporary Turkey) for counterfeiting or defacing currencylxx, Diogenes found himself living penniless on the streets of Athens, and later in Corinth. Following the teachings of Antisthenes, Diogenes became an ascetic, probably an excellent career move, as he'd already been relieved of his earthly wealth. Accounts of his life are sparse and resemble legend as much as history, but most accounts agree that Diogenes was homeless and slept sheltered under the awnings of Athenian temples in a wooden tub. In "Lives of the Eminent Philosophers" by Diogenes Laërtius, Diogenes comes off as a cross between Woody Allen and Old Dirty Bastard, delivering memorable quips and behaving inappropriately. Found masturbating in the agora, Diogenes didn't apologize for his behavior, but noted that he wished it were similarly easy to relieve his hunger by rubbing his belly. Termed "the dog" by some contemporaries (the Greek word for dog, κύων, is the root of the term "cynic"), Diogenes reacted to being tossed food scraps at a banquet as a dog would: by urinating on his benefactors. While many historians see him as a philosophical innovator and an important critic of Plato, others view him as a colorful madman. Diogenes's declaration of cosmopolitanism was hardly representative of mainstream classical Greek thought. Instead, it one of the most radical declarations of a radical thinker. Virtually everyone in Diogenes's universe identified closely with the city-state in which they were born and resided - Diogenes was probably not asserting a global identity as much as he was rejecting the key social identifier of his age, a man's place of origin. It's only in very recent times that most people have had the opportunity to interact with people from different parts of the world. In 1800, 97% of the world's population lived in rural areas. While some may have encountered other cultures through visiting merchants or other travelers, most lived their lives never encountering anyone who spoke a different language or worshiped a different god. The 3% that lived in cities before 1800 had the rare opportunity to talk to, trade with and worship alongside people who had different origins, languages and gods. While those cities were the first spaces where lived cosmopolitanism was actually possible, it's likely we overestimate the degree of cultural mixing in early cities. Historian Margaret Jacob considers descriptions of the stock exchanges in Europe's most cosmopolitan cities in the 18th century. While the market brought together traders from throughout Europe and beyond, she notes that contemporary accounts make clear that divisions between groups were firm and definite: "A 1780s manuscript sketch of the floor of the London exchange made by a vising French engineer suggests that by then national identifties competed with professional as well as religious ones. The sketch of the floor plan shows the familiar groupings - 'place hollandaise,' 'place des Indes Orientales,' 'Place Française' - but also new ones: 'The place of the Quakers,' 'the place of the Jews'..." The traders may have been become Londoners, but they were first and foremost identified by the origins and faiths. Jacobs notes that "lived cosmopolitanism" has always been more difficult than merely building spaces where people from different backgrounds come together.lxxi The 18th century London stock market sounds curiously like a contemporary multicultural city. We might think of New York, where residents know that Brighton Beach is home to thousands of Russian speakers, Flushing to a large Chinese community, Borough Park to Orthodox and Hassidic Jews. The promise of the contemporary city is that it's possible to encounter different foods, customs and ideas through incidental encounters with neighbors, or the conscious decision to take a subway ride to a different corner of town. (In chapter six, we'll explore in detail whether this sort of cosmopolitan encounter is more imagined than real.) Celebrated social theorist Robert Putnam has studied trust and civic participation in American communities, most famously in his study of social capital, "Bowling Alone". His recent Social Capital Benchmark Survey suggests that contemporary Americans have a long way to go before they embrace the multicultural promise of a city like New York. In Putnam's study, "people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to 'hunker down'." They are less likely to vote, to work on community projects, give to charity or volunteer than Americans in less diverse cities. They have less confidence in government's ability to solve problems, fewer friends and a lower perceived quality of life. Earlier sociological theories suggested that contact between ethnic groups either led to improving social relations or conflict between groups - "contact theory" versus "conflict theory". Putnam believes what we see in American cities points to a "constrict theory", a tendency to shy away from contact and engagement when presented with diversity.lxxii Ghanaian-American philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah has lived a life that has challenged him to think through the possibilities and challenges of cosmopolitanism. Raised between Kumasi and London, the child of a British art historian and a Ghanaian politician, Appiah has worked to explain the intricacies of Ashanti belief systems to western philosophers, and his identity as an out gay man to his relatives in Kumasi. Cosmopolitanism, Appiah argues, is about much more than learning to tolerate those who have values and beliefs that differ from ours. We might tolerate practices that offend us by ignoring them or turning away from them - some of Appiah's relatives may tolerate his homosexuality by not talking about the subject with him. But this tolerance can lead to the hunkering down Putnam worries about, where our response to difference is to constrict our encounters with the world. Cosmopolitanism is about embracing what's rich, productive and creative about this difference. For Appiah, cosmopolitans embrace two challenges. Cosmopolitans take an interest in the beliefs and practices of others, striving to understand, if not accept or adopt, other ways of being. "Because there are so many human possibilities worth exploring, we neither expect nor desire that every person or every society should converge on a single model of life." And cosmopolitans take seriously the notion that they have obligations to people who are not their kin, even people who have radically different beliefs. This two-part definition means that my taste for sushi and fondness for Afropop are insufficient to mark me as cosmopolitan - Appiah saves the label for those who take seriously their obligations to those people - singly and collectively - responsible for the food and the music, and presumably those who act on those obligations. Nor is cosmopolitanism as simple as a universal love of humanity, especially as expressed through a desire to "save" others through Christianity, Islam, democracy or any other proselytizing faith - we are challenged to take seriously the idea that other possibilities are worth our time and consideration, not our immediate opposition and rejection.lxxiii There are at least two challenges to Appiah's lived cosmopolitanism. One is that we, as humans, are not long removed from our tribal past. For tens of thousands of years, we benefited trusting our families and neighbors and mistrusting outsiders. Very few of our ancestors had meaningful interactions with people very different from themselves and their immediate community - those few who lived in cities or who made a living through trade. The social strategies for surviving in those societies may be deeply maladaptive in our highly connected contemporary world. The second challenge is an information problem. If we are challenged to explore human possibilities and accept our obligation to others, we need information from other parts of the world. It's hard for us to be curious about or engaged with that which we do not see. If our tools for understanding the world fall short, and especially if we imagine that they are better than they are, we will fall short in terms of knowledge and action. Like living in a neighborhood where the signs are in an unfamiliar script, the Internet provides us with constant feedback that we're sharing our virtual spaces with strangers. A quick stroll through YouTube suggests that people practice hobbies we never imagined and are obsessed with pop culture figures we've not heard of. The comment threads on newspapers and political blogs suggest we're surrounded online by people with very strong feelings who view the world in quite differently than we do. Follow the links on Facebook or Twitter and we find ourselves with signs we can't read, pages in unfamiliar languages. Are we taking on the challenge of digital cosmopolitanism, or are we hunkering down, encountering what's familiar and comfortable and the expense of the unfamiliar and challenging? One way we might decide is to spend less time looking at what the internet makes possible and more time examining what we actually do. 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