one person will drop a reference to some city, some business, some event or person, and their shared cultural context mires the rest of the conversation in an impenetrable layer of America.

whether this just happens because there are so many of y'all on the internet, so doing this doesn't end up losing people (since, hey, if all you speak to is other americans what's the problem), or because american hegemony means most people have a decent level of familiarity with an american cultural context, i don't know.

this isn't to say that any of this is bad; but as an australian if i drop a reference to bunnings or cairns or the ekka i'm well aware i'll either have to accept it flying over everyone's heads or explain it, both potentially ruining the joke.

idk what this is. i think i'm tired


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in reply to @bark's post:

it's because americans believe (by default, usually not consciously) that they are the center of the world/internet/universe and don't need to give context about their lived experience. so yeah, you got it basically spot on.

if this is true, which i do believe when i'm feeling much worse but is harder to commit to when not, i think it's definitely unconscious. everyone else either being american or being familiar with america means that you don't really have to learn to temper your references or know to explain them, so this centralisation comes naturally

(and I do admire when people talk locally of their own places outside of America, because it makes the world a lot less of an opaque black box with "America" on the inside and "Not America" on the outside).

like, throw me some hyderabad memes. talk about st petersburg (no, the other one.) like... surely there's goings-on in brno and espoo. we're not all culturally on an island over here

Irritatingly enough, I now know far more about USAian minutiae than my own country's because of this. Not because I don't learn about what's going on around me but the dominant discourse is centred around how the US feels about it.