It's good to see that with the advent of the Internet, many different culturals are coming together on the "information super highway". Unfortunatley, one typically finds it very hard to find languages other than the mainstream ones on the net (by mainstream I mean the languages used in international business):

• English
• Japanese
• Chinese
• Spanish
• French
• German

But mostly English is what you will find when dealing with the non-underground sites i.e. the sites that are not considered "subculture". Even hubpages has a policy that the majority of what you put on your site must be in English. I guess this policy is due to the fact that the creators of hubpages are English speakers and it would be difficult for them to police content they don't understand. This is understandable.

However, it is not true that a person CAN NOT use foreign languages and symbols on the internet. Even on hubpages, the strange language symbols of my ancestral language are printable. They Include:

Ị ị Ọ ọ Ụ ụ Ṅ ṅ

Unfortunately, due to what I'd like to call the "pioneer" effect, I believe that most of the mainstream media sources will continue to be in a select group of languages and other minority cultures will continue to be left behind in terms of technological progress. Essentially, I am defining the pioneer effect as meaning that those who initiate something (a theory, a law, an invention, a system) ultimately have control over the functionality of that "thing" (for lack of a better word). So, changes are limited to the knowledge and capability of those pioneers until and unless control of that entity or part of it, is passed on to a group of people with new and different knowledge (be that the passage of political control from one president to another, or an estate from generation to generation, or whatever).

It's like when you buy a used car and you pimp it out. Until it is yours, that car is going to stay the way the first owner of the car likes it and usually the initial owner changes nothing about it simply because it is new to him/her and (s)he wants to get a good use of it in it's natural form. But when it is second hand, the second-hand purchaser tends to have little or no respect for the car in its initial form, because it's old anyway. They probably think, it would have been junk if (s)he hadn't bought it, so (s)he is going to strip it down and rebuild it and do new things with it (pimp the ride).

Meanwhile, those who never had access to the technology in the first place most likely would be fighting a losing battle to try to duplicate it if they weren't already given the knowledge of the system firsthand (or if they are not the original creatures). It would be like trying to swim against the current. They either have to try to create something similar of their own, or learn precisely the techniques of the original system (which I believe is impossible, because of the "pioneer effect"...everytime something gets passed down, it changes a little to suit the needs and capabilities of the new owner).

This is not a terrible thing. There are huge burdens and consequences that come along with technological advancement as I have mentioned in a previous hub, but there are also a lot of benefits.

Of course, we will really get to see where this huge boon in technology is taking us over the next few decades. We may not even understand it in our lifetimes.

the end...for now.