tag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-04:271559Zeborahzeborahzeborah2010-10-09T06:47:46Ztag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-04:271559:74623In which she talks about US-centrism on the internet2010-10-09T06:47:46Z2010-10-09T06:47:46Zpublic14(All of us who have decent internet access and read English have a good amount of privilege thereby anyway, so US-centrism on the internet is, in the greater scheme of things, nothing more than a minor background irritation. But, you know, sometimes it's worth noting minor background irritations, if only for the record.)<br /><br />On the internet, USans have the advantage that <em>generally</em>:<br /><br /><b>Financial</b><ul><li>E-commerce sites will list prices in their currency;</li><li>and accept their credit cards;</li><li>and ship to their address. [There may be some exceptions for Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico, etc; but not as many exceptions as there are for other countries.]</li><li>They don't have to pay currency conversion charges.</li><li>Shipping charges are cheaper and sometimes free.</li><li>Charity donations are tax deductible in their country.</li></ul><b>Content and services</b><ul><li>The streaming sites they want to visit won't withhold services based on their country;</li><li>nor will new web technologies such as Google Voice or Foursquare;</li><li>nor will ebook providers such as the Kindle;</li><li>nor will competitions exclude them from entry. [See the note on exceptions above.]</li><li>Libraries in their country are allowed to negotiate access to the fulltext on Google Books.</li><li>If a helpline exists, it won't be an international call and it will be open when they're awake.</li><li>Search results will be relevant to their country.</li><li>Services in general will be designed for maximum convenience for people from their country: map sites will default to showing their country, drop-down menus will default to having their country at the top, etc.</li></ul><b>Temporal</b><ul><li>Online chats and conferences they're interested in, for either business or pleasure, will be arranged to coincide with feasible hours for them (as opposed to 4am).</li><li>They'll receive updates from lists, feeds, memes etc on the date that they're meant to receive them, instead of most of a day later. (Ie Caturday won't occur on Sunday and FlyLady's Monday assignment won't arrive in the wee hours of Tuesday morning.)</li><li>Similarly, they don't have to choose between participating in memes <em>at the same time</em> as everyone else vs <em>on the same date</em> as everyone else.</li></ul><b>Legal</b><ul><li>They can agree to Terms and Conditions adjudicated in their own country.</li><li>They can conduct regular life on the internet without having to surrender their personal data to be governed by the laws of another country.</li><li>They don't have to choose between watching a TV show or movie now in order to talk about it with other fans and thus becoming a criminal, vs waiting for weeks, months or years to watch it legally but have no-one left to talk to about it.</li></ul><b>Social</b><ul><li>When they join a community, there'll be other people there from their own country.</li><li>Conversations will be about topics that are relevant to their country, and they can assume that people from other countries will know what they're talking about.</li><li>If the conversation is about a topic that is not relevant to their country, they have the option, should they choose, to change the topic by force of numbers;</li><li>or, alternatively, they can ask to be educated about the topic without fear that anyone will think their ignorance of it is unusual;</li><li>assuming, of course, that the topic hasn't already been explained for their convenience by someone foreseeing the inevitable.</li></ul><b>Linguistic</b><ul><li>They can expect to be understood when writing in the standard dialect of their country.</li><li>They can expect others to write to them in the standard dialect of their own country.</li><li>They can expect spellcheck systems not to complain about the standard dialect of their country.</li></ul>---<br /><br />Just so you know, I reserve the right to mercilessly mock comments about how:<ul><li>there are worse things in the world to worry about (seeing as how this was the first thing I said);</li><li>population numbers may be relevant (seeing as how this is neither unobvious nor very much comfort); or</li><li>this one time, or this one site, or this one community, you as a USan were briefly disadvantaged (seeing as how the fact that this sort of experience is exceptional for USans is kind of my point).</li></ul>I have an icon ready and everything, so you can't say you weren't warned.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=zeborah&ditemid=74623" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments