I'm back home after a couple of weeks of travel that took me to Brussels, Brugge, Stockholm, Kansas City and Columbia, Mo., in pretty much that order. International travel induces a kind of vertigo in which old things, when you return, seem new, and I don't mean just the weeds that appeared everywhere in my lawn during my absence. Ideas and issues are bumped out of their comfortable positions. Gas prices, the immigration debate, advertising practices, cable and satellite TV, the way people read newspapers -- all of these things present a fresh and new aspect.
In Sweden I spoke to a group of newspaper companies about how we're using new products and new content strategies to battle the loss of readership that is dragging down American newspapers. Swedish papers are still posting readerhip numbers in the 60-plus percentage range. Why aren't they suffering the 30-point blues like we are? Until about a decade ago they only had two TV channels, both of them ad-free government stations. Today's readers grew up using newspapers as a primary form of entertainment. We, on the other hand, have an entire generation of infrequent readers who grew up with hundreds of TV channels, and another on the way that is growing up with the Internet. The future is already here; it's just unevenly distributed, as Gibson has said.
On my way back I spent a night in an inexpensive Brussels hotel in an apparently Turkish neighborhood. The satellite TV was aimed only at a Turkish satellite. You haven't lived until you've seen Robocop 4 in Turkish. Did you know there are more than 100 million Turkish speakers in Europe? I learned that from the Turksat-1 infomercial channel, the only thing in English I could find among dozens of Turkish channels. So you have this explosion of language-specific digital satellite programming overlaid on an explosion of migration across traditional geographic boundaries. This coexists with the growth of American English as the world standard. All over the world, everyone is learning English as a second or third language -- it's the lingua franca of the new century, and American programming is everywhere.
When I return home, I find people complaining about high gas prices that are a fraction of what people pay in Europe. I hear whining about Mexicans and Cinco de Mayo and people who won't learn English. (My family has been Anglophone since before it was called English, but I am reminded that my wife's family emigrated from Norway in the middle of the 19th Century and spoke Norwegian for several generations.) I hear that everything will be just fine if we build a Berlin Wall along our southern borders.
Pardon me if my reaction is "get over yourself." The world is a rich and diverse place and it's coming together. Quickly.