It is a truism of the modern age that the world has become smaller, and that this is both a good and bad thing. Information is shared where once it was hoarded; multiplicities of voice are heard. And yet the result is often a kind of uniformity.
I was thinking about the narrowing of the conversation last week, while browsing online for information about Edwardian England. What I came upon, time and again and on almost every website, were references to United States President Donald Trump, analogies with Trump’s America and discussions that, after dispatching the subject to hand, inevitably turned to Trump.
The idea of a universal conversation enabled by digital media should be enlightening, the realisation of a democratic dream. Instead, what it put me in mind of was Godwin’s law — the theory that all online discussions eventually invoke Adolf Hitler — and for which, in this case, one may substitute Trump. (Although the two overlap; most Trump discussions get to Hitler in good time.)
I don’t know why this should have been so dispiriting. Critiques of globalisation often focus on the expansion of behemoth American corporations and the free market assumptions underpinning them, but the expansion of media platforms has ostensibly been an opening out. And yet while many good things have come out of it — most obviously, the advocacy of previously marginalised groups — it has also enabled the rise of a kind of single-focus discussion that cannibalises everything that falls in its path and encourages us to magnify our anxieties to an obsessive degree.
There is a line by Gertrude Stein I often think about, in relation to this and (ironically, I suppose) many other things: “Must things have something to do with everything?” Or rather, must everything come down to the same thing in the end?
My own gaze has narrowed lately in a way that has, perversely, opened up the world to more detail. A walk to the subway used to be a straightforward undertaking. Now, in the company of twin two-year-olds, it is a journey fraught with incident.
First, we have to stop at the corner to look at the red star-shaped flowers that grow over the side of the railing. Further up the street, a diversion is necessary to check whether the fire station door is open. At the corner of Broadway, it is imperative to pause for an express subway train to pass under the grill beneath our feet.
These provisions, ignored on pain of massive, overwhelming, inconsolable tantrum, make touring the neighbourhood a lengthy exercise, but it has done something cheering to my perspective. Up close, the world is a bigger and more interesting place.
Lord & Taylor, the venerable old clothing store on Fifth Avenue, is vacating its premises and selling the building to WeWork, the office space start-up that is a totem of the new economy. This may be less emblematic a moment than it seems; it’s just a real estate deal after all.
Still, it is hard not to invest the story with meaning. WeWork broadly operates on the principle that nothing is permanent; that renters of its desk space should be able to vacate on almost no notice, and flexibility — for which read insecurity — is as integral to the new economy as intransigence was to the old. There is, as in all things at the moment, a pressure to say decisively whether this is a good or bad thing and once one has decided, to make what is perhaps the truly emblematic gesture of our times: To stick to one’s opinion irrespective of any further information that comes in.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Emma Brockes is a New York-based feature writer for the Guardian Weekend magazine, blogger for Guardian US and book reviewer for the New York Times.
