January 4, 2006
Here, There -- and Nowhere
By Froma
Harrop
My mother-in-law
grew up on a farm in Indiana. Mother was nobody's idea of a liberal,
but when she moved to rural New Jersey and saw farms being turned
into subdivisions, she wanted government to stop it. The houses
were not what distressed her most. It was living among long-distance
commuters with little connection to their physical home.
Similar thoughts
popped up, oddly, during a recent visit to my father's apartment
in New York City. My father is on in years and does nothing in
New York that couldn't be done on the panhandle of Oklahoma. On
New Year's Eve, we watched the ball come down in Times Square,
on television, of course.
The Roman Legion
could not drag my father out of New York, because he's rooted
there. He did his traveling early, courtesy of the United States
Navy, and wishes to see no more of the world. To casual visitors,
the city may seem enormous and impersonal, but to longtime residents
like my father, it is a series of small villages. He has his barber,
his building's superintendent and the kid who works at the food
market. He deals with them in person.
The communications
revolution has erased physical boundaries, and that's supposed
to be progress. But the ability to travel electronically creates
a disorientation that many folks, tied to place, don't like.
We can dial a Houston
area code to reach the cell phone of a Texan doing business in
Los Angeles. Not long ago, calling anyone in Los Angeles required
dialing that city's area code. Once upon a time, telephone numbers
reflected the very neighborhood being called: In New York, for
instance, you had numbers starting with PL (for Plaza), MU (for
Murray Hill) and BU (for Butterfield, as in the Liz Taylor movie,
"Butterfield 8").
I'd probably have
a nervous breakdown if someone took away my laptop, but the placelessness
of the Internet bothers me. Many sites purposely withhold any
hint of where the people behind them are located. This is especially
jarring when one wants to do business online. If a problem should
arise, there's often no address to visit, not even a phone number
to call. There may be an e-mail address, but it amazes me how
many companies -- including big ones -- do not answer their e-mail.
The ease of communicating
has created new opportunities for not living anywhere in particular.
Most interesting is the nomadic tribe of high-income workers who
can move from one pleasure spot to the next. They spend winters
on the ski slopes or in the tropics -- or both. Summers are in
the mountains or at the beach. Mud season and 103-degree summer
heat are not part of their lives.
Children have far
less interaction with the physical world than they used to, a
trend that worries many parents and educators. Rather than play
with toy firetrucks, they run firefighting games on the computer.
Toddlers who once stacked up alphabet blocks now punch the letters
on a computer screen.
It was amusing to
cruise through the channels on New Year's Eve. The nowhere-in-particular
channels, like CNN, portrayed the festivities as nonstop fun.
Anderson Cooper kept flipping from Times Square in New York to
the drag queens in Key West to a casino act in Atlantic City.
By contrast, NY1
News was fixed on Times Square. NY1 News is a local cable channel
featuring the unglamorous accents and faces you'd see on any street
in New York. The flashy network affiliates make fun of it because
its reporters carry their own cameras and microphones.
After the ball came
down, CNN said whoopee and moved the party to the Central Time
Zone. NY1 stayed put, centering on the fact that nothing awful
happened at midnight in 9/11 city. That was a far more interesting
take.
It's been noted in
media circles that during the recent transit strike, NY1 News
had badly scooped the networks. A November survey of morning viewers
showed more New Yorkers watching NY1 than either MSNBC or the
Fox News Channel.
There's something
to be said for being rooted. And it's good to know that in this
24/7 intergalactic economy, there are still rewards for covering
the earthbound existence down on the farm in New York City.
Copyright
2005 Creators Syndicate
