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American culture is remarkably solipsistic. We see and know so much of them, and they see and know so little of us (for any given 'us').

(Four years after moving from Australia to the UK, my twenty-volume print copy of the OED remains in storage in Australia, waiting for international freight rates to fall. Oh how I miss it.)

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In the meantime, if you're a member of your local UK library you probably have free access to the online OED using your library card number.

You can extend this to the whole of "the west". In fact, you even have this effect between west german and east german culture.

Any reason not to extend that to all cultures? There is a limitation to the bandwidth any one community (including the smallest community, yourself) has to the "outside". Mass media and the Internet has certainly reduced the latency between cultures/communities but has not eliminated it.

I'm sure I'm not the only person to have thought about how cultural differences are sustained over time on the account of synchronization challenges due to bandwidth limitations between cultures (language, frequency, latency).

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