Has the counter intuitive actually occurred? Has the Internet really saved and preserved and even help define the particulars of each of us all as well as we and ours?
It’s a widening realization, I think, that globalism, beyond banking, climate change and warfare, has always been a dubious concept, a misleading catchall for how the world supposedly works, to which culture, in its increasing complexity, gives the lie. The integration of markets and the Internet have certainly brought billions of people into closer contact. Everybody has access to the same American movies and music now, and not just American, also Indian, Romanian, South African and Chinese. But far from succumbing to some devouring juggernaut, culture — and Europe, with its different communities and nations living cheek by jowl, is a Petri dish to prove the point — has only atomized lately as a consequence of the very same globalizing forces that purportedly threaten to homogenize everything.
I suppose there may be more Finnish folk music on YouTube but I am still concerned that when I type out an HTML tag I have to write "center" and not "centre" thereby undoing my Canadianness. Does the fact that I have access to Romanian movies really mean that Romanian is spared and unaffected or that it is now corrupted by commentary from me or people like me. Well, actually people not like me as I have no interest in Romanian films.
I have had a little project hunting out the voices of folk music and folk story for the eastern Ontario region, specifically the St. Lawrence and so far I can't say that the Internet has been any great shakes in helping me out. And when I posted about the Watertown Base Ball tournament of the mid-1870s, the Toronto Sun used me as the source of information following up on the point in a column. I am not sure that my information was correct. I know it was partial. So, has the internet actually saved particularized cultures or chopped them into bite sized bits for consumption by the homogeneous homongulus that is the unified nation of Internet readership?
