Global Culture

In the chicano network I provided a quick snapshot of the deep roots that the Mexican community has in the U.S. and some of the historic reasons for this. More recently, an exodus of Mexicans have reached farther regions as a result of the climate of social instability and the idea of recruiting bridge bloggers to capture the essence of their voluntary exile came back from an early post entitled global voices.

While the term Bridge Blogs was possibly created by Global Voices, their definition can group a very large number of blogs:

Hossein Derakhshan (aka. Hoder) proposed three models for ways people can use weblogs to communicate between cultures: windows, bridges and caf√©s. Windows allow us to look into another culture, but not interact - an example might be a weblog of someone in another country, talking about her daily life to her friends and family. We’ve got a chance to look in, but we’re not invited to interact. Caf√©s are complex spaces where groups of people can meet to discuss in ways that they can’t meet in the real world, due to geography, politics or language. [...] Bridges are more interactive than windows, but less complex than caf√©s. They’re usually the project of a single blogger, or a small group of authors. Bridge bloggers write for an audience outside their everyday reality - for instance, when Ory Okolloh writes about corruption in Kenya, reaching family at home and readers at Harvard, she is bridge blogging. (And when people comment on her blog from outside Kenya, they’re bridging back.

For the purpose of this project, I’ve chosen to narrow the definition of a bridge blogger to include only those bloggers who happen to live in a foreign country, but maintain a strong bond with their country of origin. Their readers are likely people who are experiencing similar journeys or are considering it in the near future. Their blogs are full of insights as to how to translate a cultural context into another making them powerful tools for cultural understanding. In theory it all sounds great, but the real trick is to find those who are committed to participate.

As an example of such type of bloggers, consider a group of Mexicans living in the Scandinavian countries, blogging about what most people do, but doing it with a distinctive Mexican style:

• Raza C√≥smica from Sweden (spanish)
• El Agoran “On Ice” from Finland (spanish)
• Caminando de lado from Sweden (spanish/english)
• Stockholm i mitt hj√§rta from Sweden (spanish)
• El diario de Conny from Sweden (spanish)
• El rinc√≥n de la se√±ora Samsonsen from Norway (spanish)
• M√©xico@Gotemburgo from Sweden (spanish)

Now imagine a directory of bridge bloggers covering every single pair of countries in the world.