Paul.Bramscher@xxxxxxxxx <Paul.Bramscher@xxxxxxxxx> espoused:
> On Mar 8, 1:58 am, Mark Kent <mark.k...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Roy Schestowitz <newsgro...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> espoused:
>>
>> > Wikipedia, Academia Have a Love-Hate Relationship
>>
>> > ,----[ Quote ]
>> >| University of Virginia English professor John Sullivan, who also
>> >| teaches courses in mass media and American culture, is skeptical
>> >| of Wikipedia. Sullivan compared the encyclopedia to the underlined
>> >| and highlighted sections of library books that students may flip to
>> >| instead of reading the entire book. "Are we living in a world
>> >| where we have intellectual fast food?" he asked.
>> > `----
>>
>> >http://www.linuxinsider.com/rsstory/56096.html
>>
>> > Conservapedia: Far Righter Than Wikipedia
>>
>> The conservapaedia evangelist chap was interviewed on the Today programme
>> yesterday morning - I was listening whilst making my way to a meeting.
>> He was complaining that wiki is not "pro American" enough, and moreover,
>> that it was not "christian" enough. As far as I could tell, his real
>> problem was that he wanted the intelligent design religious teaching
>> to be pushed as scientific thinking, but he was handwaving around a
>> few other things. He was also complaining that there weren't enough
>> American spellings (or too many standard ones), and went on to claim
>> (free of evidence, as far as I could tell), that most Wikipedia users
>> were US citizens.
>>
>> I used to think that the internet was bringing US culture to the world,
>> but I've realised over the last few years that actually, the opposite is
>> happening. US citizens are being exposed, in most cases for the very
>> first time, to other cultures. I can see this not sitting too well
>> with the conservative right in the US, as they will see themselves as
>> losing control over influence and thinking - they will not like this on
>> iota, I suspect.
>
> US culture is extremely hetergenous. It would be both an insult to
> the remaining enlightened Americans, as well as an over-estimation of
> the carnivorous-right, to claim that their culture was representative
> of American culture at-large.
I was more positioning them as clinging on to their perceived
controlling influence over US cultural values. I'm not convinced that
the culture is as heterogeneous as all that, though. How much common
ground does a RedNeck in Alamaba have with an aboriginal guy in his
reservation, say? Or a New York ghetto kid? Or a west-coast liberal?
>
> Many Americans are cosmopolitan -- we've got some excellent libraries,
> a melting-pot of cuisines and music styles, and I've done enough of my
> own genealogy to realize that the streets just a century ago in many
> metropolitan areas were extraordinarily diverse. Apparently there was
> a sort of pidgin-English that needed to be spoken at many small
> mom&pops, since one customer might be Norwegian, whereas the next
> might be Polish, Italian, German, etc. The world brought its culture
> to the Americas.
I would say that a snapshot of local cultural values was certainly
injected in certain places by certain people, but that's not really
what I was driving at, although it is an interesting point. If you take
people in the UK, the culture changes dramatically across the country,
as different parts have been made up of different migrant populations,
something which has built over the last 2000+ years, and still continues
today. If you take someone from Manchester and transplant them, to, say,
Dallas, do they take "British" culture? Not at all, they take their own,
local, Manchester culture, because they are utterly different to people
from Newcastle or Exeter or Canterbury or Lincoln or Boston or York or
Birmingham etc. etc. Same goes for all the other places you indicate -
there is no "Italian" culture, rather, a huge range of cultures. Italy as
a country is /extremely/ young anyway. Same for Germany, another young
country with a huge range of cultures, most of which, like Italy, are
micro-cultures. The north-east of the England, including Yorkshire and up
to the Tyneside region still has much cultural heritage from the Danelaw,
for example, since it was part of the Danish kingdom for some time.
The Head of the primary school at which I'm a governor has a french
surname - why? Because his family escaped persecution in France by
coming to England - they were hugeonots. There is still a hugeonot
chapel at Canterbury Cathedral.
Consequently, the US has had an injection of micro-cultures from all
sorts of places, but then, so have many migrant-based countries, like
the UK, for example.
Having said all of that, my feeling is that large parts of the US are
very un-cosmopolitan indeed, although I agree that many parts are very
cosmopolitan.
>
> The *narrowing* of America was perhaps ultimately a failed attempt,
> and somewhat of an historical quirk, to homogenize the diversity in
> the 20th century. It occured even within the US (a special group of
> cultural/religious imperialists evangelizing within). But I think
> you're right about the internet. It's basically ending the ability to
> culturally seal off America into ideologically in-bred robots -- even
> though the current administration insists on its futile attempts to do
> so. Much of it, undoubtedly, is the "fear economy" (the paranoia and
> xenophobia which drives the military industrial complex).
>
The more your average US citizen becomes aware of the outside world,
then the less likely he will be willing to chuck bombs at it. This is
very much what has happened in the UK since WWII, the schools no longer
teach a "british superiority" mantra, rather, they're much more socially
aware, more liberal, so it's much harder than it used to be to start a
war with someone. European integration looks easier every day, as
average people travel more and more into the EU, admittedly mostly just
to the beaches, but the great success of Champions League football has
also introduced a generation of lower-income football fans to a range of
European cities which they would otherwise never have visited. The kind
of throw-away racism which used to abound when I was young is certainly
dieing out, which is good.
The kind of daemonisation of arabs/islam which was driven by George Bush
is far less effective now than it used to be here, although there are
still people who fall for it, though. The daemonisation is obviously
essential to justify invading a country (Iraq), so over time I can see
this becoming harder, *unless* governments find some way of controlling
the internet.
I think that the internet has perhaps had a bigger influence on US
culture than, say, the UK, because of the way television, radio and
newspapers are owned in the US. In the UK, (also France), there is a
requirement for even-handedness in broadcasters, so it's very difficult
for governments to maintain an effective internal propaganda drive. I
always recall the Russian ambassador to the US's remarks about this:
(paraphrasing) "The difference between your propaganda and ours is that
your people believe your propaganda". The internet is cracking open
that problem, though, for the betterment of us all, I think.
--
| Mark Kent -- mark at ellandroad dot demon dot co dot uk |
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