Manhattans 2.0 on Foreign and Far Away Shores

The picture that refuses to become forgotten is an aerial shot of a business district jutting into a water expanse that goes around an island that carries, as a giant ship standing still under its crushing weight, a whole landscape of skyscrapers shooting into wuthering heights that only a bird's eye view can measure. Rather than being the southern tip of Manhattan, the small scale vertigo that the magazine illustration captures refers to is Chongqing, a city in the mainland China. Wikipedia article on it does not disappoint in terms of iconic images that this 35-millions plus megapolis routinely churns out in its daily toil of representation. A brief scroll through what amounts to an analytical precis and a newspaper overview of an encyclopedia article that it offers in English depicts soaring construction, demographic, and economic trajectories of urban growth that undeniably catapults the city and the country around it to the position that seemed only recently to be restricted to the countries that had had a place in the story of Western modernity. With the half a trillion yuan budget that the province is going to throw on the aim of moving up the value chain, Chongqing may be in a position to genetically, nanotechnologically and cyber-optically reengineer the value chain itself just as New York, and the country around it, did when it grew at comparable speed. If my impression from a European periodical does not fail me, welcome-mats for modernity 2.0 are being already rolled out around the world.

The Shifting Sense of the Present Moment

Not sure where my sense of the present and/or contemporary situation comes from in my case, I do sense a shift that the present global and local indicators register that affects how I represent to myself where the world moves and how one can map one's position on this changing geography of global flows and places. The development hitting closest to home to my sensibility is the rise and rise of netbooks as a new category of device that apparently promises to reshape the computing landscape. Strangely enough, reminiscent of the one laptop a child trend this technological development can be hoped to made biggest changes in the countries loosely named the second world, these places that are neither too affluent nor too poor to fit into a binary opposition of the opposition between the global North and the global South. Not only that but the fact that there appears to be a more unexpected than usual convergence between the two towards an average amount of insecurity of long before declared analytically insufficient classification between these two abstract groups too that makes the developing world, another term crying for a more precise definition, that sets the terms of what counts for a cool device. Taiwan and China turn out to be new and unexpected trailblazers of what is actually considered to be a new and trendy development in the everyday life of our electronic environment on a global scale, since it is difficult to believe that iPhone's portability and capabilities are going to make as much of difference for an average person regardless where she or he is, as a full-blown and truly portable set-up of netbooks would. Besides, netbooks are already a category rather than a brand-name that are fast coming to the coffee-shops near you.

From Zeitgeist to Tagesgeist

Somewhat in jest, after our belief into Zeitgeist falls into question, I wonder if one could replace it with its daily version: Tagesgeist. Spirit of time makes place for a spirit of day with all that the overcharged age of instant technology, online communication and constant obsolescence brings with it. We no longer revere and take notice of anything as classical as a Zeitgeist, as the very notion of time becomes fragmented into digital slices of temporality. We become instead surfers of what another day brings on its media wings to our attention, sensation and experience. No longer integral personalities we become instances that take it a day at a time. Long term planning is being replaced with crisis management, micro-blogging takes place of long-winded blog-posts and the technology around us gets smaller, more carriable and standardized to the point of fading into a single environment of information management. Managers of our own lives, living in times of enormous and badly understood global changes, we become overtaxed by what it means to jump from one set of certainties to another from one day to another, as if our personal and mental software has to be reloaded on a slightest notice of lifeworlds that stop being capable of an oversight. Tagesgeist opens the doors to an age of the baroque sensibility of our days.