'NET NATIONS
Back when television reached Australia in 1956, a time immortalised
in old electronics magazines that I read, there were complaints
that all the imported American content on TV would drown out
Australian culture, particularly for the youth. As had happened
earlier again in the film industry, the solution was quotas, for
certain durations of locally produced content that needed to be
broadcast by TV channels. Unlike the film quotas, the TV quotas for
Australian content have remained right up to today, with commercial
stations required to air 55% Australian-made content.
What's harder to determine is whether, over the course of time,
this really worked. The children of the late 1950s are the retirees
of today, the generations preceeding them are no longer much of a
cultural influence. Have those cultural features some argued to
preserve faded with them? Were they preserved simply through
industry regulation, or were they a figment of xenophobic minds to
begin with?
In the 1950s important films had to be flown from overseas by air
to make it to screens in Australia. Less immediate content would be
sent by sea, along with all the narion's other imported wares,
which had the effect of keeping the country in a then-famous time
warp compared to culture on the other side of the world. It also
inspired more local innovation to create Australian versions of
ideas heard about, but not arrived from, overseas. Again the
government reinforced this, by heavily taxing imported goods.
As the practical walls blocking cultural and economic exchange with
Australia's parent western powers came down, these legal barriers
attempted to still preserve a degree of artificial isolation from
those distant continents. Economically the practice of
globalisation has been etrememly successful at pulling down these
walls, throughout the later decades of the 20th century. The world
economy is now so linked that the resulting tangle of culture,
politics, and business is practically a system of controlled chaos.
But it means we can get lots of cheap junk from China. On the other
hand finding a new item made in Australia has become a novelty, and
the profit from much of this trade by the wealthiest businesses
disappears off to foreign bank accounts, often routed behind the
back of the tax man.
Besides opening Australia up to the world economy though, how about
the world society? While TV, film, and other media began that, it's
only with the spread of the internet that individuals have been
granted access to individual foreign people in the way that we've
long been able to buy their foreign goods. What transformation will
this result in for Australian, and indeed world, society? Will
cultural characteristcs condense into one homogenous form of
borderless internet-based culture? People of the one 'net nation?
Mirroring the 1950s and before, the Australian government has now,
somewhat late, introduced quotas on local content investment from
streaming services beginning mid this year:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-01-29/streaming-giants-to-be-required-to-make-australian-films-and-tv-/101904938
On another level of course are countries such as China, blocking
large numbers of popular foreign websites that offend them one way
or another. Projects to construct internet links into China for
faster routing to the USA and other western countries are also
hampered by politics, so there's a physical difficulty with the
bandwidth available even for permitted international internet
communications. In this way the Chinese internet exists within it's
own 'net nation, maybe now set to be shared with Russia. Plans for
China to contruct a free worldwide LEO satellite internet network
further emphasise how these 'net nations need not be constrained by
the borders of individual countries, they are a way to spread a
common cultural environment across the globe.
The USA got there first, so the 'net in general, even down the
universal '.com' TLD, tends to be American, and furthermore
English-language. For a cultural transformation on the scale of the
internet though, these are still very early days. How many separate
'net nations might spring up in this way, and what global power
could they grant the geographical nations that control them? Could
people's sense of 'net nationality become stronger than that of
their physical nationality? The internet is still growing up, but
growing up into what?
- The Free Thinker
