It’s been very gratifying to read comments and posts linking to my post last week on homophily, serendipity and xenophilia. I have high hopes of writing more on the topic, and am currently digging into “Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks“, which danah boyd recommends as a thorough academic introduction to the subject. (That link will give you a summary of the paper, which is available in full text on JSTOR, a subscription-only journal archive. You may be able to get the full text of the paper if you access JSTOR from a university library… which is how I got a copy of it.)

So far, the research I’ve done has given me a sense for just how far back in time I need to go to understand scholarship on this issue… which appears to precede Aristotle, who writes about the phenomenon in Nichomachean Ethics, but who may be quoting Diogenes when he references “birds of a feather flock together”. Guess I picked a terrific time to take a month off from all reading…

One of the most exciting (for me, at least) conversations that’s come out of the post was one I had with Brooke Gladstone on Wednesday evening at WNYC’s studios in New York City. I was in NYC doing a bit of consulting for friends at Open Society Institute when I got a call from Jamie York, one of the producers of On The Media, my favorite public radio show. He’d shared my post with Brooke and they were kind enough to invite me into the studio to discuss the problems of homophily in digital media and possible solutions. You can listen to my segment on the audio player above, or on the page for our conversation. But I’d urge you to subscribe to the podcast - if you’re interested in smart, sharp, relavent critique of media around the world, this show is for you.

It was a great honor for me to be on the air with Brooke and I’m looking forward to thinking through these issues a bit more so I can speak more intelligently next time (and so I can be a bit less of a stuttering fanboy around one of my favorite public radio figures.)

There’s been a small but fascinating blog conversation going on surrounding the term “homophily”. Journalism and media critic Amy Gahran encountered the term in an interview I and Solana Larsen gave with Chris Lydon of Radio Open Source and explored the concept in an extended riff and a set of bookmarks. Tom, an educator living and working in Ankara, weighed in with a moving story about learning from a Guatemalan colleague. Michele Martin, an education blogger, worries that the internet as a whole is a source for homophily and may be making her (and all of us) dumber. (Here she’s pulling on some threads explored by Cass Sunstein in Republic.com and Infotopia. More on that in a bit.) And yesterday, my colleague and friend David Sasaki invoked the conversation in an important post on the difficulties of getting people to pay attention to voices from the developing world.

I love it when smart people join a conversation I was trying to get started. So here’s my attempt to flesh out a bit more of why I think homophily, serendipity and xenophilia are useful concepts, what little I know about the academic literature about them, and what I’m reading to learn more.

I was introduced to the term “homophily” through a post on Nat Torkinton’s blog titled “Homophily in Social Software“, which led me to an excellent piece by Shankar Vedantam titled “Why Everyone You Know Thinks the Same as You“.

“Homophily” is a remarkably useful term, a compact word that succinctly expresses the idea that “birds of a feather flock together” - that you’re likely to befriend, talk to, work with and share ideas with people who’ve got common ethnic, religious and economic background with you. It’s not a new word - it was coined by Lazarsfeld and Merton in 1954 in an essay titled “Friendship as a Social Process” - but it’s never quite caught on. A Google search for the term gives you 51,000 results, roughly as many as my favorite obscure, Greek-derived sociological term, “xenophilia”. (One of the high ranking results for “homophily” is an interesting question on Yahoo Answers with the unhelpful answer, “Homophily does not exist as a word although homophile (gay)does.”

I’ve been talking and writing about homophily as one of the concepts that helps explain the challenges and issues that surround Global Voices and my larger media attention work. It’s my contention that living in the 21st century requires understanding what people think, feel and want in different parts of the world, given that both the challenges and opportunities of next several decades are global, not local ones. (Understanding Iraqi attitudes towards a US occupying force and Shia/Sunni/Kurdish tensions better might have mitigated the disastrous invasion of Iraq. Understanding Chinese and Indian economic aspirations is probably a prerequisite to figuring out how to regulate carbon emissions while those nations embrace automobile ownership. And activists trying to change Chinese policy in Darfur would benefit from better understanding of Chinese pride, the concept of “face” and the power of nationalism.)

Historically, our understanding of attitudes and opinions in other cultures is a heavily mediated one. As Kwame Appiah elegantly outlines in Cosmopolitanism, it’s only in very recent times that most people have been able to directly encounter people from different parts of the world. And despite air travel, most Americans have an impression of Nigeria through newspapers, movies and 419 emails rather than from travelling to the country or spending time with Nigerians. We understand the world, for the most part, through what we hear about it, not what we encounter of it. To the extent that our understanding of the wider world is a poor one, it’s worth asking questions about our media is working correctly.

There’s no shortage of voices reporting a crisis in the world of journalism. In 2001, media critic David Shaw reported that foreign coverage had shrunk “70% to 80% during the past 15 to 20 years” due to economic and cultural factors. He quotes a 1998 study from UC San Diego which saw international news coverage in American newspapers shrink from 15% to 2% of total content. More recently, Alisa Miller - president of PRI - produced an elegant short video that graphically depicts the paucity of international news coverage on American television.

(News isn’t the only way we encounter other countries - movies, television and music shape perceptions as well. But journalism has an explicit public service function, a social responsibility to inform citizens so they can make political decisions. Some of the blame for an isolated, ill-informed citizenry has to fall on the news media.)

The shift from broadcast media to read/write media has the potential to shift this equation. Rather than encountering people through the filter of professional media, perhaps we can reach them directly through their blogs, videos, photos. (This isn’t always possible - the digital divide is very real, and I’d argue that many of the arguments I made about digital exclusion in “Making Room for the Third World in the Second Superpower” still hold.) We no longer need to wait for CNN to connect us with people and stories in Bangladesh or Brazil - the explosion of personal publishing means that someone is likely speaking up in those corners of the world.

The rise of the read/write web turns the problem of paying attention to the rest of the world from a supply to a demand problem. You can find Brazilian, Bengali and Bulgarian voices, but only if you bother looking for them, stumble across them or are led to them by creators and curators of content.

This new “digital disorder”, as David Weinberger describes it, requires new systems to make navigation possible. Some systems rely on trusted guides, editors who we trust to help us sort through the mess. (Think BoingBoing and the crew who man that ship, or any prominent site capable of driving traffic to smaller sites.) Others rely on collective intelligence of their users to suggest stories - Digg, Reddit, etc.

