As my son turned sixteen, I realized something odd. Travelling with his mother or me, he had visited four continents, cities from Jakarta to Los Angeles, Nairobi to Moscow, but he had never been to Lucca, Pisa or Florence. He was acquainted with distant places, but those nearby were unknown, foreign to him. However, as I thought it over, it came to me that this situation was paradoxical only by the standard of the past, and represented the new normality of the present and still more the future. Once ‘faraway lands’ were swathed in the fascination of the exotic, no less so if they were crossed by the trails of our own ancestors, like Bruce Chatwin’s Patagonia. The farther away they were, the more wrapped in the mists of the unknown, the more they were to be ‘explored’. The paradigm of our consciousness of the world was, so to say, concentric. We knew all about what lay around us and what we had contact with. Then, as the distance increased, we would become ‘disoriented’, ever more completely ‘foreigners’. But the communications revolution, both material (low-cost airlines) and immaterial (radio, tv, cellphones, the internet) has meant that ‘faraway lands’ no longer exist. There is nowhere on the planet that cannot be reached in thirty hours’ flying or observed from the sky in real time on Google Earth. The faraway is now close at hand, in sight or in range.
However, this revolution has had an unintended consequence: as the faraway has been brought closer, what was nearby has become distant. This distancing of the contiguous comes about in part because of the finite nature of human life and its span of years. The more we chat by network with remote interlocutors, the less time we have to talk to our neighbours. The more we splash about in the waters off Sharm El Sheik or Puerto Rico or the Maldives, the less we find out about Calabria’s Ionian coast: this is one reason why Italians from the North are so ignorant of the South.