Global Culture

As part of my research for this project I came across Global Voices, a project sponsored by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School.

Their primary goals are to showcase the most interesting conversations taking place in the blogosphere across the globe, by indexing, aggregating and summarizing posts from notorious bloggers in as many countries as possible. In order to accomplish this, they’ve created a Bridge Blog Index, which lists many bloggers who are considered relevant within their local communities but speak with a global voice.

Following up on previous posts regarding how this project will work, consider that many Bridge Bloggers are currently living in a foreign country, feeling a strong bond with their original local communities (recent immigrants, maybe). It is this fact that gives them the courage to try to use their wealth of cultural knowledge in a context that is completely new. In the process of doing so they effectively bridge the two communities in one of many possible ways:

• providing insight to their community of origin on the inner workings of the new community, possibly making it easier for others to follow
• providing their adopted community with valuable cultural information regarding their origins, increasing the chances of cultural understanding
• providing interpretation on costumes between the two communities, by using their own personal experience

The purpose of this blog is to discuss the mechanisms by which this army of bloggers spread around the globe will, in fact, be able to bridge as many cultures as possible by deploying tools that help everyone mine the information embedded in blogs like those found in the Global Voices project.

If you’re Bridge Blogger, leave a comment. This project aims to take advantage of the blog you already have. Editorial and technical guidelines will be provided to participate.