The systems that rely on network effects, as Torkinton points out, are deeply affected by homophily. (So, as it turns out, are the systems based on human editors.) Some of these systems ask you what stories you liked, then find others who liked those stories and recommend their favorite stories - this is a technique called “collaborative filtering“, and it’s become increasingly popular as a paradigm for navigating a complex, choice-rich world of media. You can see how CF could be a homophily trap - tell Netflix that you liked the film “Sneakers” and it will find you other people who liked “Sneakers” (most of whom are, like you, ageing computer geeks), and suggest other films they liked. The recommendations you’ll receive are likely to be good, but are less likely to be surprising and challenging.

Systems simpler than CF fall victim to homophily traps as well. A site like Reddit attracts a lot of young men who work technical jobs and lean to the left politically - rely on Redditors for your news and you’re unlikely to encounter many stories from the developing world, from the political right, from non-technical disciplines. (Yes, I’m writing in huge, sweeping generalizations here - comments pointing out a single Africa story on Digg to refute this aren’t especially helpful.)

Why is homophily a trap? Cass Sunstein argues that it can polarize us - in Infotopia, he cites a study he helped conduct that demonstrates that deliberation of political issues with like-minded people leads subjects to a more politically polarized stance. From this, and from a close reading of political polarization in the blogosphere, he argues that the Internet may make it easier for us to share information with likeminded individuals, and that in a political context, this could be a bad thing.

I’ve made a much less persuasive and elegant argument summarized by the aphorism “Homophily can make you stupid.” My argument, basically, is that it’s possible to miss huge trends, changes and opportunities by talking solely to people who agree with you. I use myself as an exemplar of this sort of stupidity - I found myself so baffled by the results of the 2004 US Presidential election that I invited Republicans to come have a beer with me to explain what they were thinking. (One did. Thanks, Ian.) If homophily is capable of misleading Americans about local politics, just imagine what we fail to understand about Egypt, Pakistan and Fiji by virtue of not consuming media recommended by people from those places?

Writing from an engineering perspective, Torkinton suggests that authors of social software need to first decide whether homophily is a feature or a bug. If the goal of an application is to broaden your information universe, homophily may be a bug, and designers may want to include “less relevant but also likely to be interesting” recommendations. He recommends framing this as a feature, searching for ways to deliver “serendipity”, which he defines as “pleasantly surprising the user”.

(”Serendipity” is a fascinating term. It was coined in 1754 by Horace Walpole, a prolific British novelist and correspondent. He referenced a Persian fairytale, The Three Princes of Serendip, referring to a set of characters who “were always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.” While that definition - and, indeed, the story cited - don’t precisely map to current usage of the term, Richard Boyle offers a long essay tracing the coinage of the term and feels that Walpole’s invention was the definitive first use. “Serendip”, incidently, was a Persian name for Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. Always nice to discover that a concept like serendipity has global origins.)

Serendipity is harder than it sounds. It’s one thing to surprise someone - it’s another to surprise someone helpfully. It’s even hard to define - lately I’ve been arguing with David Weinberger about whether certain examples constitute serendipity. Looking on a library shelf for a particular title, discovering it isn’t particularly interesting, but discovering the exact book you need nearby? (Fortunate, but also a consequence of the power of a topical organizational system.) Finding a newspaper story you never would have searched for but found very useful because the editors put it on the bottom of the front page, in what Dan Gillmor has called “the serendipity box”? (Again, very fortunate, but hardly surprising that editors would drive readers to less-read content.)

The reason serendipity is important to consider is that it’s one of the few affirmative ways to get people to pay attention to news from the developing world. I’ve argued that there’s three basic paths to get people to pay attention to, say, Somalia:
- Fear: There’s no government there, and there are lots of angry Muslims. If we don’t pay attention, we’re ignoring the next hotbed of terrorism
- Guilt: People are dying there. If things get out of hand, you might see Ethiopia slaughtering large numbers of Somali. Let’s not ignore another Rwandan genocide.
- Greed/Opportunity: Sure, it’s a mess, but did you know that Somali Telecom is making a fortune in the north of the country?

These arguments always put me in the mind of Melissa Rossi’s book, “What Every American Should Know About the Rest of the World“, a book which seems to be designed solely for people who are embarrased at cocktail parties when countries they can’t find on a map become topics of conversation. My guess is that avoiding embarrasment is not an especially powerful motivator for engaging with international issues and opinions.

I’ve argued for some time that a different model exists - xenophilia. There are people in the world who are genuinely fascinated by the very breadth, complexity and difference of the world. Many of these people are “third culture kids”, people who were raised in one country but “from” another country. Others are people who live, work or love outside their home cultures. My colleagues at Global Voices are, for the most part, people identifiable as xenophiles. I think there’s an argument to be made that xenophiles are uniquely equipped to thrive in a globalizing world and that cultivating xenophilia should be both a personal priority and an aspect of a nation’s educational and diplomatic strategy.

But xenophilia’s hard. It’s one thing to say to oneself, “I really should pay attention to matters in Somalia” and another thing to do it. Joi Ito has talked about “the caring problem“, the difficulty of really caring enough about people in another part of the world to engage with news from that community. At Berkman, we’ve been discussing the problem in terms of broccoli and chocolate - you know you should eat broccoli because it’s good for you, but there’s just so much tasty chocolate out there!

Serendipity breaks the chocolate/broccoli paradigm - it gives you broccoli as you’re searching for chocolate, adn it turns out to be just the right thing at the moment. It doesn’t require you to identify as a global citizen - it just means you’re following your interest in sumo wrestling and find yourself discovering a debate about Japanese identity and Asian politics.

So… that’s more or less an outline of the ideas I’m wrestling with right now, trying to figure out if they might represent the outline of a book. Specifically on the questions of homophily and serendipity, I’m interested in these questions:

- Do people who are ethnographically/psychographically similar consume the same media? Where’s the causality in this? Do we both read the NYTimes because we’re both liberals, or are we liberals because we read the NYTimes?

- Does consumption of the same media lead to the polarization Sunstein sees in deliberation, or is that a feature/bug of the deliberative process?

- Is homophily in terms of bridging and bonding social capital? If so, is Putnam right that bowling leagues create bridging capital? (There’s a lot of middle aged white dudes in my bowling league.) What do institutions that create international bridging capital look like in an internet age?

- How do you create serendipity? Is this something that’s algorithmically possible in collaborative filtering systems or other recommendation engines? Is serendipity a function of breaking out of your existing, homophilic social circles, or is it better generated within those circles?

