The Global Context: Rethinking Strangers and Neighbours

Abstract

In 2009 a UK broadsheet newspaper carried the story that locals in an Australian bar were spending time online monitoring the US-Mexico border via live webcam links. ‘Once logged in the [Australian] volunteers spend hours studying the landscape and are encouraged to email authorities when they see anyone on foot, in vehicles or aboard boats heading towards US territory from Mexico’.¹ In fact, the US/Mexico border can now be policed by anyone with an Internet connection, hence it being dubbed the ‘Google border’.² This form of vigilante securitization has of course attracted a good deal of criticism: ‘Border security deserves trained professionals, not pub-goers in Perth’.³

[I]n contemporary society globalization forces strangeness upon the whole of society.

(Turner, 1997: 14)