Globality

Archive: January-February 2004

Globality.org

Exploring the globalization of everyday life

February 16, 2004

No, the dark circles under their eyes aren't from jet lag, as the San Diego Tribune cleverly points out. They're globetrotting pandas! All pandas born outside China as part of a zoological exchange program have to go home after three years. Hua Mei, a female born at the San Diego Zoo, went home to Sichuan Province last week. She'll have to get used to cold weather and a new language, but the residents of her new home are certainly welcoming her with open arms. It's interesting to read two different views on the two sides of this journey, this one from San Diego and another from the Chinese official news agency, Xinhua.

February 16, 2004

It's multinational industry, but it's local too: people's jobs, the cars they drive, the brands they know. Toyota and GM started the NUMMI joint venture factory in Fremont, California, 20 years ago, the San Jose Mercury News says. It was Toyota's first North American plant and is still going strong. The Fremont factory holds a special place in my heart because it's where my family's old 1967 GMC Suburban was made. I have many fond memories of that truck, but I'm strictly a Japanese-car guy now. Toyota sells more passenger cars in the U.S. than any other company, and makes more than 60 percent of them here in North America. More power to 'em.

February 11, 2004

It's not globality, precisely, but part of globality is how we think about our relationship to people on the other side of the world, whether we've met them or not. It's a fascinating idea: The San Jose Mercury News reports DNA researchers tested a high school class in Silicon Valley and determined that more than half the class – kids from many different "races" and ethnicities -- all had a common ancestor, someone born in central China or Taiwan more than 100,000 years ago. From a technology point of view, it's a little scary that they can apparently tell so much from your DNA, and in a few years it will probably seem quaint that they couldn't better pinpoint this ancestor.

February 4, 2004

Groceries, restaurants, transportation, currency exchange: There’s a whole Mexican immigrant economy in the southwestern United States, and it’s going big-time. This article in the Houston Chronicle looks at how thriving entrepreneurs have banded together for mutual benefit in Texas and now Oklahoma.

January 31, 2004

India and the West, particularly America, used to be opposite poles of the world. India was a faraway place with starving people and exotic religions and music. (That’s looking from the West; I don’t know how the West looked from the other side.) Now, of course, nearly everyone here does yoga, sitars are showing up in just any old pop tune and there’s an inexplicable Indian-sounding tune in the background of a new ad for “Atkins-friendly wraps” at Subway. Now we’re at the stage of having long phone conversations at all hours of the day and night. True, most of them are about billing disputes and malfunctioning software. But it’s common today for people in the West to call companies for help and end up talking to someone in India. Here’s some interesting advice for those call-center staffers, reported by the The Times of India: Talk like an Indian. Faked accents are so 2003.

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January 26, 2004

One of the biggest cultural differences I saw in East Asia, coming from America, was the line between public and private. People tend to have less privacy at home, with whole families in small apartments, while businesses tend to be more family-owned and more intensely private, just to name a couple of examples. Another example is public space that’s privately used. Maybe the most common of these is the karaoke room, which is found all across East Asia. I’ve sung in these kinds of rooms in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and San Francisco. It’s worlds away from singing in a karaoke bar, because it’s just you and your family and friends. Most people aren’t there to hide anything, just to make it a private party.

In San Jose, that’s coming into conflict with the American concept of public and private, which says that home is the place for privacy and if you go out and drink, you do that in public. A ban on karaoke rooms, which the San Jose Mercury News says is possible, could really mess up a fun evening for Asian immigrants and other people in town.

January 23, 2004

If Bush’s guest-worker plan is going to make the current labor situation in the United States legal, Central Americans as well as Mexicans are going to be involved. They’re 22 percent of the undocumented work force in this country, according to this article in The Seattle Times. Just to get here, they often travel illegally through Mexico or even settle and work there for a while. (Salvadorans in Los Angeles in the 1980s used to hide their identities, saying they were Mexican so they would be deported to Mexico instead of to their own war-torn country. The whole history of Central American migration to the U.S. has been tied up with economic globalization and international proxy wars, according to this book.)

