(From the Proceedings of the 16th National Online Meeting, Edited by Martha Williams, ISBN 1-57387-004-8, New York: Information Today, Inc.)

Keywords: Internet, Information Superhighway, International Communication, Nationality, Fragmentation, Chaos, Cyberspace, GII.

Abstract: The presentation begins with defining a few pivotal words, then turns to concerns about a world network. What will be the future of the Net and what will it affect? This definition of the Net sums up the dilemma: "An open-work fabric made of twine or strong cord, forming meshes of a suitable size, used for the capture of fish, birds, or other living things. A spider's web."¹

1. WHAT IS THE GII?

GII stands for the Global Information Infrastructure, a formal, or rather, formidable name used to describe the interconnectedness of world-wide computer networks. The GII could not exist without enormous cooperation or without a considerable desire of each participating country to partake in the vast electronic network. Will the GII affect the cultures from which it springs?

When first conceiving this paper, the author toyed with words like "heritage," "domination," "language," and "enrichment." Those words are cozy and warm, not like "cultural imperialism," "pollution," and "xenophobia," words that are like a cat's claws on the blackboard of international relations. Finally, the title that summed it all up appeared: Freedom and Cooperation, or Fragmentation and Chaos. The paper begins by defining some pivotal words, moves to a discussion of certain recent concerns, and ends with input from the reader and audience. This paper is meant to ask&emdash;not answer&emdash;questions.

2. DEFINITIONS²

Nationality: a national quality or character. A nation; freq., a people potentially but not actually a nation. Also occas., a racial or ethnic group.

Using Sweden as an example, the word means people walking for hours every Sunday afternoon, smiling as they point out the berries, rejoicing at the coming of Spring. These people relish their hot split pea soup on Thursdays; they believe strongly in the Swedish view of life. They celebrate the Midsummer festival and "Lucia", the ceremony of light in December. No matter where Swedes travel in the world, at heart they are Swedish.

Fragmentation: #1 A breaking or separation into fragments; #2 Comb.: fragmentation bomb, grenade, one designed to disintegrate into small fragments on explosion.

Definition #2 encapsulates genuine worries of journalists and other information specialists, who fear that interconnectivity might result in people retreating even more into ethnic and religious divisions, speaking and listening only to each other.

Community: A body of people organized into a political, municipal, or social unity: a state or commonwealth.

Net: An open-work fabric made of twine or strong cord, forming meshes of a suitable size, used for the capture of fish, birds, or other living things. A spider's web.

Notice that "The Net" is a trap, and yet it serves as a superior metaphor to "the Information Superhighway" because the emphasis is on interconnectivity. The Net certainly steals our time, as we explore its expanse. The question is, will it steal a national character? Will it disunite people?

3. CHANGE OF POWER

The topic is the Net, the spider web, that links the world and has virtually unlimited bandwidth. The capacity and connectivity of the Net thus far has prevented monopolies, and for many users the Net is almost free. In terms of national influence, TV and radio tend to work against distinct cultures, because programming is expensive to produce and disseminate, and because up until now, these media have had limited, one-way bandwidth. Currently, the cultures with the most money tend to broadcast to the cultures which are the have-nots. With the GII, the Net will level the playing field.

Minority languages and cultures can have as significant a presence as majority ones, from the point of view of the people taking part in them. The University of Illinois can have as strong a presence as an entire country. And a small country can have a very loud voice.

Sweden has had networking since the early 1980s, and the university network Sunet began in the late 1980s. Sweden took to Gopher and Mosaic like fish to water, and the country is well-represented. If we search the Internet for the word "Sweden," we can retrieve Swedish law books, in their entirety. Web sites are springing up all over the world, making access to heretofore unthinkable resources now commonplace.

Presently, some groups are on the spot and well-placed to disseminate and gather information. Information is to modern culture what armadas were to older ones: information is power.

4. GOOD-BYE NATIONALITY?

Will the GII work against preserving culture? Optimists content that increased communication will decrease isolation and provincialism, and that it will synthesize our cultures and draw us together.

A certain amount of cultural erosion is already taking place. New Zealand, for example, is glutted with American baseball caps, and young children wearing sports jackets of every professional sports team in the United States. These symbols are being adopted in an almost complete absence of knowledge about their context in the U.S.

