If you live in or near a major metropolitan area (or near a university) in the US or Canada, you probably already have some way to watch Au Revoir Les Enfants or The Thief of Baghdad. Those of us living in cultural backwaters can’t enjoy such luxuries. The Panama City metro area (where I am) has more than a million inhabitants, but our sole access to decent cinema consists of a single Blockbuster store with a few shelves of the usual suspects: a bit of Fellini, some Kurosawa, some Hitchcock, etc. We have no art house theaters, only mall cineplexes blasting the latest superhero fluff. And as poor as our movie selection is, it’s still much broader than the music available: basically if you don’t like merengue, plena, or 1980s discount-rack soft rock you’re shit out of luck.

Why is Criterion shutting me out? For that matter, why can’t I legally buy MP3s or movies from Amazon’s online store, when I can order from them a slab of plastic containing the same bits and have it shipped to me, using up resources and crapping on the environment? Perhaps the argument is that not many people here are interested in this stuff. True enough, but so what? How much more can it cost these companies to open these digital distribution channels? Is it more than it costs to install and maintain the filters that keep people like me from becoming customers?

The internet was supposed to level the playing field for those of us that live in culturally isolated regions. But now that technology has matured to the point where cultural artifacts—music, movies, TV shows, and books—can be purchased, distributed, and experienced online, companies are doing their damnedest to maintain the old structures intact. The net result: global access to culture is constrained to a bizarro long tail, a ghetto defined by corporate lawyers and accountants.

This is interesting to me because one of the hallmarks of the much maligned International Style of architecture is a trans-national vocabulary that is rooted more in fantasies about the machine age rather than in local context. Much of the design work we do online follows similar rules that hint at a global style (or styles), and results in a homogeneousness that is meant to convey “that we, too, can design like North Americans”. Here’s an example: an article by a Russian developer that proposes a categorization of different web UI styles, all based on designs for sites for US-based companies, presumably for replication by other designers.

Perhaps more culturally-aware design can help bring a feeling of rootedness to websites, much like culturally-aware architecture can for cities. How should we approach this, when we’re being sold on the notion of “global commerce online”?