Hitchhiking in Cuba
I’ve been offline for the past couple weeks. Not just the web, but pretty much all sorts of printed and broadcast media. Other than a couple short episodes checking email, today is the first time in 10 days I’ve had an hour just to sit down and read, surf the web, trawl my netvibes page. And it makes me appreciate both (connected and unconnected) states more. You understand and appreciate better what the world has to offer. Time is also a good editor. At any given time, I generally have half a dozen or more posts unpublished in draft form; and generally only one or two of these is fit to publish a month later. Sometimes this is because the subject matter is time sensitive, but mostly it’s because, well it is just not good enough: not interesting, incomplete, ill thought out. There is a school of thought however that would say that the essence of (good) blogging is in its raw, provisional, stream-of-conciousness elements, and so to edit is to over-engineer, is to short-circuit the wise crowd editor so to speak. Perhaps there is some truth in that.
A little while back, the Economist started publishing weekly correspondent’s diaries from various locations around the world. It has become one of my favorite reads on the web. Catching up this morning, I came across the Havana diary. And having just read JP’s thinking about communities and blogs post, one observation stood out:
Widespread hitch-hiking is made necessary by Cuba’s poverty. It is made possible by Cuba’s lack of crime. Every strain of society takes to the road here―old women, young men, old men, young women, youthful karate teams. Hitching doesn’t have the tinge of film-noir-ish danger that it does now in the West. Cuba’s low crime rate is not just a matter of statistics. (I couldn’t find, and wouldn’t trust, official statistics, but it is far, far lower than anywhere else in the region.) It fundamentally changes the way people can live their lives. People are afraid to walk the streets of Guatemala City at night; the rich hire guards and live behind gates. In Cuba the default approach to strangers is not one of fear but of guarded friendliness.
We’ve lost the ability to hitch-hike in America; driving around Cuba reminds me of how much we’ve lost. It’s a wonderful thing to talk to strangers about their lives. And because I’m already doing them a favour by giving them a ride, it’s one of the few places where they won’t ask me for money. Instead, they’ll want to return the favour. I had dinner at one hitch-hiker’s house; another wanted to show me around his village.
Well blogging for me is like hitchhiking in Cuba.
And perhaps that is why it has proven to be such a powerful medium. Not just for the digital generation, but across generations. It reminds us of how much we’ve lost. Replacing the communities of physical proximity, with dematerialized communities of the mind and spirit.
It’s not nirvana. The 18,000+ spam comments akismet has helped me filter are testament to the flawed reality of online communities, but – at least for now – this evil has not destroyed the foundations upon which the blogosphere is built. Can we have our cake and eat it? Can we have communities without crime? without enforced poverty? without communist ideology? Worth trying for. Hop in.
