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Can what's local save us?
Global and local examined at the
World Summit for the Information Society

By Peter Orne
Reporting from Geneva

At the end of a long day of speeches, panels and slide presentations at the World Summit for the Information Society in Geneva last December, in the middle of a temporary Central Square postered with scenes from developing-country marketplaces, a troupe of Samoan dancers brought the global house down.

Surrounded by more than 250 display booths from the United Nations to Malaysia, Microsoft and Cuba, CERN and the Jhai Foundation, the group of tanned young men and women wearing grass skirts filled Hall 4 of Geneva’s Palais des Expositions with intimate island songs and dances. After an intensive day focusing on the uses of information and communication technologies, or ICTs, for social and economic development, delegates to the World Summit welcomed the performers with smiles and cheers.

On such a global platform, the appearance of half-naked Samoans standing in the Palexpo on the eve of Swiss wintertime could perhaps be understandably overlooked. While the comforting European hors d’oeuvres and wines served to delegates betrayed the poor-country market scenes postered around them, the grass-skirted performers seemed to serve the spirit of this first-ever summit, where national leaders and representatives pushed for the social, educational and economic benefits of ICTs and planned a follow-up meeting for 2005.

Organized by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, and Global Knowledge Partnership, the ICT4D Platform inside Hall 4 was a gorgeous manifestation of the global. Smart and sophisticated, the brilliant pastel panels and colorful carpeting of its many booths were awash in track lighting and multimedia effects and abuzz with exhibitors from 75 countries.

The Samoan dancers contrasted tellingly with their 21st-century surroundings, standing on a stage where only moments before Mrs. Nan Annan, wife of the UN secretary general, had performed a ribbon cutting for the UN ICT Task Force’s Global e-Schools and Technology Initiative, or GeSCI, which is designed “to work in partnership with local governments, private-sector companies and civil-society organizations to create effective end-to-end systems” for schools around the world.

While in one moment Mrs. Annan with her warm demeanor delivered gracious remarks about GeSCI, in the next the Samoans offered local songs, dances and drumbeats. Just a few days later, presenters, performers and platform would all be gone, though the juxtaposition between the luminous, global nexus of the World Summit and the imported, grass-skirted intimacy of the Samoans would remain squarely in the memory of at least one attendee.

Can the local think?

Switzerland and Samoa. World summits and grass skirts. The global and the local. For so long now we have urged one another to think in the context of the global and act in the context of the local. Think globally. Act locally. An accompanying big-blue-marble image of the earth, photographed from outer space, almost immediately pops into mind.

Given the predominance and growing awareness of global trends as well as the rise of the Information Society, has the time come for a subtle, magnetic-pole-type adjustment to the think-global heuristic? Have we perhaps had enough global, or at least enough of a certain full-sweep version of it? On the other hand, might many locals—both inside and outside an international-development context—be able now to think for themselves? And if they can, what could that begin to mean for our notoriously top-down world order?

As unfettered globalization and modernization continue apace, the differences between the local and at least the appearance of the global have become markedly easier to discern, if mostly, because of their subtlety, ignored. International airports, big-city meeting places and shopping centers are more often deemed global now at least partly because they have been stripped of those familiar, rough-edged resonances of the local such as culture, history and community. As cities continue to grow in importance, so too will the pervasiveness of these global zones and their stainless-steel features. As mobility and real-time connectivity across great distances also increase, the homegrown, hometown features we ascribe to the local will continue to come under pressure.

Despite the growing reach of the global, the local itself can never fully disappear, of course—if we take it that all human experience is fundamentally local—though we may see traditional culture and communality evaporating all around us. The quality of local characteristics around us may change ever more abruptly in a globalizing world, but the local will be there so long as you are, even if reduced to a set of x, y coordinates recorded on a sattelite flying high above you.

Locals everywhere can think, so to speak, because you are what's local wherever local happens. In spite of the global, some additional questions we might therefore be asking one another these days are: What is the quality of your local? How dramatically has it changed in recent months or years? Are you newly arrived in it, or, if not, does it still speak back to you? Does anything remain of grass skirts—or their rough-edged cultural equivalent—in your local at all?

Global and local valences

Delegates to the World Summit on the Information Society may have willingly suspended the sense of their localness when they cleared the Swiss guards checking bags and briefcases, entered the Palexpo and began perusing the aisles of the ICT4D Platform in Hall 4. At day's end, however, the Samoan dancers reminded them of the revivifying feeling and simplicity of the local features—culture, tradition, song and dance—that remain elusive at the tenuous level of the global.

