Competing in a Global World - A "New" Sense of "Placeness"
Growing up as a university brat I've never really felt like I've ever really been "from" anywhere except perhaps the "Midwest". Which is probably why I found myself so taken with a column by Peggy Noonan which recently appeared in the on-line version of the Wall Street Journal entitled "The End of Placeness" in which Peggy waxes nostalgic for a earlier iconic time when all of us really did have a "home town" that was an instrumental force in making us who we became.
Peggy's thesis is that, in a departure from past politicians, neither Obama nor McCain exudes any "strong sense of place in the sense American politicians almost always have, since Mr. Jefferson of Virginia and Abe Lincoln of Illinois, and FDR of New York, and JFK of Massachusetts." And she says she misses that because it makes the candidates seem "disjointed" , less distinct, and perhaps less easily understood. At the same time, however, she also somewhat contradictorily suggests that this same lack of placeness she laments might have the positive consequence of lessening any pork-barrel spending tendencies.
She goes on to observe - quite correctly in my view -- that both Obama and McCain "are not from a place, but from an experience." Obama is, she says, from "Young... from the town of Smooth in the State of Well Educated" while McCain is from "Military... from Vietnam Township in the Sunbelt State." I would also argue that the unusual VP picks of each candidate in choosing not someone from a "swing state", but rather based on their experience and/or personal characteristics, further supports this conclusion. However, the point Ms. Noonan seems to miss is that American politics is just finally catching up to where we've all arrived a while ago.
Americans have always been more interested in your job than where you're from. It's the first question you ask someone you've just met: "What line of work are you in?" I've been told that Europeans in contrast want to know first about where you and your family are from.
Perhaps it's just part of heritage. We were settled by people who had so little tie to the Old World that they were willing to pack up and take a lengthy and sometimes dangerous ocean voyage to a new place they'd never even seen, knowing that they probably would never see anyone they left behind again. Once here, we kept moving West to seek new opportunities or to start over once again. When you think about it this way, it's really no wonder that we care more about what work you're doing now than where you've been.
Technology has just accelerated this tendency. The "end of placeness" in the geographic sense is already quickly disappearing, if indeed it has not already entirely departed, from the business world.
Today, it is relatively common for geographically disbursed employees of a single company - and not just big multinational companies - to work together on projects. Someone in Ohio barely gives it a second thought that their "team" at work consists of folks in Denver, or NYC, or Seattle, and perhaps abroad as well. Through the magic of e-mail, shared computer files and networks, and conference calls (both video and the old fashioned basic telephone call), we've grown very accustomed to -- and perhaps, have even grown to value -- working across geographic space and time.
Personally, I'm more than O.K. with the "end of placeness", whether in politics or business. For better or worse, it's a "global" world out there and we can't afford, as a nation or individually, not to participate fully.
The "end of placeness" also puts more emphasis on skills and "what's inside" someone -- when you first grow to know a person over web communication, its difficult to react to personal characteristics the way we sometimes do. In this way, perhaps race and gender discrimination will lessen.
And for people like me who've moved around a lot, it makes a lot more sense. I'm not from Wisconsin (where I was born), Tucson (where I spent my toddler years), Nashville (where I sent my childhood and preteen years), Iowa (where i went to high school and college), or Michigan (where I went to law school). And although I've now lived longer in Ohio than anywhere else in life by a long shot, because it didn't start until after I graduated from law school, I'm not really from here either. I am from Academia in Suburban Middle Class much more than I'm from any of these geographic locations.
In reality, all we've really done is redefine what "placeness" is. Placeness can be about whether you're internet savvy or not, how much you care about and take action to advance being "green", how your job makes you think, or any number of other things. All of these are in fact more relevant to who the person before us is than geographic "placeness."
So while Ms. Noonan is correct in her observations, I don't think it makes the candidates, or any of the rest of us, "disjointed". If anything, the "end of placeness" in a geographic sense has simply caused us to use more relevant "placenesses". That, I think, is a good thing.