On the network, sometimes the invasion of one country into the "territory" of another is irritating, as when a person from another school, city, or country "invades" the local interest newsgroups. Some Australians were thoroughly annoyed when an "invader" sent a spate of American jokes to aus.jokes&emdash;the humor made sense only to Americans. The offended Australians called this "pollution," and the posts confirmed the Australian stereotype of "pushy Americans."

And then we have the sticky issue of Internet addresses. Most Internet addresses finish with a country code: New Zealand has .nz, Sweden has .se, the United Kingdom has .uk. Americans don't adhere to this policy. We are like "Madonna"&emdash;we don't need a last name.

Other counties would presumably like to drop the .se ending for local posts, just like we omit the country name on a letter mailed internally. However, if a message ends in "edu" it has to go to America. If you ask Americans why they do not conform to world standards, they answer that they designed and built the Internet, and they set the rules. The Australian says, "Those bloody Americans have messed it up again for the rest of us." Thus the Internet can be a place where people are very aware of who sets the rules.

5. LANGUAGE

English is the Lingua Franca, and for the foreseeable future, Americans won't have to work very hard to read what the rest of the world has to say. Beside the field of science, on the Internet, and in the sphere of computers, English is also the language of International Telecommunications and International Air Control.

Before the newly developing GII, English was decreasing as the dominant language of international business and communication due to the ascendancy of European and Asian markets. However, now English is dominant. The spread of English could be seen as an emblem of American domination, another form of "Coca-Cola-nization."

A source of tension surrounding language is the limited alphabet of transmission. The Internet carries ASCII characters (American Standard Code of Information Interchange), which only provides the figures of the English alphabet. This lack of available characters limits possible expression. In some systems, Cyrillic is now possible, and the Asian languages have worked out means to send their mail. There is a 16-bit Unicode in being refined, which would include Chinese and Japanese characters. However, at present, anyone wanting to send a character such as é or æ or â is limited.

The "medium" is English&emdash;is the "message" unconsciously English? The language of programming is American&emdash;how deep does that effect what we see? Isn't it possible that as other countries join the Net in greater force, they will begin programming and working in their own languages on issues that are important to them that, in turn, will change or modify the way that Internet works?

Fortunately, Veronica, the searching engine on Gopher, makes no language distinctions. It contains all the information in "Gopherspace" in both English and other languages.

In the formative days of network bulletin boards and listservs, one researcher found that, when offered both alternatives, Swedish users chose communicating in Swedish five times as often as they chose English. That was back in the days of ARPANET. He notes that today the Internet is very English-oriented. And if a user sticks to Swedish-only groups, the choice is very limited.3 Finland has a broader assortment of groups.

Using English does not mean the demise of culture. For example, after visiting Turkey, a network user wrote that " There are three universities in Turkey that teach entirely in English&emdash;I was at one of those last June, in Gaziantep in East Turkey, and they are certainly keeping their culture and identity&emdash;a mosque near the university blared out prayers five times a day which is a constant reminder of culture and religion."⁴

Another Net citizen wrote the author: "Men det er goey aa samtale i et fremmig sprog!" which means, roughly, "But it is yummy* to talk in a foreign language."⁵

6. FRAGMENTATION

The Net recognizes no nation-state borders, so a natural bond is shared culture and this will be expressed through shared language. If we seek out our own kind, and use only the languages we understand, we can retard our development as citizens of the countries we happen to be in. Part of the immigrant experience in America was learning English and leaving the mother tongue at home. National boundaries grow increasingly meaningless with the GII&emdash;we can be one place in body, and another in spirit.

Pockets of revolution can quietly grow, too. In the Asian sectors of the Net, the East-Timorians have formed a number of discussion-lists where (in their own language) they have organized campaigns of resistance against the Indonesian occupation.

In Ireland there are some lists on Irish culture&emdash;the discourse is all in Gaelic. These lists gather the Irish from a large number of geographical areas&emdash;language/culture is the bind that holds. New Zealanders all over the world check into soc.culture.new-zealand and reminisce about mutton dinners.

On a university campus, the only female physicist in a department can feel fairly isolated. If she joins a Listserv and "talks" daily to people like herself, she gains strength from shared understanding and support. Women have felt it necessary to set up their own news/discussion group. What will other groups do? I am told that an example of how this can develop can be seen in ethnic newsgroups, such as alt.scopjia.is.not. kkl and alt.macedonia.is.greece. Here the two ethnic groups (Greeks and Albanians) replicate the bitter arguments of their groupings.

