Cosmopolitan Literacies, Social Networks, and “Proper Distance”: Striving to Understand in a Global World

Abstract

How are identities as cosmopolitan citizens realized in practice, and how can dialogue be fostered across differences in culture, language, ideology, and geography? More particularly, how might young people be positioned to develop effective and ethical responses, in our digital age, to local and global concerns? Such are the questions we addressed in a design‐based research project that linked young people around the world via a private social network. In effect, we studied cosmopolitanism “on the ground,” as youth on the cusp of adulthood came to think and act reflexively about the opportunities, responsibilities, and challenges of intercultural, cross‐geographic communication in a global, digital world. To analyze the conversations and creative artifacts exchanged by groups of youth in New York City and in India, we invoked the cosmopolitan construct of “proper distance,” asking how participants gauged their relationship to their readers. We identified three stances that composers adopted in their efforts to communicate with and understand their audiences—proximal, reflexive, and reciprocal—and we demonstrated how such stances were manifested semiotically and relationally. This study contributes to a growing literature on the relationship of globalization to education and on cosmopolitanism as one response to this confluence. It demonstrates in empirical, interactional detail the complexity and challenge of learning to communicate, create, and understand across difference, as well as the potential of youth to engage those complexities ethically and to work at comprehending their subtleties. It further illuminates the centrality, for our youthful participants and their cosmopolitan project, of being able to compose in multiple and conjoined modes, and it reanimates the rhetorical construct of “audience” for digital and global times.

Notes

Notes

The theme of hospitality began early, with Kant’s 1795 essay on Perpetual Peace, in which he claimed that all people have the “right to the communal possession of the earth’s surface” and that “hospitality means the right of a stranger not to be treated as an enemy when he arrives in the land of another” (Reis, , pp. 105–106). Derrida (), drawing on Kant (1795/), made ethics synonymous with hospitality and argued for a conception of hospitality that, like his companion construct of forgiveness, is unconditional. Silverstone (, ), on whose work we draw, engaged the ideas of Kant and Derrida but also Levinas () and Arendt ().

Cf. Couldry (), who offers a related compelling framework for an ethics of media, but who takes issue with Silverstone’s use of hospitality and the Kantian tradition that this term indexes. Couldry is concerned, for example, that hospitality as a construct has limiting territorial and temporal associations incompatible with a digital age and “media’s inherent mobility and the unpredictable human encounters media make possible” (p. 196).

Please see www.space2cre8.com for more information about the network (including many of the videos and projects described here and a public beta version of the network).

To be precise, the Jaagriti movie did not have sufficient air space for Emilio to “fly” through, consisting as it did of close‐up interviews with women, so Emilio used another film as a proxy.

Emilio’s SpaceTime movie can be viewed via this link: https://berkeley.box.com/s/od3dyr4blno43cf1i1v4