On my immediate reading list:
Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks, by McPherson, Smith-Lovin and Cook
Lazarsfeld and Merton’s essay introducing the term “homophily” in Freedom and Control in Modern Society, edited by Berger, Abel and Page, 1954
Putnam, both Bowling Alone and his recent, worrying research on trust and socioethnic diversity

Would love your suggestions, directions, critiques and feedback, both from people already in this conversation and those who’ve been watching from the sideline.

One of the inspirations for Global Voices Advocacy, our online free speech project, was the good work being done by Don’t Block the Blog, a project led by two Pakistani bloggers to protest that nation’s block of Google’s Blogger platform. Don’t Block the Blog has been a real innovator in the anti-censorship space, and has done some excellent work reaching across borders, including the border with India, where they provided scripts to allow India’s bloggers - who were briefly blocked by their government - to reach their blogs. This sort of cross-border collaboration is what Global Voices is all about, and we hope to encourage more collaboration when some of these anti-censorship activists meet face to face in Budapest this June.

Today I’m leaning heavily on the Don’t Block the Blog guys to understand Pakistan’s attempts to block YouTube, and the widespread consequences of that decision. Sami ben Gharbia has a copy of the block order posted at GV Advocacy. It orders Pakistani ISPs to block a single URL - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3s8jtvvg00 - as well as three IP addresses. The URL now leads to a YouTube page that declares “This video has been removed due to terms of use violation.” But many Pakistani users are discovering that YouTube, as a whole, is inaccessible as their ISPs are blocking access to the IP addresses associated with the site.

There are very few Pakistani ISPs sophisticated enough to implement the block of a specific URL - the Don’t Block the Blog guys note that ISPs using the TWA-1 cable rather than the FLAG cable to connect to the global internet can access all of YouTube, just not the specific URL ordered to be blocked. Most ISPs followed the block order much more closely, blocking the IP addresses and preventing Pakistani users from accessing any content on YouTube, not just the offending video. (There’s speculation that some ISPs chose to block widely because there are new videos on YouTube alleging fraud in recent parliamentary elections.)

While it’s always a drag when countries overblock, taking offline whole services instead of offending content, it’s become increasingly common. Sami’s Access Denied Map shows blocks - current or past - of YouTube in Turkey, China, UAE, Iran and other nations. What made the net sit up and take notice was that a Pakistani ISP managed to take YouTube off the net as a whole for a brief period of time.

Here’s how it happened, more or less:

There are at least three ways to block internet traffic to the customers of an ISP. The most exact way is to block specific URLs, like the URL specified by the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority. There’s two problems with this, from the perspective of the blocking ISP. It’s expensive - every request that goes over your network needs to be examined, not just at the header level, but within the packet to check for the offending URL. And it’s imperfect - tell the system to block “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3s8jtvvg00″ and it will fail to block requests for “http://youtube.com/?v=o3s8jtvvg00″, which will get you the same video.

A second way to block traffic is wicked cheap, but extremely ineffective - change the Domain Name System (DNS) records. People using that DNS suddenly discover that youtube.com no longer resolves to 208.65.153.238 but to an IP address controlled by the ISP - you can then put up a page saying, “YouTube is blocked by order of the Pakistan Telecom Authority.” The problem with this method is that it’s trivially easy to defeat - users can simply type in the correct IP address for the site, or switch to using an “unpolluted” DNS server like OpenDNS.

A third way involves blocking IP addresses. It’s far cheaper than blocking URLs, as the IP address is in the header of every packet, and all routers can be easily programmed to block IPs (it’s a routine way to fight denial of service attacks.) It’s effective - users need to use a proxy to get around it - though the major downside is that it’s overbroad. If you’re trying to block a single offensive page on Tripod, block the IP and you block all the millions of pages hosted there.

PieNet, a Pakistani ISP decided to block YouTube using the IP block method. (It’s unclear to me from these accounts if PieNet is part of Pakistan Telecom or not - I’d appreciate insights from my readers if you know.) They also wanted to implement a blockpage. Rather than tell their routers to block all traffic to 208.65.153.238 and redirect any requests to a blockpage, they decided to tell their users that they controlled all IP addresses that began 208.65.153.* - when a user requested YouTube, the DNS server would tell them that the site was at 208.65.153.238. Their browser would request that page, and they’d be redirected to a PieNet server, which would tell them they were blocked.

So far, so good. But PieNet’s rewiring of the net was propogated by their upstream internet service provider. PieNet accomplished its rewiring using Border Gateway Protocol, the internet’s core routing protocol. BGP is designed to allow large network operators (called autonomous systems, or AS’s) to announce paths to certain destinations on the internet. BGP is designed so that router prefer the most specific route possible. Google had announced a (correct) route that covered a fairly large block of IP addresses, including YouTube’s - PieNet announced a much more specific route, covering only 256 addresses. So routers that “trust” AS17557 - Pakistan Telecom - began telling their neighbors about a great new way to reach YouTube… which was now hosted by PieNet.

As a substantial portion of the world’s YouTube traffic attempted to make requests on PieNet’s servers, they went offline. In the meantime, Google released the correct routing information with more specific routing info, and most routers were looking at the correct address within two or three hours. To prevent Pakistan Telecom from propogating the bad address, its upstream provider, the Hong Kong based PCCW, removed Pakistan Telecom from the internet until they were able to fix its servers.

This sort of misrouting isn’t uncommon on the net - old net hands have been citing the AS7007 disaster, where a misconfigured router advertised that all Internet routes could be reached through it… and a good chunk of the Internet believed it and attempted to route itself through a single, overwhelmed router.

There’s at least two, and possibly three, things that went wrong in this case:

- Modifying routing records via BGP is probably a bad way to censor the net. (I’ll wait for confirmation from smarter people like Nart Villeneuve before removing that probably.) There are lots better ways to block IPs than to claim IPs that aren’t yours via BGP.

- Pakistan Telecom should not have advertised this route to other routers - they should have checked that PieNet was authorized to route this block of IP addresses before passing it on to the rest of the network. And PCCW should not have accepted Pakistan Telecom’s new route, as Pakistan Telecom didn’t have authority over these nunbers.

- Depending on who you ask, BGP is too trusting a network protocol. Back when the net was used mostly by academics, lots of systems simply trusted each other - you could send mail to another mailserver and ask it to deliver it for you. That doesn’t work so well in the age of commercial spam, and so network operators don’t do it anymore. The idea that one network can simply tell another that it’s got a route to certain IPs scares some operators, who see this as a system that would be very vulnerable to attack. There’s discussion on some blogs, mailing lists and message boards that this incident will get network operators to start using more secure forms of BGP that check carefully to make sure that another network is who it says it is, and that it has authority over the addresses it wants to route, before accepting its instructions.