The danger is introspection, concentrating on reinforcing the group and not looking beyond the borders. This is the question: will we end up with a Balkanization, a fragmentation, with barriers to entry, or will we have a blending, a synthesis?

Apparently as Europe unites, the weakening of national identity is being replaced by a renewal of regional identity. Even regional dialects are experiencing a comeback.

7. CHAOS

Many writers also worry about the dissolution of organizational identity. An eroding of the hierarchical nature of information results from e-mail, because it allows users to jump the ranks, bypassing lower management and writing straight to the top officials. Media can topple governments, as we saw with the VCR and the fall of the Eastern European regimes. There is a threat of new communication technology destroying traditional forms of communication. We already watch ourselves relating better to our e-mail friends than to our workmates at the office.

People could become "more self- centered, less attuned to their neighbors and society. Bridging the gap between cultures and races could become more difficult. Civility will suffer too...a consequence of the new communication is...a new, unexpected rather social isolation and group breakdown&emdash;that is potentially and paradoxically a product of the high connectivity and openness of 'decentralized' two-way communication. ⁶

8. CULTURAL COLLISIONS

It is dangerous to assume that the people you are communicating with in cyberspace have the same cultural background. Even English speakers can come unstuck on the Net. In the United States, the word for condom is "rubber." In New Zealand, a "rubber" is an eraser. Imagine the embarrassment of the New Zealander in an American school asking a classmate for a "rubber."

It takes understanding and skill to becoming friends with a person from a different culture, particularly a collectivist culture.7 A collectivist person begins a public talk by being humble, perhaps beginning with, "This presentation is inadequate, based on limited data...please forgive this unworthy effort." Americans are not at all self-effacing, and might begin their speeches promising a depth and breadth of knowledge not yet seen on the planet.

The chapter went on to describe 23 ways to act correctly and avoid conflict with "The Other," meaning all people from collectivist cultures. With the speed of communication today we don't have time for the subtleties, and we too easily can end up misunderstanding one another. It is on that point that this paper ends and seeks discussion and input from the reader and listener.

9. AN OPTIMISTIC VIEW

One lesson continually relearned is that we are all on the same "spaceship." The only change is that we now have the power through the Net to organize ourselves better. The GII has great potential for international, regional, and cultural understanding, as we see with the Mosaic pages countries have produced. Among the most popular newsgroups are the alt.sex variety, indicating that sex is of interest to people the world over!

The advantage of the Net is that it reduces discrimination based on physical and social cues such as gender, race, socio-economic status, physical features&emdash;it enhances the interaction with one another.

The Web offers an opportunity for small countries like Sweden to present their views on the world stage and thus claim or re-appropriate the right to represent themselves, not letting travel writers and political scientists speak for them. The Net lets people "Reach out and touch someone."

The Net is a tool of survival. It is not a matter of choice. Survival in Africa depends on communication, and if that brings bad side effects, that's the price they must pay for living. An African is quoted as saying:

"For years," he said, "the main obstacle to real development has been the statement, 'We have to feed the people first.' After all, who can withhold food? But if you want the people to feed themselves, you have to have a different view." He gave me an appraising look. "Say you go to a small village. People are hungry. Is the priority an electronic mailbox...or 100 kilograms of corn?"

I said nothing. Fall nodded his head. "What we've learned, over the past twenty years, is that the mailbox may well be the priority."⁸

^{10. REFERENCES}

^{1. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition.}

^{2. Ibid.}

^{3. Jacob Palme, personal communication, 1994.}

^{4. Fay Sudweeks, Sept. 17, 1994, e-mail message from fays@arch.su.edu.au.}

^{5. Kronick, Paul, Sept. 7, 1994, e-mail message from pkronick@asrr.arsusda.gov.}

^{6. Singer, Ben. The New Media and Electronic Anomie, 1994, Communications in Canadian Society, in press, 1995.}

^{7. Triandis, Harry C. A comparative analysis of subjective culture. Group Effectiveness Research Laboratory, report 55. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1967.}

^{8. Greenwald Jeff.Wiring Africa, Wired. 2.06.}

1995

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