the dispersion of vocab and theories from US universities into everyday life is pretty fascinating i think. one of the key things that's going on with the internet is what it's doing to language, people increasingly modelling their speech on how things are written on the internet. the guardian front page this morning had a couple of things like that, i forget what.
there's the associated thing as well of concepts and terminology being totally unmoored from the reality of lives in a place. people in england ending up with these conceptual tools to think about their life and their world, when these tools are to a large extent a product not only of america, but of these weird liberal arts colleges in the middle of nowhere (there are caveats obviously, this is a generalisation, but this is one thread in the overall phenomenon. i've been through a fair number of these in upstate new york, new england, new jersey, attended one briefly, they are incredibly odd places, physically segregated from any other community, properly in the middle of nowhere, with what seems like a very market-based customer-client relationship between staff and students, and when they cost $60,000 a year in tuition fees obviously it's a very rich segment of US society who show up. and then out of that emerges concepts that like end up in the brains of people in i don't know, exeter or whatever.
i find a lot of those ways of thinking about things really unsuited to thinking about life in the UK, personally. there's a thing going on where people read american feminists for example and don't get that they're really talking about america, and that gender relations etc are structured a bit differently there. it's ripe for misunderstanding all of that i think. especially as the default way of thinking about the US from the UK is that it's pretty culturally similar to us, when really its really very different