Orkut language conflict and multiculturalism.
The Orkut.com service by Google is a vain attempt to quantify social prestige. While I am one of those who looks with scorn and disdain at such hubris, I admit to a degree of fascination with the recently reported brouhaha occurring within the Orkut community.
It’s important to know that Orkut membership is only open by invitation. You must know someone there to login. When I receive an Orkut invitation, I promptly delete it.
Designed by US–based Google, Orkut began primarily as an English-speaking site. Today, however, thanks to its invitation system, over 41% of Orkut users are Portuguese-speaking Brazilians, and only about 23% are Americans. (*)
A few English speakers are now openly oomplaining about feeling excluded on Orkut. In their view, what was once an English-speaking service is swiftly losing its Anglophone identity in favor of a Portuguese-speaking identity.
Tammy Soldaat, a Canadian, got a sample of Brazilian wrath recently when she posted a message asking whether her community site on body piercing should be exclusive to people who speak English.
Brazilian Orkut users quickly labeled her a “nazi” and “xenophobe.”
“After that I understood why everyone is complaining about these people, why they’re being called the ‘plague of Orkut,”‘ she said in a site called “Crazy Brazilian Invasion.”
(†) Obviously, this is just an online community that we are talking about. There is no reason to think that someone like Soldaat is a “nazi” or a “xenophobe.” Those charges appear to be totally spurious.
This just begs for someone to say something profound about multiculturalism, and the open borders immigration policy. Yet, what would there be to say? The story writes itself.
If you want a community that survives and retains its cultural identity, you have to be willing to exclude others. If you wish, you can include a few outsiders, but only to a point. If you value your own community, you have to at some point protect it by excluding outsiders or it will eventually be destroyed by outsiders who don’t like your community. There is no way around that.
Like several others, I react with great distaste to the Orkut concept that friendship could be represented in a software program. Thus, I have no personal interest in whether Orkut survives, or what is Orkut’s identity. I just find it to be an interesting story.