Roman Leibov. Globe: strange new No

Globe: strange new No
Roman Leibov

Publication date: June 7, 2000

Somehow , the fanfare that proclaimed a new era of globalization, associated with the entry of the Internet into the cultural arena as a supranational, uncontrolled creative space, quietly died down. It’s been a long time since I’ve come across the comical phrase “global village ,” which sounded so romantic and loud just three or four years ago.

However, who was screaming? And in what language? Of course, in English. With a unique North American accent. Those who shouted assumed that all people with any brain power could communicate in this language, therefore (that’s why) they thought of the Internet as an area of ​​free interaction between cultures. Sorry, cultures .

In fact, things didn't turn out quite like that. Following the era of globalist dreams came an era that can be called the time of virtual nationalism - an exact analogue of the replacement of the universalism of the Enlightenment with a romantic craving for isolation. We now live in precisely this era of network development, and the point is not only that more and more French, Indonesians and Russians who do not speak English get the opportunity to use the Internet every year. Obviously, periods of specification of this kind inevitably replace universalist stages in culture. Veterans may wince and brand the idiots who run in, but it is these idiots who now define the cultural landscape of the network.

In our country, this era was marked by the transition from translit to Cyrillic (the first stage), the accumulation of content itself and the creation of powerful search devices (the second stage) and the invention of the impossible word “Runet” (the last stage).

The universalist stage is characterized by the dominance of one culture, most often the most technically advanced and imposing (explicitly or covertly) its standards on others. The fact that such a culture in our case was North American culture is entirely natural. For a very long time, Americans viewed the Internet as a domestic matter; the inhabitants of this world looked at characters wandering from afar as if they were bears or kangaroos that suddenly appeared on the city streets: with benevolent curiosity. I'm not sure that my description is in any way adequate to the real sentiments of the creators of home pages and the old talkers from Usenet groups; however, the texts they generated produced just such an impression.

The nationalist stage (we can describe it more softly as the “specific” stage), explained by the repulsion from universalism and the desire to fill a bottomless bag with something qualitatively new, is completely justified. However, at this stage there are several dangers awaiting us. The first, which again brings to mind the nineteenth century, is the danger of network isolationism. The second, related to it, is the danger of binarism. More than once I have heard judgments that “with us everything is not the same as with them.” What confuses me here is not so much the first part (although there are also certain doubts about “us” as a unity), but the second.

Roughly speaking, by describing the network as ethnically (without going into details - linguistically and culturally) diverse, but using a simple opposition between "us" and "alien", are we not thereby following the same universalist scheme? Shouldn't we describe different cultural segments of the Internet separately, and only then, comparing these individual pictures, try to move on to generalizations? Unless, of course, we want to get another variation on the theme of “Eurasianism” vs “Atlanticism” or something in the same old spirit...

will be devoted to such a segment-by-segment description The new project of “Net-Culture” - “GlobusNet” .

"GlobusNet" is a series of articles, each of which describes individual "national" segments of the network. The word "national" is in quotation marks for obvious reasons. What exactly are we going to try to describe? Separate domains? But then the Russian Internet will be reduced to the .ru domain. Websites in separate languages? But then Belgium will be divided into two spaces, and England and New Zealand will unexpectedly reunite, adding a large number of Scandinavian sites...

Of course, both administrative and linguistic (since network activity is still primarily a linguistic activity) aspects should be taken into account, but should not be made absolute. Perhaps the wisest thing to do here is to rely on the instincts of the authors of the articles.

A logical question that arises immediately: who will write? The well-known bias of the external observer and the not always intentional, but often manifested desire to project the foreign and unfamiliar onto the familiar and our own, force us to turn to the bearers of specific online subcultures. The known impossibility of describing the system from the inside forces us to turn to external observers. The optimal option, of course, would be co-authorship, however, I am afraid that this is a utopia. I believe that a view from the inside will be more interesting to RJ readers and more adequate to the period being experienced.

The aspects of the description of national “nets” offered to the authors are as follows (this, however, is more likely the wishes of the editor than a specific program for authors):

• history of development: when and how the network developed, what are the specifics of its development (in terms of the representation of different protocols, provider policy, government policy in relation to the Internet);
• www - the share of sites of different types (education and commerce, government resources), the most popular “internal” resources, “external” resources, search devices and directories;
• language features: bilingual and multilingual sites;
• network culture: main publications and characters;
• image and ways of presenting the Internet in traditional media.

In addition, I am going to provide an appendix for each issue about the “Russian” segment of the corresponding domain.

Of course, the description should not be limited to these aspects. I think everyone will have something to say about their own. In fact, we will try to give the floor to representatives of different “national” segments of a single network and see how they see their network space and how it differs from someone else’s.

I invite potential authors of GlobusNet and everyone interested in the project to correspondence!

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