Interesting to me has been the tone of discussions around the incident. Many network operators believed the incident was an accident “on the part of probably stressed NOC staff at 17557.” Others concluded that “it was almost certainly an intentional hijacking designed to make a political statement. A bogus BGP advertisement is a very loud and rude way to make such a statement.”

NANOG, the North American Network Operators Group, has a long and intriguing thread, which includes technical discussion on fixing the problem, speculation on how to prevent such accidents/attacks in the future… and political arguments about the Islamic world. At least one network operator threatened to block all routing changes from 17557 - Pakistan Telecom - while others pointed out that, even on “a sleepy Sunday”, it took less than two hours to fix this problem. In other words, even if a network operator wanted to “attack” the rest of the network by propogating bad IPs, they’d likely be shut down pretty quickly.

I’m always interested when realworld and network politics intersect. While issues like this take some effort to understand, the solutions offered and adopted on lists like NANOG can have profound implications for how the Internet works for everyone. It bothers me a great deal that there’s routine discussions on some forums on how to block entire nations from accessing a website. I’d be very disappointed to discover that some network operators began blocking routing information from Pakistan based on what, I suspect, was a mistake… but I wouldn’t be surprised.

At its heart, the Internet is based on trust. That trust has been badly abused over the past decade, and the net as we know it today is a patchwork of trust and verification. I don’t know who you are, but you’re able to read this blog entry from (pretty much) any IP address in the world. But when you go to comment, I try to verify that you’re a human being using a CAPTCHA… and Akismet tries to verify that you’re not a spammer by checking your comments against other comments identified as spam. This doesn’t always work - I end up blocking more comments than I mean to, but with over a million attempts to post spam on this blog in the last 18 months, running comments without verification would be disastrous.

What worries me is when we move from verification strategies to strategies that simply deny access based on preconceptions about national identity and character. Yes, it sucks that there’s a lot of spam and fraud originating from Nigeria. Yes, it’s a drag that Pakistan decided to censor YouTube. But it would be truly, truly stupid for network operators to stop accepting certain types of traffic from these countries due to laziness and prejudice.

Lots more information on the situation and the tech behind it at Data Center Knowledge and at Renesys. Apologies in advance for anything I’ve gotten wrong in trying to offer a readable gloss on what’s a very complex technical issue.

I realize this is old news, but it makes me very, very happy.

That’s Journey, performing at Festival Viña del Mar in Chile, one of Latin America’s most popular music festivals. That’s not Steve Perry behind the mike, or Steve Augeri, or Jeff Scott Solo. It’s Arnel Pineda, who’s had a long career in the Filipino music scene, singing both his own material and covers from the American soft rock canon. Journey’s guitarist Neal Schoen was frustrated that his band was without a lead singer. It’s unclear whether he was influenced by Mark Wahlberg vehicle “Rock Star”, but he started listening to Journey cover bands, looking for a new singer.

On YouTube, he found the above video, which features Pineda fronting The Zoo, a Manila-based band known for 80’s soft rock covers and for their original tracks. Impressed with Pineda’s uncanny vocal resemblance to Steve Perry, Schoen contacted Pineda’s friend, who’d posted the videos to YouTube. He, in turn, contacted Pineda, who predictably thought he was the victim of a prank. Eventually persuaded, he flew to the US for a two-day audition and now fronts the band.

My hope for the internet is that it blurs the idea of nationality, letting people find the most talented collaborators around the world, regardless of their language, culture or national origin. Most of the time, this doesn’t happen - homophily reigns. It’s worth celebrating those moments when ageing America rockers realize that hooking up with a honey-voiced Filipino is the perfect path forward.

Oh, and for all you bands performing Joy Division in the style of Tuvan throat singing - don’t stop believing.

I’ve gotten a couple of very unusual emails the past few weeks. As the presidential primaries heat up in the US, I’m getting polite, gracious, very enthusiastic emails from friends in other countries who hope that I’ll be voting for Obama. None urging support for Clinton, McCain or, god forbid, Romney.

I answered a few of these early emails telling people that there was no chance my vote would actually count in the primaries - as a Massachusetts voter, I’m used to having the primaries over and done by the time I get to pull a lever. But the combination of Massachusetts joining super-duper Tuesday and a surprisingly competitive Democratic field means that my vote actually counts, for a change.

And my international friends will be happy, I hope, that I’m voting for Obama.

I wish I had a slew of good policy reasons to support Obama over Clinton. I don’t. Both are articulating economic and environmental policies I can live with. Both endorse civil unions, but neither has been brave enough to support gay marriage. Frustrated as I am with Clinton’s vote to allow Bush’s endless war in Iraq, I can’t find huge distinctions between her plan to end the war and Obama’s. Frankly, I believe either would be a solid, competent leader, and would be a damned sight better than the last seven years we’ve suffered through.

But my friends from overseas have a point, and it’s a point I agree with. America’s image abroad has suffered incalculably under the Bush 43 presidency. It’s going to require a huge overhaul for America to be viewed as a desirable partner in international affairs and as a force for positive change. I’m not sure Hillary Clinton has the power to change America’s image that profoundly; I think that Barack Obama does.

Obama is a born globalist. He’s the child of a first-generation immigrant; he’s lived and studied abroad; his family tree helps reflect the diversity and complexity that characterizes our nation. Writing in what amounted to an endorsement of Obama, Fareed Zakaria talks about the importance of understanding the views of the rest of the world:

But when I think about what is truly distinctive about the way I look at the world, about the advantage that I may have over others in understanding foreign affairs, it is that I know what it means not to be an American. I know intimately the attraction, the repulsion, the hopes, the disappointments that the other 95 percent of humanity feels when thinking about this country. I know it because for a good part of my life, I wasn’t an American. I was the outsider, growing up 8,000 miles away from the centers of power, being shaped by forces over which my country had no control.

Understanding that perspective is going to be critical in rehabilitating America’s international image. Zakaria believes that Obama will see America, in part, from that outsider’s perspective and that his ability to step outside the usual American frame will strengthen his decisionmaking on foreign policy. Other commentators have suggested that Obama will be perceived as a globalist. Writing in the Lebanon Daily Star, Dominique Moisi noted, “The very moment he appears on the world’s television screens, victorious and smiling, America’s image and soft power would experience something like a Copernican revolution.” We could use one of those right about now.

