Discuss “Paperhouse”

We are all part of a global community!

You hear that all the time now. Well, the fact is, a global community might as well be *no* community. What we call the global community is really just a term for the gray uniformity of the globalized media. When the same story runs in Topeka and Miami, in Bangor and Burbank and Bangkok, it must speak to the common denominator of all those audiences. It cannot express a human perspective, being forced instead to synthesize its human elements into a sort of bland universalism, and it has no capability to provide much in the way of “local color.”

But the greatest problem of the globalized media is trust. As media outlets become more far-flung, as stories have to be turned around in shorter and shorter...