Introductory Statement

Pacific Rim New Media Summit Introduction: Leonardo Special editorial

The world must seem flat in the minds of the soft-ware designers who created the above visualizing tool (visualroute.com) to show connections between hosts and clients in on-line interactions. A connection from Berkeley, California, to the Chinese Ministry of Commerce in China falls off the edge of the map (far left) and emerges again, in “Asteroids” fashion, on the far right side. The technical challenges of adjusting the map to show a continuous connection across the Pacific are minimal. The cultural bias of seeing the world from a Eurocentric viewpoint seems far more difficult to overcome.
The world seems flat, economically, as some people realize the potential of global economic competition, increasingly to the advantage of their home countries. The world seems flat, metaphorically, in the workings of the Internet, as its diverse protocols remove geographic limitations from the communications among more and more people who are lucky enough to be on-line, the digital “We.”
However, we often cannot remove cultural limitations from our minds, even as we are engaged in transcontinental interactions. What we say about our interactions often does not reflect what we do. Mutual trade and mutual cultural cross-pollination are standard practice in our daily lives, yet culturally we still contend with the edge of the map cutting through the Pacific Ocean. This edge causes our widespread blindness to both the benefits and the challenges of Pacific Rim cross-cultural relations.
In my imagination, the Atlantic cross-cultural challenge is resolved, because one side of the Atlantic is called the “New World,” and the other is called the “Old World”. Although this colonialist view of matters is naive and by no means harmless, it at least allows for the drawing of continuous lines from one side to the other.

• Greg Niemeyer, Special issue Guest Editor and Governing Board Member, Leonardo/ISAST

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