We could also use a Copernican revolution in the tone of politics in America. As happy as I was to see Bill Clinton elected in 1992, his presidency was punctuated by the most rancorous, nasty, hatefully partisan politics I’d ever care to see. I can’t help thinking that a Hillary Clinton campaign is going to be a redux of some of American politics at its worst. I don’t blame Hillary for this - I just think that there’s a large group of pundits, commentators and politicians who genuinely believe she’s the devil, and who will go to the ends of the earth to combat her candidacy or presidency, dragging the tone of discussion down in the process.

John Broder offered a hopeful story in the New York Times Week in Review a year ago, suggesting that Obama might be able to move beyond the political divides of the 1960s and change the tone of left/right debates in the US. He quotes from Obama’s book, “The Audacity of Hope”:

In the back and forth between Clinton and Gingrich, and in the elections of 2000 and 2004, I sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the baby boom generation — a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago — played out on the national stage.

Broder argues that this is a boomer drama, and that Obama may simply be able to move beyond it since his political instincts and signposts are from later years. Those endlessly rehashed arguments from the 60s simply aren’t his battles, and he’s in a better position to let go of them than Clinton, avatar for many of these arguments, will be.

Hope is really the reason I’ll be pulling the lever for Obama tomorrow. Hope that some of the damage of the past few years can be corrected. Hope that nations will be willing to look at the US as a partner in international efforts. Hope that the partisan grind of Washington could move a bit more smoothly and civilly. Hope that I can put away my American Apology t-shirt.

I’ll close with Obama speaking about hope and foreign policy in a speech that helped me make up my mind about how to cast my vote:

We know where extremists thrive. In conflict zones that are incubators of resentment and anarchy. In weak states that cannot control their borders or territory, or meet the basic needs of their people. From Africa to central Asia to the Pacific Rim — nearly 60 countries stand on the brink of conflict or collapse. The extremists encourage the exploitation of these hopeless places on their hate-filled websites.

And we know what the extremists say about us. America is just an occupying Army in Muslim lands, the shadow of a shrouded figure standing on a box at Abu Ghraib, the power behind the throne of a repressive leader. They say we are at war with Islam. That is the whispered line of the extremist who has nothing to offer in this battle of ideas but blame — blame America, blame progress, blame Jews. And often he offers something along with the hate. A sense of empowerment. Maybe an education at a madrasa, some charity for your family, some basic services in the neighborhood. And then: a mission and a gun.

We know we are not who they say we are. America is at war with terrorists who killed on our soil. We are not at war with Islam. America is a compassionate nation that wants a better future for all people. The vast majority of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims have no use for bin Ladin or his bankrupt ideas. But too often since 9/11, the extremists have defined us, not the other way around.

When I am President, that will change. We will author our own story.

We do need to stand for democracy. And I will. But democracy is about more than a ballot box. America must show — through deeds as well as words — that we stand with those who seek a better life. That child looking up at the helicopter must see America and feel hope.

If you’re interested in international views on the US elections, including a whole lot of posts expressing enthusiasm for Obama, let me direct you to Voices Without Votes. This is a new collaboration between Reuters and Global Voices, and will be showcasing an international perspective on the US elections via blogs. It’s edited by Amira Al-Hussaini, our remarkable Middle East editor, and promises to be an amazing platform for international perspectives over the next ten months.

Many Americans are praying that we’ll have a different place in the geopolitical order after the 2008 presidential elections. In an excellent piece in yesterday’s New York Times magazine, Parag Khanna makes it clear that the US’s position in the global order of things is changing, like it or not, and that whoever is leading our nation in a year will need to understand that things are radically different from the world order of 1992.

Khanna is a fellow at the New America Foundation, working on a book called “The Second World”, slated for release in March. His piece in the Magazine is digested from the book, and is a dense summary of his take on a new, multipolar world. Basically, Khanna sees three powers in today’s world - the US, China and the European Union - and identifies a set of “second world” nations that are part developed, part developing, and whose loyalties are very much in play in this new world order.

It’s hard to get a sense for the rules that define the second world - in another interview, Khanna offers, “Some good examples of second world countries are: Ukraine, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil, Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Vietnam.” They’re not just emerging markets, Khanna argues, but countries in strategic regions that will shape geopolitics for the forseeable future. (Near as I can tell, the only non-strategic regions on Khanna’s globe are sub-Saharan Africa and the Pacific Islands…)

These nations aren’t looking to be democratized by the US - instead, “Right now, from the Middle East to Southeast Asia, the hero of the second world — including its democracies — is Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore.” These second-world nations are governed by self-interest, not ideology, and if cozying up to China or seeking inclusion in the EU will make them stronger, all the ideology in the world may not be enough to make siding with the US appealing. Khanna clearly sees himself as a realist, inviting readers to see themselves as the Henry Kissinger of this new administration and asking what steps the US should take to position itself in this new world.

His suggestions include a refocusing of America’s diplomatic efforts, turning teams of diplomats into regional teams (as the Pentagon deals with security) and putting more diplomats on the ground, observing, “There are currently more musicians in U.S. military marching bands than there are Foreign Service officers, a fact not helped by Congress’s decision to effectively freeze growth in diplomatic postings.” He advocates for a massive expansion of the Peace Corps, programs to teach English and offer job training overseas and increased student exchanges.

While this sounds like the standard left-wing xenophile pro-engagement line you’ll usually hear me endorsing on this blog, I’m pleased that Khanna throws a framework around these ideas - the concept of the “marchmen”: “Europe is boosting its common diplomatic corps, while China is deploying retired civil servants, prison laborers and Chinese teachers — all are what the historian Arnold Toynbee called marchmen, the foot-soldiers of empire spreading values and winning loyalty.” I continue to believe that the most devastating impact of 9/11 is going to be the wave of American isolationism it’s triggered. At precisely the geopolitical moment where Americans need to be finding ways to engaging with a rapidly changing world, we’re (understandably) terrified, looking at the world as a hostile, dangerous place that we encounter through military might, not through cultural engagement.

I have no idea whether Khanna’s reordering of the world is the correct one. I’m intrigued that he doesn’t follow Tom Friedman in trumpeting the rise of India - indeed, he sees India as far behind China and constrained geographically in its ability to project power. And he appears to avoid the entire narrative of “the Muslim world”, perhaps recognizing that a worldview that attempts to treat Wahabiism in Saudi Arabia with the same tools as we address syncretic Islam in West Africa is a disastrous oversimplification.

