Digital Diversity

Digital Diversity Does the international scope of the Internet entail an end to the cultural and historical diversity of style in composition? In the past several decades, technology has led to a giant connected network of computers. This new Internet (and mainly the World Wide Web) has become a new communication and information exchange tool. All data that used to be transmitted by voice, paper, radio, television, or other mass media device can now be done so digitally, and these messages can be personal as well as broad-scoped.

Throughout the ages, the style of messages being delivered has reflected upon the culture and history of their origin. Although the Internet reaches most places in the world, it will not homogenize the …show more content…

The idea that English is the primary language behind the inner workings of the Internet leads some people to mistakenly believe it will dominate the global communications world. However, this is far from the case. The actual protocols and scripts making the digital world possible have very little English in them.

An example of commonly used PERL code is shown below. # Read in text if (&MethGet) { $in = $ENV{‘QUERY_STRING’}; } elsif (&MethPost) { read(STDIN,$in,$ENV{‘CONTENT_LENGTH’}); } @in = split(/[&;]/,$in); Most of the English words in the code can be replaced by whatever the programmer chooses. In this case, those are “#Read in text”, “QUERY_STRING”, and “CONTENT_LENGTH”, and could have been written in any language. Everything else is very terse and shorthand and really does not force the English language upon foreign programmers in any way. Even people brought up speaking English still have to learn the new commands and syntax. However, these new “languages” will not help bring out any sort of universal language like Esperanto tried to do in the early twentieth century. With more and more programs designed to help a normal user avoid this computer code interaction, few people will actually have to learn and understand the various computer languages. People will be free to create their web pages in whatever design and language they choose. Currently web pages exist in over 75 .