Consider, analogously, the Periodic Table of Elements and those molecules you learned most about in high-school chemistry, such as hydrogen, oxygen and carbon. Try substituting into this "table" the elements of the local, such as community, history and rootedness, which, with their low atomic numbers, were easily and abundantly dispersed among our forebears. The nascent global, in contrast, with its high atomicity—that is, all the perceptions and personal circumstances, if you will, that each of us brings to it—might situate on the outer edges of this table along with Einsteinium, Nobelium or (in a handy coincidence) Americium; that is, packed with protons and neutrons, shedding electrons and in certain cases unstable. This is the idea of the global we hold within us: an uncertain, high-valence substratum on which we've pinned high hopes because of its novelty, complexity and "out-there" rarity.

Reminding delegates to the World Summit of a more basic chemistry, to follow the analogy, were the Samoans singing their native songs and dancing to traditional drumbeats. While conspicuously out of place on a global stage, they brought elemental warmth to the intersection of world leaders, display booths, international development and technology panels. While conventional wisdom may hold that the local wants, needs and must prepare for more global, it could be that today the global needs the local more than it ever considered.

Think locally, act globally

Is it possible to constrain the global through local lenses and contexts? Can we really flip the timeworn heuristic and begin to think locally and, when we need to, act globally?

Clearly a first step toward trying is to acknowledge that the global is part illusion—an unstable element—often used in one turn as an intellectual eggshell for describing wide-ranging interconnection, interdependence and commercial processes and, in another, to jazz up things in local contexts. For example, you've probably seen some version of a Global Dry Cleaners, Global Used Cars or Global Fuel Company right in your back yard.

A second step is to remember that all human experience is fundamentally local. Whether we live in Samoa or Switzerland, the local where we eat, walk and sleep is the local we are in right now. Like old lovers, we may recollect with nostalgia all the locals we have known, especially those that grew familiar and reliable, and mourn how rapidly they have changed or irrevocably been lost. How much has the global simply overshadowed the basic memory and honor of rooted human experience?

A third step is to begin to push for the emergence of the local as the new unit of our global regard. Even the most committed fans of life lived globally might welcome the reacknowledgement that all human experience is local, and that the quality of locals everywhere on earth should be a top priority. Global thinking and planning will continue apace, national orders will necessarily obtain, but the local is where things improve or decay, for and because of all of us.

By fundamentally inverting and constraining our understanding of the global through local lenses everywhere—say, for example, through the homes and neighborhoods of Iraq on the eve of the Iraq War—we may all view the world through a new local-based prism, one that would seem to approach infinity in sheer numbers of locals but that would feel as familiar to most of us as the market where we buy our food, the post office where we drop our mail, and the store or stand where we pick up the newspaper.

Through the looking glass

Where, possibly, is the global order in following a Montevideo bus route, or in taking a stroll along the sidewalks of Sydney? In going to market in Osaka, or on a pub crawl in a Manchester suburb?

While it's true that the magnitude of the international affairs and global trends and issues that has emerged over the past century remains as big as, if not bigger than, any one superpower or national government, a Cartesian-oriented shift in our sensibilities toward ourselves and others would begin to sharpen our attention at key decision-making times and enable our leaders and ourselves to see through the national and global fog, if not the local and personal fog of war itself.

Locally oriented individuals tapping into regional, national and global networks of accountability, common sense and creativity can help splash cold water on the governmental and media story lines that distract, confuse and scare us. As we were able to do during the March 2003 anti-war protests, which were broadcast and uploaded worldwide, how can we begin speaking a local language with one another in basic ways, realizing that it's not borders and languages that separate us but our own entrenched notions about ourselves, as though governments and their actions remained the only facades through which we view one another and present ourselves?

Over the past few years, in particular, many Americans have relied on their travels, the Internet and e-mail to inform not only themselves but their non-American colleagues and friends about the intensive debate surrounding the policies and actions of the Bush Administration. What if the US government or the broadcast media, which has been so reluctant to engage and amplify this debate, were Americans' only voice in the world? Person-to-person and local-to-local contact across borders has meant everything.

With so many hundreds of thousands of locals in the world, it may indeed seem impossible to constrain and contextualize the complex global and the powerful national through soft local lenses and personal contacts. Yet without re-esteeming and sharing with one another those basic elements of the local everywhere—neighbor-to-neighbor friendliness, cultural continuity, the honor of rootedness, to name a few—we may find ourselves more frequently facing Nobelium- or Americium-styled environments—the appearance of the global—where there is only a tenuous forward and the creeping arrival of an endless now, where the local around us may have plenty of bright lights and pastel panels but where the human and elemental warmth of grass-skirted local culture has disappeared forever.