…the other lives at the heart of the technological essence we so long fondly thought was ours, birthed from our heads, sprung from the creative hands and hearts of the western autonomous subject. How can the other inhabit it, always already swarming inside it, taking control of it, defining it in ways mysterious to us, in tongues unfamiliar?
(K. Philip, in Post-colonial conditions: another report on knowledge [2008], on Geean unnamed Dutch media theorist’s shock! shock! that “the internet is becoming”—oh no!—”largely non-Western”)
NPR story yesterday:
Move Over Dot Com, Bonjour International URLs
If you speak Mandarin, you can e-mail your friends using the Chinese alphabet and read articles on the Web in Chinese. But one thing you can’t do is type a full Internet address — a URL — using Chinese characters. The same is true for many other languages.
That’s because the tail end of domain names — the .com, .edu or .org — can only be written in the standard Latinate alphabet using the letters A to Z. But that’s about to change.
The standard is shifting so that a URL can exist entirely in other native languages…
Soon perhaps we will be quantifying economic hegemony by the number of domain names with TLDs in various character sets. I for one welcome the end of anglophone electrocultural hegeour new other[“World”?]ly overlords… (No no, I know the advent of non-Latinate TLDs is not the harbinger of the new international democracy to come, Twitter’s API is not the “revolutionary” infrastructure we have all been waiting for [nonsensical nonsense notwithstanding], etc., etc….I’m mostly joking.)
Yes, “nonsensical nonsense is nonsensical.” There, I said it.
