DENNIS REDMOND:
The cellphoning of the global periphery is hitting overdrive these days.
JG:
Two weeks ago, my wife and I were hiking a trail in a Yue/Zhuang ethnic minority area of Guangxi, China. The area is undergoing the inevitable transition from low-impact (mostly Western) backpacker tourism to high-impact (mostly Chinese) mass tourism. Anyway, after incessant badgering and imploring on her part, we agreed to pay a (late) middle-aged Yue woman 40 RMB to be our trail guide for two or three hours. She and my wife got to chatting (they both speak fluent Mandarin). Our guide comes from what appeared to us to be the poorest (and filthiest) village in the area. We gathered that her primary activity (at least during the planting, growing, and harvesting season) was subsistence rice farming, and that her guiding endeavors earned her a very small ancillary cash income.
Yet not only did she have a fancy mobile with multiple functions, she was constantly using it while leading us down the trail (not exactly an "exotic" experience for romanticizing urbanites, ha ha...). She was corresponding with other guides about the location and timing of other hikers so that they could be intercepted along the trail and "offered" income-generating guiding services. She was fielding calls from fellow peasants about whether she had seen their livestock along the path. A good half of the time she accompanied us, she was on the damn mobile.
It was a scene right out of one of those "globalization"-themed IT ads from the 1990's, with Masai warriors sporting handsets...