Reimagining the Community

As part of the information-centered technological revolution that started in the late twentieth century, the Internet has not only transformed our culture and society in terms of networking, but has also challenged our traditional concepts of identity and community that were geographically conceived and historically constructed. According to the UCLA Internet Report, “Surveying the Digital Future,” released in November 2001, “the Internet is now a mainstream activity in American life that continues to spread among people across all age groups, education levels, and incomes.” ¹ As the Internet expands across North America and around the world, the United States Internet Council, in its 2001 edition of “The State of the Internet Report,” announces that the online population has crossed the half billion milestone globally and that online demographics have finally begun to reflect offline realities. ² What is more interesting in this annual report, however, is its declaration that English speakers have now for the first time lost their dominance in the online world, and represent approximately 45 percent of the total online population. While the United States, European nations, and Japan still lead the Internet in terms of technology and language content, the council further observes, “several other nations such as China, India, and South Korea (have begun) to play larger roles.” ³ The latest development of the Internet and the emergence of the three Asian nations as new major players in the IT industry have important political and cultural implications. To begin with, as the Internet continues to facilitate the free flow of information across regional and national boundaries, these three Asian national governments have promoted the technology as a means to integrate their national economies into the global economy and bridge the gap between them and the more advanced countries such as the United States, even though it means that they have to continue to wrestle with issues of authority, jurisdiction, and law enforcement in their traditionally defined nation-states. As a result of their efforts, the Internet and their native language contents on it have now flourished in these nations. ⁴ Moreover, as the Internet continues to grow at a phenomenal pace, Internet architecture has now expanded to accommodate new multilingual domain names as well as to develop new multicultural top-level domains. What all these changes mean culturally and technologically is that the Internet has finally experienced a transformation from an initial English language-centered and U.S.-dominated environment to the present multipolar, multilingual, and multicultural one, the meaning of which remains to be determined and interpreted by scholars of technology and cultural studies.