SARAJEVO - I had an interesting conversation with my boss the other day. As I am currently stationed in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a place where democratisation and transition experiments are mixing with the post-war recovery, he wanted to know if there are any interesting Internet-related projects happening here. He assumed that here, like everywhere else on the planet, social and economic activities are gravitating towards the virtual space.

Digital divide notwithstanding, it was an interesting idea to assume that in a country struggling to rebuild basic infrastructure, where the 20 cent difference in the price of bread has serious social consequences requiring state intervention, and the population is begging the international community (this is their mess!) to remove its democratically elected politicians for their lack of sense and a refusal to agree on anything of consequence; one would expect a vibrant debate about a (more) virtual future.

And, since reality is not full of unexpected twists and happy-ends, the reality of Bosnia and Herzegovina didn't disappoint. Asking questions about Internet use in the process of ‘democratising democracy' drew surprised and indignant responses from the people that are currently barely able to answer the question of whether their country is going to go down the road of final separation or not. The questions they wanted answered were about justice, corruption, education and their daily bread. The questions I wanted to ask were of no relevance to them.

I briefly switched from the staple of local news, mostly print and television, to the very digital reality of Australian current affairs to find the realities of the two collectives barely cross in the supposedly ‘connected' global space. From Britney Spears, Kevin Rudd's strip club visits, the death of a Big Brother contestant and regular market updates, back to the horrid counting of bones in the ever-emerging mass-graves of Bosnia and Florence Hartman's statements about the international community's unwillingness to bring to justice those most responsible for their existence.

Is it any wonder that we don't understand each other? The existential light-heartedness of the questions we would like to ask simply don't match the reality of the existence of the people we would like to engage. Where survival is a pressing issue, only hope can engage people in something more esoteric than the mere ability to provide the next lunch. Which is why people are returning to the less costly, but more universal solution of ‘hope and connectedness' - religion.

In a society that had, for some 50 years, been rather more secular than Australia, the rise and current strength of religious institutions and practice is the only certainty anyone is able to offer to the population for which the promises of democracy and prosperity are consistently failing to materialise. Rejecting them for a better world somewhere else is a powerful message.

This is an interesting observation for many reasons. Transition in itself is a difficult process; transition from one reality to the next is a completely separate issue. This is where we're all failing in our responsibility to understand the world we are trying to change and are directly responsible for the continuous rise of the forces that are undermining the effort.

If the international community had not learnt any lessons from Bosnia before going to Iraq, and is threatening to repeat both experiences with the talk of war in Iran, the hope for a world unified by the promise of democracy and prosperity is just as arrogant as my question of democratising the non-existent democracy in a country that cannot afford to eat -- by connecting to the Internet. It is naïve at best.

Expecting people who had recently gone through the trauma of snipers, shells, death and hunger to rise to the challenge of democracy and globalisation at any cost and on our terms, while exporting Britney Spears as our best product and a solution to their need for hope, is hardly going to provide those people with the incentive they need. Assuming that a year or two or ten after your right to be a human being had been taken away in order to forcefully make way ‘for a better world', and asking them to deliver it to themselves by simply ‘following our way' while refusing to acknowledge their situation and provide some sense of justice for their pains, is illusory.

Does it surprise you that they see us as ‘the pillars of avarice', ‘the bearers of the meaningless robbery called capitalism' and ‘the superficial society with no insight into the human condition other than their own', as some of my indignant interviewees have described us? It shouldn't. Their understanding of our luxury to live light-heartedly with our digital future experimentation is as scarce as our understanding of the hardship of the existential experimentation they are going through. And their pain is ultimately stronger.