"We are all globalists now" might be an apt refrain for The Death of Distance by Economist writer Frances Cairncross, which bears a back-cover photograph of a sun-drenched, laptop-using woman at the seashore. It's a tempting postcard, beckoning seductively from a fantasy island of global telecommuting: Where do you want to go today? We've heard this stuff before in techno-utopian pronouncements of friction-free capitalism and distance learning.
Luckily, Cairncross is a more pragmatic guide to the communications revolution than many neo-McLuhanites, and she is most illuminating when discussing specific case studies. Yet she too suffers from a tendency to paint the effects of this revolution as so profound that they are only dimly imaginable. As in any book of this sort, some prophecies now ring outdated (WebTV, anyone?); history, meanwhile, is blithely neglected. Nobody could have foreseen the consequences of the Internet, she writes, yet later she points out that William Gibson's writing prefigured cyberspace by several years. Similarly, Jules Verne's Paris in the Twentieth Century anticipated the fax machine and the automobile well ahead of those inventions.
Yet Verne also prognosticated the collapse of law and art, which speaks to the shortcomings of this book. It is far easier to speculate about future technology than about future society, and it can be dangerous to overestimate the effect of the former on the latter. The steamboat, like the Internet, was said to annihilate time and space. Cairncross posits the Internet and reduced trade barriers will promote world peace as we learn more about people in other countries; advances in technology, however, can also aid militarism. The author herself cites how Russian jet fighters were able to kill a Chechen general by tracing his cell-phone signal - was that a blow for peace?
The Death of Distance identifies a number of paradoxes that will herald the next century: The income gap between countries will diminish, but within countries it will rise; as the planet becomes more intertwined commercially and technologically, cultural and social fragmentation will increase. Too often these larger phenomena are left unexplored in the author's frenetic race to catalog the future as it is happening today.
STREET CRED
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Distance Fades Away
