Danah Boyd’s got an essay up on ‘Why Web 2.0 Matters‘, which is worth reading. In a few sentences (but read the whole thing) – Danah’s arguing that Web 2.0 enables ‘glocalization’, a combination of globalization and localization. Danah’s definition of ‘glocalization’ is nicely summed up by the sentence below:
Web2.0 is about glocalization, it is about making global information available to local social contexts and giving people the flexibility to find, organize, share and create information in a locally meaningful fashion that is globally accessible.
It’s a very thought-provoking essay, but I’m not certain I fully buy into it – I’d like some examples so I can really see the process in action. I’ve come to see the Internet as the great homogenizer, gradually making disparate cultures similar. For example (and correct me if I’m wrong, this is not particularly well-thought-out stuff), buying and selling face-to-face is conducted in a myriad of ways from culture to culture, but buying online is remarkably similar. Conversational norms are different from place to place, but how different are IM conversations? Craigslist is all over the world, but it’s exactly the same all over the world. Ditto for just about any popular webservice or software I can think of – LiveJournal, eBay, Google, the Firefox browser, and so on. These shared experiences over time will construct a shared culture. Which strikes me as a good thing.
Now, ‘glocalization’ might change this – if all information was freely remixable, I could in theory see local creators optimizing services for their own local cultures. But I don’t see this coming to pass unless there’s clear economic incentives, and I’ve yet to have a clear sense of what those economic incentives might be – especially if the local is perfectly willing to adapt to the universal, which seems to be the case so far.
I’ll have to think on this further. If anyone reading this has pointers to more information, I’d appreciate it.
