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. 95 6 P R O X I M I T Y A N D C O N F L I C T Networked Space Harish lives in Chennai, India. He works for a U.S. company that has outsourced most of its operations. The company’s clients are located in North America, while those who provide them with services, like Harish, are in India. His daily routine is not atypical for someone in similar circumstances . After spending the day training new recruits, the other part of his job begins: “At seven-thirty in the evening, when it’s 9 a.m. in New York, he confers with the American banking clients for whom he tailors his training, to insure that he is emphasizing the right skills. And then he turns to a slew of computer-programming challenges that may show management his greater gifts. He often goes home after midnight.”1 Harish’s rhythm of life has to accommodate two environments: Chennai and New York. Both environments can be said to be equally relevant to Harish, and thanks to digital networks, both can be said to feel equally immediate or real to him. However, the coexistence of these two geographic spaces does not come without tensions. Harish worries that what feels near to him is becoming increasingly disembodied, detached from his immediate surroundings: “Already, we are half of the time in New York, just our bodies are left behind . . . I worry that nowadays anything near us seems unimportant, while anything we can’t see becomes larger than life.”2 Harish’s participation in these intersecting networks shapes his perception of social belonging, making it more conceptual and less determined by geographic location: “Lately, he considered community less a function of roads and roofs and tea shops than of imagination. Even the solid presence of his grandmother could dematerialize at the latenight ring of his cell phone, the urgent summons of American clients. And while his parents rolled their eyes at the constant needs of the world beyond Chennai, Harish saw the calls as tidings of cultural integration.”3 96 . P R O X I M I T Y A N D C O N F L I C T Detachment from one kind of nearness (the immediate environment) is accompanied by attachment to another kind (the mediated environment ), and Harish attempts to integrate the benefits of one while not letting go of what is important for him to retain of the other. Eliot (a blogger’s pen name) lives in Charlottesville, a city in the United States. She is a professional website designer, and one of her leisure activities is to coauthor a blog that used to be called Red Inked, now defunct. According to her personal blog posts, digital networks have also fundamentally redefined Eliot’s relationship to the near but in a different way than they have for Harish. Commenting on the fear that the Internet replaces face-to-face with mediated interaction, that it makes distant people and places accessed via the Internet more important than one’s immediate surroundings and that it foments antisocial habits, she writes, “I’m not chatting with people in New Delhi; nor am I stuck at the computer , turning pale and cutting my wrist to Emo music. Because of the following lists, all on Yahoo Groups, I’ve gotten connected to and made friends with people in my local geographical area I would not have otherwise met.”4 She then lists online discussion groups related to recycling, church activities, and networking with working moms. Instead of severing her connections to the near, digital networks have augmented Eliot’s links to what is socially proximal: “So my very busy social life, my identity with the town in which I live, and my sense of community—all have been enhanced if not completely created through the weaving of various strands of the web. I have made more linkages and ties to the people in my immediate vicinity than I ever have done in my whole life.”5 Of course, Harish and Eliot are—literally and figuratively—thousands of miles apart. It would take a lengthy study to discuss the differences between these two cases and their significance. One could start by considering the history and present position in the world’s economy of India and the United States and the particular effect that globalization has had in each location. One could then go on to discuss Eliot’s and Harish...

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