An Open Global Village

I was rocked back on my heels when I read a Maureen Dowd column yesterday. She has recently visited Saudi Arabia, and in discussions with the Saudi Foreign Minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal about the changes coming in the near future of that country’s liberalization. After talking about women’s role in the future Saudi Arabia — there are female lawyers there, now, albeit in a very limited role, and Saud looks ahead to a time when women would drive cars — she turned the discussion to technology:

I asked if technology — Saudis love their cells, Berries and computers, and Bluetooth flirting is rampant in malls — would pry open the obsessively private kingdom.

“Privacy in the modern world is a relative term,” he replied. “How can you have privacy when you have the computer, Twitter and all the others? It is just part of the complications and difficulties of modern life.” (He and the king have never Twittered.) People now, he mused, sounding like a Saudi Garbo, just “have to worry about how to be alone.”

Saud might have been the foreign minister of a western democracy, or the CEO of an American company. BUt here we have a Prince of Araby, a major leader in an Islamic, closed society, discussing the rise of publicy in an open web.

I bet that enormous societal change is coming, because once bluetooth flirting starts, and the foreign minister is talking about Twitter’s impacts on the foundations of privacy, the global village is not far behind. No society can long withstand the lures and promise of an open web.