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And here’s another interesting argument about the plan, from The Cato Institute. I disagree with some of what Alan Reynolds says and I find some of his arguments flippant and not well examined. For example, I don’t think that the reason there are relatively few immigrants from affluent democratic countries is that they don’t have relatives here to lobby for their admission. The main reason has to do with economics and quality of life: Everyone has options in life, but Swedes tend to have more options than do Salvadorans. However, he brings up some good points, such as that a bureaucratic system of rationing tends to encourage the creation of a black market. Should the U.S. sell off the right to live here, as Canada does in some cases? I’m not sure, but many immigrants already pay thousands of dollars to not-very-nice people to get here illegally.

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January 14, 2004

Here’s one perspective on Bush’s new immigration proposal: Joe Rodriguez of the San Jose Mercury News suggests acknowledging that migrant labor is part of globalization and bringing it under the North American Free Trade Agreement.

January 12, 2004

This one is about the old globalization: colonization. One day the locals right here in San Francisco (which wasn’t San Francisco then) were doing their own thing when along came some people from Spain, who set up a church and started doing some agriculture and crafts. Oh, and they got the locals to do most of the work. The mission they built became a global meeting place between people with wildly different beliefs and ways of life. But it was pretty one-sided about whose way things were going to be done, because the locals didn’t have much say.

Now one of the local people is taking it back. The new curator of Mission San Francisco de Asis is a descendent of a Mission Indian who was baptized in the church sanctuary that’s still there. It’s the first time an Indian has been in charge of a mission, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. One thing he plans to do is to find out what everyday life was like before that global moment.

January 8, 2004

President Bush’s new immigration plan would at least put a legal stamp on the economic situation between Mexico and the United States. That’s why Mexican President Vicente Fox seems to be giving it some backing as well, as the Arizona Republic news story indicates. workers and money keep flowing over the border. However, despite the fact that international migrants tend to keep their connections with the homeland for a generation or more, Europe’s postwar experience has shown that migrants who are seen as temporary guest workers usually end up as permanent residents, legal or not. The lack of a mechanism for achieving permanent legal status could run into a hurdle there, especially considering that once they arrive, Mexican immigrants to the U.S. have one of the best support networks of any immigrant group in the world.

January 6, 2004

Crossing one of the most heavily guarded borders in the world to go to work – and, with luck, being able to cross back over occasionally to visit family – is a way of life for millions of Mexicans. It’s also a way of business for thousands of U.S. companies and the country’s whole economy. There are plenty of willing workers and willing employers. But how to reconcile that reality with U.S. law has been a sticky issue for a long time. Now there are a couple of bills in Congress, and President Bush is going to say some hopeful-sounding words about it in advance of a summit with Mexico’s president, The Seattle Times reports.

January 5, 2004

A century ago (less than a month after the Wright Brothers’ first flight), only a few people had ever traveled on a plane. But then, not many had been fingerprinted, either. Today most foreign arrivals at U.S. airports began to be photographed and fingerprinted as part of the war on terrorism. That’s millions of mostly ordinary people in the course of a year, The Washington Post reports. Aviation technology changed travel, and surveillance technology followed. You may be asked for some information when you try to travel to the Post’s story, too, but it’s not unique identifying information about you. (Who even thought about this kind of stuff a hundred years ago?)

January 4, 2004

In another example of globality and the Internet, the Indian online entertainment company IndiaFM plans to sell Bollywood movies for download through Kazaa, a file-sharing service run by an Australian company. Only 10 million people in India use the Internet, but 20 million Indians outside the country do, according to an article by the IndiaFM News Bureau. In addition to easing overseas Indians’ access to the movies, it could help producers get around the country’s territory-by-territory distribution system, according to this article from Reuters. One producer said the Internet could become a territory on its own for the purpose of Indian movie distribution. That would be sort of like India claiming sovereignty over the whole world for online Bollywood-movie distribution purposes. Of course, they might have trouble enforcing that.

January 3, 2004

Jennicam, the Webcam that let paying subscribers watch American woman Jennifer Ringley in her apartment at all hours of the day and night, wasn’t intended as an experiment in globality. But the very nature of the technology made it that way, just as everything else on the Internet is either available, on sale, or censored in every country in the world. Jenni globalized her everyday life without even leaving home. Here’s a story from the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper on Ringley finally shutting down her site.