Where Khanna’s work is probably most disconcerting for American readers is his enthusiasm for the European Union. We’re used to worrying about China here in the US, but we tend to consider the EU a coddled, over-taxed, ageing and increasingly irrelavent set of nanny states. But the EU offers a model for affiliation, a model that nations can hope to join - the US doesn’t offer anything similar, and Khanna sees this as a key weakness. Turkey can aspire to become part of Europe, and even if it doesn’t, there are massive economic and cultural ties between Turkey and much of central Europe. Canada’s not exactly lining up to request membership in the United States…

I’m looking forward to Khanna’s book. And if you’d like to have your illusions of American hyperpower blown into little, tiny pieces, I recommend his article in the Times.

The last time I wrote about happiness, I found myself swamped with emails requesting my data set and asking questions about methodologies for measuring happiness. Readers, it seems, are pretty interested in happiness. And editors certainly are - Businessweek just produced a story and photoset of the dozen happiest nations, according to British researcher Adrian White.

People love to think, talk and argue about happiness. I have a hard time counting the number of times I’ve been approached at development conferences by someone who wants to tell me the story of Bhutan’s decision to focus on Gross National Happiness, not Gross National Product. Or the times I’ve been forwarded an article asserting that Nigeria tops a world happiness survey. We’ve all been happy and unhappy, and we’ve all got opinions - well- or ill-informed - on what makes people happy, which means we’ve all got something to say on the topic.

I was interested in correlating happiness to health, and threw some simple statistical techniques at a data set I’d found online. In a development that made me, well, pretty unhappy, I discovered that the data I was using - also Adrian White’s Global Projection of Subjective Well-Being - was apparently “borrowed” from the New Economics Foundation’s “Happy Planet Index”. That data, in turn, is apparently extrapolated from Dr. Ruut Veenhoven’s World Database of Happiness, which is a concordance of happiness research from around the world. The database includes results from 95 countries, many of which have been surveyed several times over the course of decades, asking people a fixed series of questions about their subjective satisfaction with their own lives.

Veenhoven’s database is the starting point fror Eric Weiner’s excellent “The Geography of Bliss“, a witty, funny and insightful book, which follows the wanderings of a self-described “grump” through his travel to happy and unhappy nations.

A foreign correspondent for NPR, Weiner sees a lot of nations at their worst. And he claims not to be a happy man, an addict of self-help books designed to help him enjoy his life more. Explicit in his journey is the question, “If I lived here, would I be happy?” There are some interesting geographic patterns to happiness. Impoverished and wartorn nations are generally not happy places. Scandinavian and Alpine nations are, for the most part. You might conclude that cold, rich nations are the places to be if you’d like to be happy.

But making generalizations in this field is difficult.
Many of the former Soviet states are cold, and most rank very low in happiness. Money’s not guaranteed to help either. There’s an “East-Asian Happiness Gap“, where wealth East Asian nations are a lot less happy than you’d expect given their wealth. (Possible explanations for the gap include, “environmental disruption, excessive competitiveness, repressive education, excessive conformity, negative attitudes towards enjoyment, and the emphasis on outward appearance.” Sounds like a drag.)

Weiner travels to nine nations in writing the book, some unusually happy (Switzerland, Bhutan, Iceland), some surprisingly unhappy (Qatar, Moldova). He’s better at writing about the unhappy ones than the happy, which may reveal a fundamental truth of travel writing - it’s just not much fun to read about someone having a great time. (One of my favorite travel writers is Redmond O’Hanlon, whose jungle journeys generally sound like misery, interspersed with danger, failure and sheer terror, gently seasoned with British wit. My guess is that he wouldn’t be nearly as good at writing about beach vacations in the Bahamas.)

It’s hard to draw firm conclusions from Weiner’s travel about what makes some nations happy and others miserable. Weiner gives us intriguing hints at the state of the art of happiness research, writing at some length about “the hedonic treadmill“, a concept coined by Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell, who were studying the happiness of lottery winners and accident victims. Unsurprisingly, the lottery winners were quite happy, and the paralyzed accident victims unhappy. But over time, both returned to levels quite close to their happiness before these surprising developments.

Most people believe that acquiring a bit more money would make them happy; they tend to find that acquiring wealth is a trap, as they always want a bit more (hence, the treadmill.) There’s an exception - people who are truly impoverished will see their happiness increase with increased income. But this effect maxes out at a surprisingly low level, around $15,000 in annual income. In a rich country, there are only a few things likely to have an unambigious effect on your happiness over a long period of time, Weiner tells us: “Noise and big breasts. Studies have found that we really never get used to loud noises, despite prolonged exposure. Another study found that women who get breast implants never tire of the enjoyment it brings them, and presumably their companions as well.” And now you know.

Weiner adds his own layer of theory to his travels, introducing a couple of useful concepts to people interested in happiness. He discovers that throughout his travels, he meets people who are much happier in the places they’ve migrated to than in the lands of their birth. “They are hedonic refugees, moving to a new land, a new culture, because they are happier there. Usually, hedonic refugees have an epiphany, a moment of great clarity when they realize, beyond a doubt, they were born in the wrong country.” My guess is that a lot of people born in Burkina Faso, for instance, have this moment of clarity but aren’t able to relocate to Denmark - this is, perhaps, a more useful concept for explaining the migratory patterns of the rich and privleged than the world as a whole. But it’s an intriguing clue about “cultural fit”, the idea that someone who doesn’t fit well with the dominant culture of a place may be unhappy even if most of her fellow citizens are blissful.

Weiner also suggests that culture goes a long way towards explaining unhappiness in Moldova, the unhappiest nation he visits. Moldova is legendary in the happiness studies community, a nation that ranks extremely low in happiness despite beating out many nations in terms of life expectancy and wealth. Weiner believes this is because Moldova is:

…a fabricated nation. It doesn’t exist. Oh yes, you can go there, as I did, and walk its streets, eat its mamaliga, drink its bad wine, talk to its miserable people. Later, safely home, you can flip open your passport and admine, if that’s the word, the stamp that says “The Republic of Moldova”. None of this matters. Moldova does not exist, and existence is, in my book, a prerequisite for happiness. We need a solid identity - ethnic, national, linguistic, culinary, whatever - in order to feel good about ourselves.

