The ages we are in

I personably think I had these ages: happy, naïve, depressed (after loosing my illusions) and now I am in the angry age. Some of my rude friends call it my ’30-year old crisis’

Some thoughts around the theme Ages (Tabula Rasa Issue 3)

Yeah, right. I believe that we are as old as we think we are!! I know kids that are more mature than some 50-yearolds I know. It's all in your mind. Still, our ages in years are used for pinpointing us in life, to what we are supposed to be doing. My mother at my age had a little me of 11 running around… I don't! I'm still a bloody student, for crying out loud! And this is starting to get more and more normal… students are getting older, first time mothers are getting older and somehow I think the kids of the modern rich world are resisting becoming adults. Still we are adults; we just don't feel like we are. Perhaps we should.

If you can somewhat decide how old your mind is, you cannot decide what age you live in. Some of us are fortunate or unlucky enough to live through more than one age in our lifetime. Like my grandfather. He is still in this world, and has witnessed an amazing change in how the world works, from a community based on farming and fishing to industrialism and now the age of the Internet. With a lot of scepticism I might add, perhaps justly so. On his 23'rd birthday Norway was occupied by Nazi-Germany. He might have said: I wished they had not done that! And someone might have answered:

'So do I, and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for us to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.' (Gandalf)

So what about our time, our age, right now, in 2004? Who determines when an age ends and a new start? 'There are no beginnings nor endings in the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning'. Thus begins Robert Jordan his famous fantasy novels, and many argue that we now are in a beginning of a new age. It is called many things, like Cyber-Age, Information-Age, Globalization-Age, Global Age, the Network Society, Information Revolution, Information Society etc. What defines it?

The Stone Age was pretty self-explanatory, so was the Industrial Revolution. Today we got no more cold war and only one superpower, we have Internet & Globalization, we got big multinational corporations, wars, unrest, terrorism and somewhat radical climate changes. All linked together like the hypertextual world of Internet. Chaotic.

A key therm is Globalization. It sounds like a very nice thing at first, with shiny happy people holding hands throughout the world, chatting on the net, travelling the world in fast airplanes, trading equally from each other and exchanging ideas to make the world a better place for our children and so on. It’s the utopian dream, but alas like all utopian fantasies not the whole truth. To my big surprise I am now going to quote a former American president to get my point across:

'Globalization, as defined by rich people like us, is a very nice thing... you are talking about the Internet, you are talking about cell phones, you are talking about computers. This doesn’t affect two-thirds of the people of the world.' (Jimmy Carter)

In fact, it doesn’t affect 90% of the people in the world. The only shiny about Globalization is the 'TV-reality' served to us by men like Rupert Murdoch, who are very busy trying to get his hands on every media company in the world.

I might add at this point that Tabula Rasa is very happy to announce that we are an independendt studentmagazine. Not many of our media colleges can say that. Remember that the next time you watch TV, read a newspaper, read online news or listen to the radio. One man can, if he decides to, possibly make you and most of the world believe any old crap. Murdoch owns many big newspaper in UK, USA and Australia as well as many television stations and radiostations. How was he able to get to that point?

'The origins of the catastrophe lay in the Utopian endeavour of economic liberalism to set up a self-regulating market system.' (Karl Polanyi)

Globalization is very much about free market. When countries open up for unlimited trade, it does not mean it will be fair trade. It’s actually helping the big corporations expand and grow. They want you to be able to buy a Big Mac anywhere in the world.

'If the market is the driving force in globalization, many fear, it is bound to exacerate inequality by creating winners and loosers. If globalization makes the world more homogeneous, others fear, many cultures are in trouble' (The Globalization Reader)

Don’t believe a word you read or hear, take care of your original culture, discover your inner age and think about what kind of age you are living in. Your grandchildren might ask what you did about it. Remember that 'even the smallest person can change the course of the future.' (Galadriel)

Good luck to you, spoiled child!