Screaming Penguin

While I am catching up on stuff I meant to post about, I just want to make a quick note about this post by Kevin Drum at MoJo. The thing that really stood out was the included quote he cited:

Nancy Scola uses Iran's recent ban on Gmail as an occasion to say this:

I've been squawking recently about the rising time of anti-Internet rhetoric that is at its core anti-American Internet rhetoric, and how that's something that those of us who love the Internet should perpare ourselves to deal with. We saw it with China, when they responded to a possible Google pullout by complaining that the World Wide Web is hopelessly flooded with American content, and we see it again and again in Cuba, where the Castro regime argues that the content on the Web is so skewed toward American interests that they just don't want it for their people. From the perspective of Beijing or Havana, it's as if you turned on a TV in New York City and 470 of 500 channels were running Latin American telenovelas. More local, non-English content would be good for everyone involved.

There are about five things that are wrong with this whole line of thinking. First, the "Internet" even if you want to paint with the broadest of brushes, isn't "American," it is "Anglophonic/Anglographic." People in the UK or AU or NZ don't care much about where stuff comes from, as long as they can access it in their language. The NYC TV example here is cute, but it misses the point. If 470 of those 500 channels were Brit or Kiwi channels, most people wouldn't mind. The main difference here is that when you are in Havanna or Rio, the most TV you see on the local cable is in Spanish. If you are in Tehran or Damascus it will be in Arabic. Sure, the Internet is mostly English language, because those of the people producing content. That doesn't even really make it an "Anglophic Internet." It just means that Iran and Cuba and anywhere else aren't producing content locally. Nothing is stopping them from building the "Internet version of telenovellas" to run right along side the "Internet version of Wife Swap." The real analogy for the NYC TV for other parts of the world would be "There are 16 million channels and only 750,000 of them are in my language." We leaping lizards, you have 750,000 channels!