This theory helps explain Weiner’s reaction to Qatar, which he finds surprisingly unhappy. His visit to Qatar’s historical museum, an unairconditioned concrete bunker in a nation where summer temperatures routinely break 50C, convinces him that Qataris have outsourced their history and heritage, not just all menial - and much technical - labor. Unless it’s the claustrophobia that comes from a society bound by tribal rules, but freed of the constraints of traditional financial rules by incredible wealth through national resources. Turns out it’s almost as difficult to pin down the causes of unhappiness as it is to explain happiness.

“The Geography of Bliss” makes a lousy self-help book - it won’t help you relocate to your happy spot on the earth, if such a thing exists. But it’s a really fun way to get a handle on what we do and don’t know about happiness, and you’ll likely be (marginally, slightly, temporarily) happier if you read it.

My friend Evgeny Morozov’s bookmarks on del.icio.us are one of the places I look for inspiration when I’m feeling burned out on blogging, writing or thinking… which is more or less how I’m feeling near the tail end of a very long year. Evgeny linked to a story from Nat Torkington on O’Reilly Radar about the ways in which social software can reinforce homophily - the tendency of individuals to associate with people who are alike in age, gender, class, value terms - and how users or designers of tools might fight these effects.

Nat points out, “Designers first need to decide whether homophily is a a feature or a bug. Life is easy when you’re unchallenged: this is why people read the New York Times or watch Fox News…” This is, in essence, what Cass Sunstein worries about in Republic.com - in a world where one can choose media that matches one’s preconceptions and prejudices, what prevents us from choosing to live in an echo chamber of supportive voices?

There’s an odd paradox at work in the world of the pervasive web. On the one hand, it’s easier than ever before for an individual to share her ideas with the entire world. On the other hand, the mechanisms we use to discover ideas may make it harder for us to discover different ideas from different people. Assume that our social networks contain a lot of people who’ve got similar interests and backgrounds to our own, as homophily implies. There’s a good chance those folks are going to recommend similar stories for us to read. If our social networks become a major source of new ideas for us, there’s a real danger that homophily traps us in a conceptual echo chamber.

(At this point, if you’re like most readers, you’re ready to fight the premise of homophily with a list of all the people you spend time with/link to/have friended on Facebook, etc. who don’t share your nationality, language, socioeconomic status or race. That’s okay. danah’s here for you: “Sociological fact: most white people hang out with mostly other white people. Individually, everyone immediately screams not me! and starts listing off all of the people of color that they know. Individuals never want to see themselves as non-diverse, but the desire to be seen in a positive light does not make someone diverse.”

You may also be asking the “what’s so bad about homophily?” question. Here Sunstein can offer some help, suggesting that people who hear only similar voices end up polarized, less likely to compromise with people of different political viewpoints, less likely to find the sort of common ground and experience neccesary for a democratic society. I’d go further and argue that too much homophily can make you a) dumb and b) boring, ignorant of news and ideas that aren’t already interesting to people around you, and incapable of bringing ideas to your friends that they haven’t already heard.)

Examining ways around the homophily trap, Torkington looks closely as collaborative filtering, the technology that underlies most online recommendation systems. Rate a couple dozen movies, and the system looks for other users who liked the same movies you did (and, sometimes, disliked the same movies you did) and recommends to you the movies they like that you haven’t yet rated. That’s all well and good, but if you happen to like the same movies that other white computer geeks from rural America like, you’re very unlikely to be recommended a movie that’s the favorite of urban latino fashionistas.

Torkington suggests that social software should consider ways to make these serendipitious recommendations. It would be trivial, for instance, for Netflix to offer a feature titled “People different from you love these movies”. They’ve already calculated your nearest neighbor - in the process, they calculate your furthest neighbor. The question is whether these recommendations would be at all interesting to you - it’s not a recommendation of bad movies, or even movies that might be a bad fit for you, but movies that are loved by those different from you…

While Torkington takes a swing at the New York Times in framing homophily, newspapers like the Times have a terrific mechanism to encourage serendipity. In many major newspapers, the lower right-hand side of the front page is reserved for a story that readers would otherwise likely miss. (Friday’s paper is a good example. On a day where leading stories were about steroids in baseball, Al Qaeda and the US presidential race, the serendipity box featured a fascinating story about a Liberian mother in Staten Island sending her son back to Liberia rather than lose him to gang violence in the US.) These stories aren’t selected by algorithms - they’re chosen by editors who want to feature content in the paper that might otherwise be ignored, which frequently includes stories on topics other than Iraq, US elections or terror. Dan Gillmor describes this feature as “institutionalized serendipity“.

It’s less clear where the institutionalized serendipity lives on the New York Times’s website. The NYTimes homepage features several times as many stories on its webpage than on the front page of the paper edition, but it’s much less clear which ones you’re encouraged to read. There’s more choice and less guidance… which isn’t a bad description for the information universe opened by the Internet. And the guidance that’s offered may be a homophilic form of guidance - in the bottom right of the homepage is a box that offers a list of the ten most popular stories, as measured by email traffic, blog links and searches. In other words, these are the stories that fellow websurfers found most interesting, not the stories the editors felt you should read, even if you didn’t know you were interested in them.

The serendipity box in the paper New York Times is a form of persuasive technology - it convinces us to pay attention to information we’d otherwise ignore. As BJ Fogg notes on the homepage on Stanford University’s Persuasive Technology Lab, the idea that technologies are persuading us, not just people’s arguments, can be an uncomfortable topic. But it’s also a very powerful tool.

By way of example: I visit the Googleplex in Mountain View a couple of times a year. Being a cheapskate, I usually try to arrange to be there for lunch to take advantage of Google’s amazing cafeterias. My favorite of the lunchrooms offers a huge salad bar, complete with chefs who dress your salad on your behalf. This is an odd phenomenon. At first glance, I assumed that this was Google’s way of saying, “We’re so wealthy and successful, we can afford to save our geeks the hassle of dressing their own salads.”

But that’s not the reason why. Dressing is where many of the calories in a salad come from, and most people over-dress their salads, turning a healthy meal into a more fattening one. Google’s salad chefs put a modest amount of dressing on your salad and toss it in steel bowls, so that your salad is thoroughly dressed, but not unheathily so. Look closer at the salad bar and it becomes clear that the entire experience is engineered to encourage you to assemble a healthy salad. Vegetables like peppers and carrots are closest to you; cheese and olives are as far away as possible, forcing you to make an uncomfortable reach to add that tasty fat to your innocent greens. The salad bar is a persuasive technology designed to change your eating habits.

