Are niches navels?

I snagged on this remark by novelist Paul Auster recently:

"We're not interested in others any more. It's hurt us politically and it's hurt us culturally. We've lost our taste for what I would call 'the exotic'."

Whilst this trend is obvious, especially across the pond, is it not strange that our culture should be becoming more hermetic at precisely the time the Web is said to be stretching our collective tail, a phenomenon John Husband refers to as the "mass customisation of life"?

Perhaps this atomisation of interest is also an inward contraction that impedes the kind of macro-level exchange between civilisations that we've been used to.

In my post on Monday I noted how hard the French have found it very difficult in the information age to construct and propagate meaningful political structures around the idea of Frenchness (or Europeanness), and one reason for this surely has to be the cultural balkanisation that the Internet is fostering.

Where are all the Arabists today to balance out the Islamophobes? Otherness no longer fascinates us, it puts the willies up us - and its more violent exponents of know this and continue to exploit it to our disadvantage.