This postcard was going to be about the old men of Italy, but it’s turned out to be first about communications and how we’ve come to take good infrastructure and easy access to information for granted. Several things happened at once – we hired a car which we drove to Gallipoli, a tiny medieval town in Puglia. The day we made that 7 hour journey the truck drivers went on strike, which we knew about mainly because on the way down there were long queues of semitrailers parked next to groups of drivers waving their arms in discussion. But we didn’t know much because Gallipoli is without an internet café, (or at least without one we could discover without the help of Google), and the Italian television news stories were of limited help.
The next day we drove to Lecce, a larger town 40km away, on a mission to read our email, newsvine, and most of all to make contact with our daughter in Japan. No dice. For hours no sign saying Internet. Finally brief access to a pirate WiFi signal which allowed only the most basic email check. But we did finally find a WiFi point we could use: closed for lunch. At this point things looked reasonably sane, except that something normally simple had spiraled out of normal proportion – as often happens while traveling.
But by evening the strike had run stations short of benzine and we were grounded. In a futile search for fuel in the rain and dark I’d picked up a stranded Italian motorista and learnt that the whole country was pretty much out. In daylight we discovered that neither Tabbacci nor Poste could sell us an international phone card, and three different banks had no one euro coins for the payphone. Finally we made a brief call to Japan with a large handful of half euro coins wheedled out of the third bank.
It feels like being blind. Over the last decade I’ve become so used to near-perfect connectivity; to being able to talk to anyone, find out anything, see a map to anywhere! It’s very strange to have this enforced separation from the world of information and the society of my friends.
Centuries ago – like 1990 – social interaction was primarily with family, neighbours, and work-mates. Information was, before television, primarily in the form of gossip. Nowdays my friends are on the other side of the city or the other side of the world, and to be cut off from telephone and internet, especially in a non-english speaking country, is to take a vow of silence and join a monastery.
Gallipoli still functions in the old way, and the masters of gossip are the old men. Some old men are farmers, and drive tiny three wheeled trucks with produce on the back. The old women are busy with shopping and home, they don’t seem to have so much time. But every convenient sunny bench is populated by gaggles of old men, gossiping as they wait for 10am when the bars open. Or else they’ll go to the nearby Associatione to play dominos or cards or simply drink until 1pm. There are infinite numbers of little clubs with official sounding names like Society for Professional Fishermen. But whatever the name on the door, it closes for lunch and the old men leave their philosophy or dominos and go home to eat. And at four of five the old men are again sitting on the steps near the fishmarket making the most of the afternoon sun.
They’re in near-perfect connectivity with no need for facebook or newsvine or google. Gossipnet. A short range but effective system of great antiquity.
I have hopes that the world-wide interconnection of people which the new media provides – once the language barrier is overcome – will bring people together in such a way that war becomes impossible. That’s the one problem with gossipnet, it’s easy to convince people who don’t know anyone more distant than the sound of their churchbell that the people in the next valley are different or evil or covetous of the wealth around here. When you personally know several of those people you’re less inclined to believe the rumours and the sermons.