A lecture was held at Cal State Bakersfield’s Dore Theater that had special guest speaker Andrei Codrescu, an author, poet, screenwriter, and National Public Radio commentator. The event was put on by Cal State Bakersfield’s Kegley Institute of Ethics, which is currently celebrating its 25th anniversary. The lecture was co-sponsored by San Joaquin Community Hospital and the Norman Levan Center at Bakersfield College.

The topic of the lecture was a discussion about “Whose Global Village is it?” Codrescu stated the global village was a theory brought up in the past, which has since become more pertinent.

His lecture brought up topics including: advancements in technology and how they’re affecting us and our culture, the positives and negatives of this “medium,” as he refers to it, along with the state of the world we live in and how it’s changing.

Codrescu made clear early in his lecture that he was not going to debate over whose Global Village it actually was.

The term Global Village was coined by a man named Marshal McLuhan, a philosopher who predicted a form of information would dominate our culture and “turn us into mindless slaves,” as Codrescu put it.

Codrescu went on to say that some people saw the potential of a Global Village in the Internet, when it was originally brought about. Information available so effortlessly, was said by many to be the ultimate power and was thought to bring about a “Cyber Utopia.”

“The only barrier to universal harmony, as we saw it some years back, was ignorance of each other’s culture, mores, customs and skills,” Codrescu explained. “When everyone could participate in everyone else’s wisdom, borders would fall away on their own and the narrow, nationalistic tribal impulses that led to war would just vanish.”

There are also others, Codrescu explained, called Luddites, who saw this new found technology to be evil and believed that it enslaved humans to machines. There were many cases in history that they felt proved this to be true, the Industrial Revolution being one example.

Luddites also believed the advancement in technology was taking peoples time. Electronic products cost a great deal of money decades ago and time had to be dedicated to use them.

Codrescu explained that during the ’90s, too much time was spent trying to understand machines turned into obtainable electronics that took no time to comprehend. Instead of having too little time, people started having a tremendous amount of time; work was faster paced making everyone a lot busier.

The truth, he said, is that time is the same as it’s always been, but our perception of it is altered. What free time people used to possess, between careers or occupations, is now shared on the Internet, on facebook.

Codrescu stated that, “Human activity now consists of downloading and uploading, our sentimental and intellectual life takes place in public.”

Along with our time being shared, health watchers, Codrescu said, are connecting the Internet to various health issues. “Studies that link the Internet to everything from: blindness, obesity, carpel tunnel syndrome and plain old absence from human company are appearing all the time.”

Despite these two theories, Codrescu spoke of the recent situation in Egypt where websites like facebook and Twitter helped bring about a change in their government. What really made a change, he said, was when the government counteracted and turned off the Internet.

Groups that were originally brought together by facebook had to go into the streets and band together to protest. This was a change, because the main form of protest today, Codrescu explained, is forwarding e-mails. Our generation has experienced three wars that had no actual protests, because everyone was too afraid of retaliation by the government. Instead they forwarded e-mails to protest the war.

The situation, he explained, could have easily gone a different direction. “A few months earlier, in Iran, when the tyrant drowned the green revolution in blood, they used internet postings to make a neat file of people to arrest and torture afterward.”

He concluded his lecture with explaining a few of his personal experiences with technology and how our society has become so accustomed to relying on it for the most trivial tasks.

After the lecture, Codrescu answered questions from the audience, followed by a book signing set up by Russo’s Books, which took place after the lecture.