Michael Sieburg

Ethan Zuckerman posted the transcript of a speech he recently gave at a conference in the Netherlands. The last section on xenophiles is of interest to me, and I would like to think of myself, in many ways, as a xenophile:

Xenophiles are people who are fascinated by the whole world, by things other than their ordinary experience. They’re people who want to connect with people who see the world very differently.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the rather non-linear path I took in the first few years following  university and one conclusion I’ve come to is that I had the need to have a more complete perspective of the world, or at least the need to know that my perspective was broader than my own, as Ethan puts it, “ordinary experience”. It wasn’t that I needed to walk the earth, sleeping in every capital. It was more that I wanted to develop a better framework to process current events and even my own experiences, and I felt I couldn’t do that as successfully as I wanted without catching the next flight to Hanoi. And so I went.

Ethan continues:

Xenophiles are good at making connections in this lumpy world. It’s a good idea to have them if you’re trying to do business in another country – some of the people who are making lots of money in this economy are people from developing nations who study in Europe or America and then return home. They can bridge between cultures in a way that helps them make smart economic decisions.