In which she talks about US-centrism on the internet

[zeborah]

(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.)

On the internet, USans have the advantage that generally:

Financial

• E-commerce sites will list prices in their currency;
• and accept their credit cards;
• 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.]
• They don't have to pay currency conversion charges.
• Shipping charges are cheaper and sometimes free.
• Charity donations are tax deductible in their country.

Content and services

• The streaming sites they want to visit won't withhold services based on their country;
• nor will new web technologies such as Google Voice or Foursquare;
• nor will ebook providers such as the Kindle;
• nor will competitions exclude them from entry. [See the note on exceptions above.]
• Libraries in their country are allowed to negotiate access to the fulltext on Google Books.
• If a helpline exists, it won't be an international call and it will be open when they're awake.
• Search results will be relevant to their country.
• 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.

Temporal

• 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).
• 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.)
• Similarly, they don't have to choose between participating in memes at the same time as everyone else vs on the same date as everyone else.

Legal

• They can agree to Terms and Conditions adjudicated in their own country.
• They can conduct regular life on the internet without having to surrender their personal data to be governed by the laws of another country.
• 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.

Social

• When they join a community, there'll be other people there from their own country.
• 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.
• 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;
• or, alternatively, they can ask to be educated about the topic without fear that anyone will think their ignorance of it is unusual;
• assuming, of course, that the topic hasn't already been explained for their convenience by someone foreseeing the inevitable.

Linguistic

• They can expect to be understood when writing in the standard dialect of their country.
• They can expect others to write to them in the standard dialect of their own country.
• They can expect spellcheck systems not to complain about the standard dialect of their country.

---

Just so you know, I reserve the right to mercilessly mock comments about how:

• there are worse things in the world to worry about (seeing as how this was the first thing I said);
• population numbers may be relevant (seeing as how this is neither unobvious nor very much comfort); or
• 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).

I have an icon ready and everything, so you can't say you weren't warned.

Comments

[dsgood]

Temporal: The US has several timezones, which can be an inconvenience. In the contiguous continental US, there's usually only a difference of three hours. But it's somewhat more for Hawaiians.

[keieeeye]

Yeah, I mean, Hawaii is like seventeen hours different from New York time.

[zeborah]

Yeah, I was... kinda aware of that. There are also several timezones (and a dateline) outside of the US, which can be an even greater inconvenience....

[(Anonymous)]

ya think? :P

the ppl I chat with most on the internet live on the US East Coast and Ireland. The few hours difference that I know by heart bc I used to live there is nothing compared to trying to remember what time it is in Dublin.

(although you'd think I'd have that memorized too, since I lived in that time zone for a while as well. but not for as long and I don't have occasion to deal with it as much in general, so I guess not)

-jennygadget

[(Anonymous)]

More seriously, did you see this line? 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;

You have come into a post about some of the conveniences that many people on the internet experience by virtue of not living in the USA, and you are attempting to redirect it to the much lesser inconveniences suffered by those who do live in the USA.

This is derailing. Kindly STFU.

-Piemonkey

[mollydot.livejournal.com]

*like*

[sciamanna.livejournal.com]

Sing it, sister...

On a more restricted European scale, some of it applies to the UK. Very frustrating if you live in the Republic of Ireland and find that all kinds of offers and delivery options are available for locations a few km north of you but not for you... (Though Amazon.uk has recently extended free delivery on most items to the RoI. Still won't sell a lot of hardware & software though.)

[zeborah]

Argh, yes, I can imagine!

(BookDepository has free delivery everywhere, afaik, but only books, not even movies.)

[sciamanna.livejournal.com]

I mostly buy books, never movies, sometimes computer stuff. I've bookmarked BookDepository a while ago, haven't had occasion to use it yet, but I will!

[green_knight]

I don't suppose we'll ever quite get rid of this, but it's one reason why I like the Euro and hope it gets adopted more widely - it has greatly facilitated cross-border shopping and price comparisons.

[dendrophilous]

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.

Huh. I thought that was generally done by ip detection. It surprises me to see Afghanistan at the top of some sites.

Re: temporal issues - One of the people in my group at work lives in Australia. He has to attend meetings at the most awful times of day.

[zeborah]

Hahahahano.

I mean, it could be done. Some places even do. But most places (including Google Maps, which is weird because Google does IP detection on all sorts of other things) don't.

[aquaeri]

My biggest pet peeve that you didn't mention is that USans can talk about their holidays and seasons and many of them not only assume everyone knows what they're talking about, but don't even realise "late spring" isn't the same thing as "May". And I know when their Labor Day is, only because I lived there a while.

And I live somewhere that still has a moderately good approximation of four seasons, even if that might not be the best way to think about the weather here - further north (another alien concept to USans) it's too warm for that.

[zeborah]

Oh yeah - I keep wanting to say "last summer" and then have to calculate whether or not it's important enough for people to know when I actually mean, and work out the best way to explain, whereas Northern Hemisphereans can blithely assume everyone knows what they're talking about.