Virtual Village

Global Village: Living in the Circle of Virtual Grass Huts

Following a seminar on the Millennial Generation, a bolt of insight struck my brain from the clouds surrounding the Ivory Tower where this philosophy professor sits.
We have come back to our ancestral tribal villages after centuries of fragmentation.
Picture the typical African village with its grass roofed huts and wattle fence. You know everyone in the village and quite a number from villages nearby. You know almost everything about people who live near you—their quirks, their habits, their opinions and talents. In short, the good, the bad and the ugly.
In a way, you know more than you need to know or want know. You hear their arguments and the sounds emitting from their huts. Everything seems to hang out in the open.
In York, England, the Yorvik Centre recreates a Viking village of the 10th Century. A man is sitting in an outhouse, screened off by a waist-high fence, all the while conversing with a neighboring housewife a few yards away who is shaking out the thresh in her doorway. Life was very public then, especially compared to a modern home where each person has a private room and maybe a private bath, plus a personal computer, a cell phone, and myriad other gadgets that give control over all unwanted intrusions.
Life for many affluent people today is isolated and hermetically sealed against the natural rhythms of society.
The younger generation, by contrast, is in constant contact with any number of virtual neighbors by texting and social utilities like Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube.
The intimate and often embarrassing details of life are now shared with the world. It’s a virtual Viking Village or African compound where one knows many titillating details of a person’s hopes and dreams, their minds and sometimes their body parts.
This seems to be a way of overcoming the excessive isolation of their narcissistically-inclined parents.
We are coming full circle to the closeness of the ancient villages our ancestors lived in. Only this time we can choose which village to live in, simply by being selective about the networks we sign on for. We can admit new people to our village any time we choose. And we can marginalize or de-select those whom we find obnoxious.