The just passed Friday and Saturday, I spent at the University of Copenhagen, Faculty of Art, attending a conference/seminar on "The Internet as a Medium of Cultural Globalization", arranged by the Danish Research Project "Global Media Cultures". Although, at a first glance, somewhat at a remove from my own project, it turned out that the conference presenters more or less all had some interesting points and "thoughts to think with". Especially Jenny Sunden from Linkoeping University, who also works with MOOs and textuality, though with focus on embodiment and sociological perspectives. She and I met for coffee Sunday and had a nice exchange of book- and article titles - and of RL impressions of mutual aquaintances - quite an interesting phenomena: one starts out knowing a colleague be e-mail and then one day, finally, at some conference meets this person in RL. So it's always quite interesting to hear other's impression of this person, if she/he has meet the person in RL before one self. "What does he look like?", "how is she...?" Strictly speaking of academics, they sometimes seem so cool, calm and collected in their e-mails and then they turn out to be as chaotic as oneself when acting and speaking in the physical world, which is quite reassuring somehow.
This leads me back to one of the points of discussion on the Saturday seminar - the importance of space or place, "locality", and of making a distinction btw the virtual world and the RL (real life) world - which is, we agreed, not necessarily more "real" than the virtual world, so perhaps it makes most sense to make a distinction between virtual space and physical space and forget the talk of real life (RL)?!? So above I should actually have written that we exhanged impressions of the physical impressions of colleagues, not the RL impressions...hmmh, but that's not very descriptive, either, is it? I mean, it is not just a question of how a person moves hirs body in physical space or how it looks, but also of patterns of behaviour, that might deviate some from the on-line, in-mail behaviour. Not that this aspect of a person's personality is more "true", just different or - let's face it - often more "inhibited" when people act in physical space.

Talking of space or place, what emerged from several presentations was the point, that even seemingly "global cultures" needs to act within and share an either imaginary or "real" space online, a "locality" that is theirs and defined either solely by using norms of behaviour to draw the boundary btw this locality and other localities or by both the use of normative behaviour and the sharing of an actual on-line place, for instance a MOO or MUD. Hence it seems, that if there is such a thing as a global culture - or international culture, it is always tied to a local place. Gitte Stald, a phd-candidate who has been examining young Danish teenagers use of the media, pointed out that they preferred to talk to other Danes and to do it in places whey they felt "safe" in the sense that they knew who they were talking to. Meeting people "in English" when you're just learning to speak English, is understandbly not easy and visits to random chatrooms with unknown people just results in very superfically talk or massive disappointments (when people's "physical" identity is revealed), so young Danes stick to young Danes in "proximate" and local virtual rooms when and if online.
Hence, globality is a relative thing - in practice, it seems that local norms (such as stereotype Americanism in Jenny's WaterMOO)or a basic human need for a safe place from which to speak pretty much makes global culture more an utopian ideal than a practised fact.

Also, as long as most of the internet culture(s) comes into being by means of the English language, we still have a long way to go. Some stat to prove this: Yvonne Værn showed a statistic claiming (on reasonable grounds) that in a survey 75% of the websites examined was English language sites. In comparison, f.i. 2, 53% was Spanish, which - compared to the actual spread of the language spoken - means a diffence in score of 0,4 for Spain and 7,14 for England (ie 7 times more online presence of language than should be, when 1 represents the scope of the respective language in the physical world). Thoughtprovoking.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 17:59