Valid concerns and well articulated. (You also get the prize for first DTLT staffer to use “always already” in a blog post. :)) You’re exactly right that it’s all too easy for us in the US to speak of “global” phenomena when we hardly know our own culture, let alone what’s happening in the UK or South Korea or India or Africa.

That said, it is true that those who are thinking in these spaces (not just enjoying their uses) are crossing national boundaries with some regularity, even if they’re speaking in English to do so. I think of IT Conversations, where English is spoken with a foreign accent a substantial part of the time. I think the international conversation among developers and philosophers of the Web is very promising.

Sometimes the spaces themselves foster genuine international contact. I think of the Japanese woman in Second Life with whom I had a very interesting and occasionally unsettling conversation just the other day. She’s probably an outlier, and of course we spoke in English, but I came away from the encounter feeling I had just had a sudden, profound glimpse of an entirely different way of thinking.

I also wonder about the idea of boundary-less-ness. There are deep questions of identity and alterity here, as well as the exhilaration of contact and community. Nations are geopolitical entities, yes, but cultures are something stronger, as the Soviet Union (for example) found out to its sorrow. The challenge as I see it is to honor culture and enable cultural contact and cross-fertilization without diluting or erasing the semi-permeable boundaries that define a culture.

Thanks for this very thoughtful post.

What you say above makes a lot of sense. i guess my questions, which intersect nicely with your thoughts, are asking how we have framed the internet’s networking capabilities, from its nascence, as an international, boundaryless phenomenon. And while it does represent these possibilities, the fact remains that many of these technologies (social or otherwise) depend much more on these geo-localized areas, as you nicely put it, then on any global/international frame that is often used hyperbolically for effect when describing these tools (something which I am all too guilty of). Thanks for both the comment and the great post which lead me to such unwieldy ruminations!

I’d bet that all of these services have “cross-national” strategies, but I don’t know how well it will work. A userbase must establish itseelf before a service spreads - a service can’t spread from the top down.

Very interesting post. Oh, and thank you for your excellent work with Lyceum!!