Critical
Responses | Informative
Summaries | Works Cited
Global Village Narrative and Its Discontents
In the introduction, Hawisher and Selfe question the “global village
narrative” that infuses the common, western perceptions of the Web. This
narrative presents cyberculture as culturally neutral and as equally approachable
by all peoples; in effect, the “global village narrative” erases cultural
differences and national boundaries (5-6). So this narrative can be seen
as a kind of colonialism (9), which this collection is designed to “challenge”
(10).
Hawisher and Selfe most clearly attack this narrative in their conclusion:
“We began this collection with a discussion of the global-village narrative and a reminder of the potency that this story exerts in shaping a contemporary vision of literacy practices on the Web. But the cracks and fissures in this story, as [. . .] each of the chapters in this collection suggests, are becoming increasingly evident and powerfully insistent [through] the spread of global consumerism and multinational capitalism, [. . . through] the colonialism associated with the investments in the global information infrastructure, [and through] the regional and national increase of poverty and the spread of transnational crime. The global-village narrative, it is becoming clear, simply will not work for much of the world [. . .] – it is too reductive, too western, too colonial in its conception.” (285-286)The global village narrative strikes me as a kind of modern myth. In this myth, the Web represents Western, especially American, culture as a universal, human culture that would be appealing to all of the species: I hear distinct echoes of Star Trek. In this myth, the Web is accessible to most people, and the dominance of Western culture and the English language on the Web is seen as an affirmation of the universality of that Western culture, and, implicitly, the superiority of that language. This text thoroughly demonstrates the inaccuracy of that myth, showing that the culture and the language are not universal and showing that the dominance of Western culture on the Web is an accident of the Web’s history, not an indication of universality.