File spoon-archives/avant-garde.archive/avant-garde_2000/avant-garde.0011, message 5


Date: Sat, 4 Nov 2000 09:10:03 -0600
From: Bill Spornitz <spornitz-AT-pangea.ca>
Subject: Senseless spam. Don't even read this.


Sorry. Some of my best friends are American. Really.








AMERICANS ANNOYED BY "ALL THIS INTERNATIONAL JUNK"
ON INTERNET

Web's Increasingly Worldly Flavor Threatens Americans' Worldview
PULLMAN, WASH.  (SatireWire.com)

The profusion of international news available on the Internet has made it
increasingly difficult for the average American to ignore the rest of the
world, a trend researchers say threatens Americans' long, proud history of
disregarding anything not about them.  "With all the foreign newspapers and
multi-cultural sites, the Internet is making it almost impossible for the
average American to remain uninformed and apathetic," said Samantha Lessborn
of Washington State University, which conducted the survey.

"Americans can still do it.  But it now takes effort, whereas before it was
as easy as turning off Tom Brokaw whenever he said 'In South Korea
today...'" According to survey participant Danny Grisham, a
22-year-old from Cheyenne, Wyoming, it's not just the plethora of
international news on the Web that is irritating.  "Look, I can get around
the news.  I just turn off Reuters headlines in MyYahoo," he said.
"But even some of the search sites like Yahoo and Alta Vista are available
in different languages.  Like everybody in the world doesn't speak English.
Yeah, right." "I can see where it's important if we're, like, beating some
country in the Olympics or bombing them or, ideally, both,"

Grisham added.  "But if some Colombian drug lord sinks a ferry full of
Israeli soldiers in North Latvoania or Serbo-Malaysia, or wherever, and
Americans aren't involved, what has that got to do with me?" Other
respondents said they were appalled, not just by the availability of
non-U.S.  news, but by the way important U.S. news is reported by some of
these foreign sites.

"Yesterday, for instance, the St.  Louis Rams beat the Atlanta Falcons, OK,
and I go to the London Times site and it's not even there," said Chip
Pernadge of Kansas City, Mo.  "Jesus, no wonder those guys lost the war and
had to give Hong Kong back to Canada."

Sensing a market opportunity, NetNanny, makers of NetNanny filtering
software, announced this week it will introduce NetNarrow, an English- only
product that automatically filters out content that appears to be
international.

Specifically, the software looks for world datelines and keywords indicative
of irrelevant foreign stories, including "Shiite," "post-Apartheid," and
"Bob Geldof." Survey-taker Craig Barker of Brooklyn, New York, said he will
be among the first to get NetNarrow.  "On the Web, there are so many ways to
get news from so many different places, I could really get some fresh
insights into what's going on in other countries if I wanted to," he said..
"But I don't want to." "You'd think these Internet people would know that,"
Barker added.  "I mean, that's why the Internet is called America Online,
right?  It's supposed to be about America."


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