You Are Where You Live

The global mass media change a lot of things, but regional identity probably isn't one of them.

It's been nearly 50 years since Marshall McLuhan coined the term "global village" to describe the shared (if largely vicarious) experience that television and other electronic media were fast creating. One of the foundational principles of the global village--which, of course, the Internet has expanded by some vast multiple--is that electronic media doesn't just serve people; it changes people.

As more people communicate over greater distances, goes the theory, the less important are geographic regions as unique repositories of ideas, languages and moral sensibilities--in a word, culture. If so, the cultural differences once assumed to distinguish, say, New Yorkers from Texas farmers should become increasingly vestigial artifacts of a pre-Google world.

But if freedom from geographic constraints means liberation from regional identity, why do many Americans still think in terms of the Midwest vote, Southern conservatism, urban this and rural that? If the entire globe is connected to the same cultural mother ship--drinking the same Starbucks, driving the same cars, using the same search engines, watching the same CNN--how is it that one can still identify regional politics, tastes, values, idioms--the very substance of identity? Were the prophets of convergence wrong?

One argument in their favor is that convergence simply hasn't had enough time-- the global village, after all, is still a new entity by historical standards. You don't have to believe in "the end of history" to recognize how much more alike, at least superficially, far-flung places are today than 100 years ago.

Consumerism, once thought of as a uniquely American phenomenon, is now a staple of life from Kuala Lumpur to Santiago. Drive down a highway anywhere in the U.S., and the first thing that strikes you is how alike every place looks--the same strip malls, the same visual clutter, the same boxy office buildings, whether you're in New Hampshire or New Mexico. (The architectural vernaculars that once distinguished regions from each other are now largely quaint, secondary relics preserved by self-conscious historical societies.)

An American visiting Bangkok, Thailand, 100 years ago would have been struck primarily by its otherness. Today he's struck by its sameness--the same consumer products, the same cars, even the same language (English is common there) as back in Houston. Project the arc of convergence out a few decades, and it's not hard to see regional origin being relegated to a rather minor component of personal identity.

Of course, the world is not a linear equation, and there are forces working to resist the trend. Proximity is surely one of them. There is a whole academic discipline that says, in effect, that you are who you know. So-called "social impact theory" holds that the stronger and more immediate your relationships, the more likely you are to adopt your friends' values, regardless of what else you might read, watch or hear.