An Arab intellectual named Abdel Monem Said recently surveyed the massive anti-Israel and anti-American protests by Egyptian students and said: ”They are galvanized by the images that they see on television. They want to be like the rock-throwers.” By now everyone knows that satellite TV has helped deepen divisions in the Middle East. But it’s worth remembering that it wasn’t supposed to be this way.
An Arab intellectual named Abdel Monem Said recently surveyed the massive anti-Israel and anti-American protests by Egyptian students and said: ”They are galvanized by the images that they see on television. They want to be like the rock-throwers.” By now everyone knows that satellite TV has helped deepen divisions in the Middle East. But it’s worth remembering that it wasn’t supposed to be this way.
The globalization of the media was supposed to knit the world together. The more information we receive about one another, the thinking went, the more international understanding will prevail. An injustice in Thailand will be instantly known and ultimately remedied by people in London or San Francisco. The father of worldwide television, Ted Turner, once said, ”My main concern is to be a benefit to the world, to build up a global communications system that helps humanity come together.” These days we are living with the results — a young man in Somalia watches the attack on the south tower live, while Americans can hear more, and sooner, about Kandahar or Ramallah than the county next to theirs.
But this technological togetherness has not created the human bonds that were promised. In some ways, global satellite TV and Internet access have actually made the world a less understanding, less tolerant place. What the media provide is superficial familiarity — images without context, indignation without remedy. The problem isn’t just the content of the media, but the fact that while images become international, people’s lives remain parochial — in the Arab world and everywhere else, including here.
”I think what’s best about my country is not exportable,” says Frank Holliwell, the American anthropologist in ”A Flag for Sunrise,” Robert Stone’s 1981 novel about Central America. The line kept playing in my mind recently as I traveled through Africa and watched, on television screens from Butare, Rwanda, to Burao, Somalia, CNN’s coverage of the war on terrorism, which was shown like a mini-series, complete with the ominous score. Three months after the World Trade Center attacks, I found myself sitting in a hotel lobby by Lake Victoria watching Larry King preside over a special commemoration with a montage of grief-stricken American faces and flags while Melissa Etheridge sang ”Heal Me.” Back home, I would have had the requisite tears in my eyes. But I was in Africa, and I wanted us to stop talking about ourselves in front of strangers. Worse, the Ugandans watching with me seemed to expect to hear nothing else. Like a dinner guest who realizes he has been the subject of all the talk, I wanted to turn to one of them: ”But enough about me — anything momentous happening to you?” In CNN’s global village, everyone has to overhear one family’s conversation.
What America exports to poor countries through the ubiquitous media — pictures of glittering abundance and national self-absorption — enrages those whom it doesn’t depress. In Sierra Leone, a teenage rebel in a disarmament camp tried to explain to me why he had joined one of the modern world’s most brutal insurgencies: ”I see on television you have motorbikes, cars. I see some of your children on TV this high” — he held his hand up to his waist — they have bikes for themselves, but we in Sierra Leone have nothing.” Unable to possess what he saw in images beamed from halfway around the world, the teenager picked up an automatic rifle and turned his anger on his countrymen. On generator-powered VCR’s in rebel jungle camps, the fantasies of such boy fighters were stoked with Rambo movies. To most of the world, America looks like a cross between a heavily armed action hero and a Lexus ad.
Meanwhile, in this country the aperture for news from elsewhere has widened considerably since Sept. 11. And how does the world look to Americans? Like a nonstop series of human outrages. Just as what’s best about America can’t be exported, our imports in the global-image trade hardly represent the best from other countries either. Of course, the world is a nonstop series of human outrages, and you can argue that it’s a good thing for Americans, with all our power, to know. But what interests me is the psychological effect of knowing. One day, you read that 600 Nigerians have been killed in a munitions explosion at an army barracks. The next day, you read that the number has risen to a thousand. The next day, you read nothing. The story has disappeared — except something remains, a thousand dead Nigerians are lodged in some dim region of the mind, where they exact a toll. You’ve been exposed to one corner of human misery, but you’ve done nothing about it. Nor will you. You feel — perhaps without being conscious of it — an impotent guilt, and your helplessness makes you irritated and resentful, almost as if it’s the fault of those thousand Nigerians for becoming your burden. We carry around the mental residue of millions of suffering human beings for whom we’ve done nothing.
It is possible, of course, for media attention to galvanize action. Because of a newspaper photo, ordinary citizens send checks or pick up rocks. On the whole, knowing is better than not knowing; in any case, there’s no going back. But at this halfway point between mutual ignorance and true understanding, the ”global village” actually resembles a real one — in my experience, not the utopian community promised by the boosters of globalization but a parochial place of manifold suspicions, rumors, resentments and half-truths. If the world seems to be growing more, rather than less, nasty these days, it might have something to do with the images all of us now carry around in our heads.
George Packer is the author of ”The Village of Waiting” and, most recently, ”Blood of the Liberals.”
Author: GEORGE PACKER
News Service: The New York Times
URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/21/magazine/21WWLN.html?tntemail0
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