It is a common assumption of cyber-anthropologists, that an increase in virtuality leads to an increased level of internationalism, cosmopolitan lifestyle, and a global, borderless image space. Contemporary social networking environments attempt to look cosmopolitan as well. SecondLife promotes an open and free toy society of semi-anonymous avatars from all around the globe, who peacefully share islands, clubs and shopping malls. The potentially cross-cultural agora turns out to be as Philistine as can be, a petty bourgeois low-cost paradise with garden gnomes, cowboy hats and corporate T-shirts in pink and black.
Go to Japan Resort, France Pitoresque, or to any of the SecondLife art places to find out how restricted and narrow-minded the World Wide Web can be. These locations are characterised by an extreme homogenisation of appearance and talk. Foreign languages are merely cherished as exotic and cool, yet controlled by a unified jargon below the level of language. SecondLife is a conglomerate of cyberprovincialism rather than an international community. I would like to suggest that there is a counter-trend to expanding locality in Virtual Worlds, a user-generated trend of imploding locality. Locality collapses into a digital Mega-suburb of cyber-solarium tanned bores who have set their daylight zone to eternal noon.