About Andrés Ortega
Andrés Ortega is presently an editorial writer at El País. He has been twice (1994-96 and 2008-2011) director of Policy Planning in the Prime Minister’s Office. His latest book (with A. Pascual-Ramsay) is Qué nos ha pasado. El fallo de un país (2012).
Articles by Andrés Ortega
The power of the few
If globalisation has made the world flatter, it has also fragmented it into crevices, mountains and a myriad of islets. The new media and the standardising technology favor the multiplication and radicalisation of identities. Today, minorities and fringe groups have a global reach. Against the power of the big ones, there is now the power of the few.
Andrés
Ortega is an editorial writer and columnist at El País and editor of the spanish-language
edition of Foreign Policy.
He
is the author of Las
fuerza de los pocos (Galaxia
Gutenberg, 2007)Man
no longer defines himself just by what he produces or how he produces it, nor
- apart from some exceptions of a
religious nature - by what he consumes. For that reason, and because the human
being needs to be different in order to have an identity, other cultural,
deeper differences are now much more significant. New media, together with
migrations and an ever-increasing urbanisation (in 1800, just 3% of the world's
population lived in cities;
in 2007, for the first time in history, there are more people in urban centres
than in the country), make it possible for such differences - including
minorities and radical or fringe groups - to have a global reach. Indian social
anthropologist Arjun
Appadurai calls it the eruption of "small
numbers". It is the power of the few, that, despite being
scattered, often manage to be many, or much.
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