Americans on the web Americans, oh americans. There are so many of you on the web and you really do dominate. See, it's generalistion time again. I wanted to give a little back-story to my odd comment on America and American culture (maybe I haven't made that many, but I have in my mind, so it's pertinent). There being so many web-using, english-speaking Americans in the world necessarily means a huge web-presence. So big is it that one often feels that the web is American (certainly if English is your main language - lucky Japanese, for example, can inhabit an entirely parallel web-universe). This is especially true when looking at news events and political opinions. Or if using the "next-blog" button. It makes for a sense that American issues are everyone's issues, yet they're also literally foreign at the same time. The types of racism, homophobia and religious bigotry are very different in character in America, often more extreme, than they are in Britain. And yet, these issues are consonant with those in the UK, allowing me to relate to them to a certain extent.

Reading these stories - about Terri Schivo, about Michael Jackson, about gay clergy and gay partnerships, about the war on terrorism, about global warming - they all seem familiar, and yet horrible, grotesque, outrageous. And because they're so widespread, it feels like on the web the grotesque is the norm. But all the viewpoints on these issues and the issues themselves are not normal to a Brit - so often they come from a standpoint of Christian conservatism, or a reaction to that, and this is alien to us. Western Europe is largely godless in the traditional sense, and issues close to my heart like gay rights do not raise the same bile here as they do in the states. When I read some of this bile on the web, it truly makes me sick. And because I come across it so often, it starts to feel like I've entered a really unpleasant alternate reality - where, for example, gay people are reviled and hated like I've not seen in the UK. I come away feeling sad and angry and depressed, and often have to say to myself "It's not here, it's elsewhere, it's another culture". What makes it hard and scary is that American culture is related to my own and influencing my own, and it can't just be ignored.

This is the complex position a Brit on the web finds themselves in. In the UK, it feels like the politically liberal are the more web-literate, articulate and voiciferous, so it always shocks when in America it's (almost?) the reverse. And while we fight the tide of cultural imperialism we also embrace it, because Americans are our cousins and some have a lot to say to us that is worth hearing. If only they used their powers for the good...(I should specify; "they" being the American government).  ¶ 15:06