The world is becoming non-western

“The world is becoming global, nonwestern, at an incredible rate.” Geert Lovink announced this at UC Irvine in Feb 2009, at the Critical Theory Emphasis (CTE) Winter Mini-Seminar. Yo, somebody tell the guy the world has been non-western, largely so, for a a very long time. But there’s Ethan Zuckerman in Africa, “he’s trying to help empower people to speak in their own languages.” These are just random quotes, but they seem no less bizarre out of context than they were in the context of this lecture. In its general form, however, it was all too familiar : several slides with statistics and maps of internet usage, predicting its worlwide expansion and calling for radically new theory to address this new object. As a graduate student pointed out, it was all delivered in corporate speak, using the language of commodities and markets.