found drama

To pick up where we left off…

Firstly: Paolillo’s research was done as a refutation to the idea that the net, in and of itself, is democratic and diverse because of its global reach and will hence foster those principles by its very nature. w00t! I couldn’t agree more. The assumption that the net (in and of itself) is democracy incarnate and diverse by nature is agreeably naive and damaging. A sober analysis of the numbers can’t be argued with unless you’re blinded by optimism or pessimism. (Your choice…) The major point of contention though is that the creation of a “technical-class” is fundamentally bad or damaging to a culture. Why re-invent the wheel?

Of course, that brings us back to Pete’s original point about “[l]earn[ing] to read left to right, top down[.]” The technical-class created is going to already have learned enough Technical English to get by BUT ALSO they would (presumably, at this point) be familiar enough working on the existing platforms that the effort involved in writing a new Native-[insert language here]-shell and toolset would be a Herculean task. The fact that this would open up the tools to a host of new users is laudable but let’s run its value up against creating language packs for most-commonly-used applications.

There’s a technical class at work w/in the 72% of web-content already. It’s not a phenomenon limited to “minority language groups.” Plaudits to native-tongue open source projects. Plaudits to funding for said projects. But let’s try to bear in mind what fruits we hope this plowing to bear. A native-Tamil command line is still going to serve a technical elite only. Common-computing in the English-speaking world moved away from the command-line for a reason.

So what is the goal of language-diversity on the web? There’s little point in having it simply reflect the linguistic diversity of the world. This accomplishes nothing in and of itself. If (however) “the point” is to have information available to people that are looking for it, people that are going to use it, people that might otherwise not be able to use it because English is not a language known to them… Then right on. And it’s not that I don’t believe that the demand isn’t out there — but these things take time, you know…

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