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Language, Power, and Software 295

versus an emerging global monoculture. The political scientist Ben-
jamin Barber has recently argued that world culture is increasingly
polarized around two extremes (1995). The first is what he calls “Mc-
World”: the cosmopolitan, international, consumerist, multination-
alized, advertising-based culture of cable TV, popular magazines,
Hollywood films—a culture which aims at universal accessibility, in
which billions watch the same World Cup finals, a culture where
MTV (translated), dramatizations of the lives of imaginary American
millionaires, CNN, and films like Titanic dominate and flatten local
cultures, producing a thin but powerful layer of consumerist, adver-
tiser-driven, entertainment-based, and perhaps in the last analysis,
American-influenced culture with great popular (if lowest denomi-
nator) appeal, backed by enormous financial and technological re-
sources. It almost goes without saying that this culture is, in origins
and assumptions, predominantly English-speaking. Its centers are
the US, Britain, Australia, English-speaking Canada, and English
speakers in nations and city-states like Hong Kong, Singapore,
South Africa . . . and India.
In defining the power of this global monoculture, computers, In-
ternet, and the Web play a small but growing role. In South Asia,
countless million Indians have access to cable television, while three
or four million at most have computers, and of them, perhaps ten
percent have access to Internet and the Web. The driving forces of
Anglo-Saxon global monoculture are still television and film. But the
dominance of English in computation is part of this broader picture,
and its importance is likely to increase in the years ahead. With the
liberalization of Internet service providers in India, with efforts to
lower the costs of local telephone connections, and with the plum-
meting price of computers, more and more Indians are likely to join
the “wired” world. Rates of Internet growth are higher in South Asia
than in most English-speaking nations, although the starting base is
low and there are virtually no non-English Web sites or Internet
hosts in these nations. At the same time, however, the dominance of
English as defining the wired world remains intractable: indeed, an
article in Salon, the on-line Apple magazine, several years ago spoke
of “the English speaking Web” (Brake 1996). While some counterex-
amples exist (Hongladarom, this volume), the world of computers
and computer-mediated communication must be counted almost ex-
clusively as McWorld, not of cultural local diversity.
The Japanese sociologist Toru Nishigaki of the University of
Tokyo sees a global Anglo-Saxon monoculture ultimately based on
the power of American entertainment and American values as