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.
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.
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).
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