I will be upfront and admit that I am a McLuhanist. Communications technology extends our senses and this to a large degree eliminates spatial boundaries, bringing communication (and hence information and empowerment) to humanity as a whole, not just to the world's elites. So I feel compelled to forward this article, an article that attacks these ideas. The concept of the global village has failed, argues the author, and from the wreckage of the dot com collapse is arising a digital hegemony dominated by western cultural influences. I have a few comments in reply. First, it's early days: you don't build a global village overnight. Second, the proliferation of western values (and especially American values) is meeting with resistance - consider, for example, the many people resisting the commercialization of knowledge and information. Third, I think of my own experience where I receive emails from all corners of the globe on a daily basis. And finally, though there was a dot com crash, it was the commercial hegemony that crashed, not the thousands of individual web pages, open source projects, document sharing and general chatter that characterizes the global village. Reading the media, you'd think that the global internet is in trouble, but don't forget, it's the media - not the internet - experiencing the trouble. This article isn't available at the CTheory website yet, so the link is to a copy posted on Yahoo Groups - you do not need to log in to read it.
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