However, I am more interested in your concern about what technology and new media can do to “save the world” (remember the Issue Entrepreneurship project?). I have been sort of thinking about this in my dissertation. “Saving the world” involves, in my opinion, a certain kind of engagement with the local (saving the world at a global level without some sort of local actualization is meaningless). My concern, however, is that new technologies do not really distinguish between the local and the global, and make both equally mediated (I’m still untangling this in my writings). I fear that the lack of opportunities for actualization that people sensed after Gore’s movie is not a function of the film, but of an emerging inability to figure out how to act in a world in which both the near and the far are equally reduced to locations in the network.

Happy Thanksgiving to you too.