I find this amusing, and vaguely sinister, but end up conceding that it’s probably a good thing, or would be if I ate at Google every day. In the same sense, I wish more websites would take institutionalized serendipity more seriously. Like green peppers, information you didn’t know you needed is good for you, and should be periodically put onto your plate, even if you didn’t request it.

Encountering new ideas isn’t a supply problem in today’s internet - it’s a demand problem. There’s a near infinity of people unlike you creating content and putting it online for you to encounter. But it’s entirely possible that you’ll never encounter it if you don’t actively look for it… or unless the systems you use to find ideas start forcing you outside your usual orbits into new territories. Don’t fear the serendipity.

Go to enough conferences and, if you’re lucky, eventually you’ll meet most of the people you’ve admired from afar. I’ve wanted to meet Mimi Ito for years - I’ve admired her research on mobile phone culture in Japan and have been keeping an eye on her research on youth culture, some of which intersects with fellow fellow danah boyd’s youth and tech work. Mimi and I were on a panel together at a meeting earlier this week - that event was, unfortunately, off-blog, but Mimi was good enough to let me post some notes about her talk and the conversation she and I had afterwards.

Mimi’s talk focused on the “Post-Pokémon” era of Japanese - and global - youth media. She identifies Pokémon as a media form that has defined the current framework, laying the groundwork for peer-to-peer communication and creation of media. While the current generation has outgrown Pokémon, the game franchise shaped how global youth think about culture and gaming. It linked analog and digital media, she proposes, by creating an electronic game that later manifested as a collectible card game, manga, anime, toys and other media. It put portability at the center of the media mix, and helped establish Japanese media content as a transnational source of cultural capital.

Mimi argues that we can think of Pokémon as “training wheels for participation in network geek culture.” The obsessive detail of Pokémon - according to Wikipedia, 493 fictional species of creatures have made their appearance in the franchise so far - introduces fans to the joys of complexity and specialized knowledge that characterizes otaku culture. When groups of kids gather around a Pokemon game, Mimi observes, they end up sharing extremely complex knowledge about the universe, and engage in self-expression through their play of the game, which invites players to choose strategies that reflect their personal style.

She sees a generation of kids engaging in a set of cultural practices - cutting, pasting, linking and forwarding in spaces like MySpace - that she believes are learned, in part, from media like Pokémon. She suggests that we can see a change in identity, network scale and exchange systems that reflect post-Pokémon culture. Individual identity is no longer consumer or producer - there’s a middle ground that includes connoisseur and amateur. Networks are no longer mass media or purely personal communication - there are community networks that allow communication about niche interests to a large population. And exchange systems now go beyond commodity and gift cultures to include a variety of local, niche and grey markets. (She offers the intriguing insight that we might consider political communication in terms of these new middleground possibilities.)

It’s a little harder to see some of the effects Mimi studies from looking solely at Pokémon - she points us to Naruto, an enormously popular manga book that became an anime series, capturing attention within and outside Japan in the past few years. Naruto’s popularity in the US is due almost exclusively to the “fansub” community, individuals who’ve added English (and other) language subtitles to the Japanese episodes and released via the internet to other fans.

The work done by the fan community is of impressively high quality and speed - fan substitles are usually distributed to new episodes within 24 hours of their release, and networks recuit members based not just on their skills but their location, so that production cycles can take advantage of time differences to produce works rapidly. Fans acquire impressive skills to participate, learning to edit video and sometimes learning Japanese so they can be key participants. Communities like narutofan.com boast over two million members. Media companies aren’t unaware of this obsessive fandom - their release cycles and their localization of content into different languages often reflects producers watching fan behavior.

Making the case that fan behavior is also creative behavior, Mimi shows us a series of anime music videos produced by the fan community, including the brilliant “The Narutrix Reninja’d”, which recuts the trailer of “The Matrix Reloaded” using footage from Naruto anime. (It’s brilliant. Watch the Matrix trailer first, then the AMV to understand the sheer beauty.) The Matrix itself is something of a remix, an American film that borrows heavily from the cliches of Japanese and Chinese action films - remixed with anime, it’s a veritable stew of common cultural reference points shared by US, Japanese and other media fans. We’re beginning to see a “transnational pool of cultural identity, released from national identities - deoderized,” so that the references are no longer obviously Japanese, US or from any other specific culture.

This post-Pokémon generation is “crafting niche culture from global media flow.” In the process, Mimi sees three trends taking place:

- a ping-pong back and forth between US and Japanese culture, informing the mass communication aesthetic

- a mainstreaming of the otaku aesthetic, a fondness for arcane, complex, richly detailed worlds (think of the popularity of the absurdly detailed universe of Harry Potter, for instance)

- remix as a method of localizing and “talking back” to mainstream media.

All well and good, but what does Mimi’s work have to do with my own? (That’s a question at least two thirds of the audience found themselves asking when my presentation - about hacking technology to localize it for developing world environments - followed directly on the heels of her talk.) Well, we’re both very interested in international groups brought together by the web… or to use Mimi’s terminology, “intentional midscale networks that span distance”. The communities she’s interested in are united both by their love of a particular media universe and by “shared joint projects”.

These shared projects apparently can form powerful bonds between people who’ve never met face to face. Participants in multiplayer games like World of Warcraft develop powerful obligations to the people they adventure with, making massive time commitments to their guild members. (Just try getting your buddy to watch a football game with you on his raid night.) Mimi tells stories of fansubbers raising money to travel to Japan for the first time and interacting with a ready-made community of people engaged in the same fandom.

So here’s a question - does participation in these international joint projects turn into a more generalized form of xenophilia? Do American fans of anime develop a generalized fascination with Japan, which somehow expands from watching Naruto to watching global politics?

This is an interesting question for those of us who are interested in recruiting more people into the ranks of global citizens. Bicultural people like Mimi seem to have a natural advantage - growing up in more than one nation immunizes many people to the bad habit of assuming one’s culture is the dominant culture. Falling in love across cultural lines works well, too - marry someone from another culture and you have a strong chance of developing a fascination with that person’s culture as well. And plane tickets are surprisingly effective in producing xenophiles, as we discovered with Geekcorps (and previous generations had discovered with the Peace Corps and other cross-cultural programs.) But it’s expensive to put millions of people on airplanes to work and live in other countries, and probably unethical to force everyone to marry someone who grew up speaking a different language.

One of the utopian hopes for the Internet is that it would help bring users into contact with people from other nations simply because we’re all connected to one another. But parochialism is a powerful force, and it’s pretty easy to spend years online without encounterin