Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Ethan Zuckerman, one of the co-founders of Global Voices [Disclosure: Ethan is a good friend, and I am on a GV board] asks whether the Net is letting us hear voices unlike our own. He founded GV precisely so we could easily find bloggers in other nations opening up a window into their world. But now he wonders if that was "a phenomenon for a specific moment in time." As the communities of bloggers have become available in many cultures where previously there had been only a handful, they are talking amongst themselves. "[T]hese conversations are taking place in a public medium, but I'm not part of their intended audience," Ethan writes.

I am not arguing that bridge blogs are dying out - though there's evidence that some, like Sandmonkey in Egypt, are - or that they've lost importance. My point is that when you're one of the few people in your real world community who is online, the tendency is for you to address your thoughts to a global audience. When a larger segment of your real-world community comes online, there's good reasons for you to start talking to that audience using the Internet, a global medium used for a local purpose.

Ethan seems wistful for a time when you could fool yourself into believing (as he says) that "a knowledge of English and a little curiosity was all you needed to explore the world of blogs." Now it takes much more — Global Voices relies on over a hundred people putting in serious time and effort. He contrasts this with the pronouncements of the "cyberutopians" that the Net would make us all one people, engaged with one another and at peace.

But we need to ask whether they saw the Internet bringing people together into a single, unitary net culture, or whether they saw that the Internet could be a space that allowed people from all different cultures to meet on common ground. The former is a fun club to belong to, where we can trade All Your Base jokes and cat macros. But the latter is powerful, political, and potentially transformative. It's something worth fighting for.

Indeed.

The global conversation isn't all-to-all, for the reasons Ethan cites. For one thing, the fact that no one speaks every language means that all-to-all is impossible until we discover Babel fish. The Net is not going to erase all culture. Who would want it to? We don't need homogeneity to be at peace. We need to live with difference.