Here it is a week later, and I can finally sit back for a second and reflect on my first experience attending We Media in Miami. (I’ve also posted a couple live-blogged point form summaries of talks here and here.)

A lot of people have covered this event, probably better than I could, so I won’t try to add too much to those discussions. Dave Cohn, who I met for the first time at WeMedia, posted this run-down of the “The Power to Change the World” session. Mark Jones of Reuters, a strong supporter of Global Voices, had some interesting things to say in this article. Solana made nice use of CoverItLive in this post. For the full list of coverage, check the iFocus roundup, which Andrea claims will continue to be updated in the future.

The general sentiment that I got out of a lot of talks, one that I’ve also heard expressed quite a lot in Japan, is that with increasing connectivity there is a move in journalism back toward community, toward local coverage. There is something slightly unintuitive about the idea that a medium which connects the whole world would transform journalism into something local, but this is what is happening. In an interesting session on “Social Entrepreneurs”, Alberto Ibarguen of the Knight Foundation talked about moving back to the community journalism of the ’60s and ’70s, arguing that there was a huge bonding social value in such journalism that is still very much needed.

I’ve heard similar talk here in Japan, and I am thinking a lot about what kind of impact this shift from audience to community will have in a country where the national media has been so powerful for such a (relatively) long time.

But that’s actually only half of what I mean with the question in the title of this post. The other half involves something so fundamental that it should have featured front and central at this conference, but didn’t. If not for Michael Smolens of dotSUB, the topic would have been completely skipped.

The point is this: how can we talk about “we” in any kind of global sense without talking about language? It’s baffling to me that this topic was so little mentioned in all the discussion of global “conversations”. Everybody else in the non-U.S. world is aware of this issue and struggling with it, talking about it, working to overcome it. But at a conference about the future of “we”, the word came up only tangentially, in a handful of presentations.

That’s just not going to cut it. As I’ve written before, the future of global conversations is all about language networks. Clay Shirky got it right ten years ago when he wrote that:

[I]n an information economy the vital protocol is language, written and spoken language. [...] In the next century, as countries increasingly trade more in information than hard goods, the definition of proximity changes from geographic to linguistic: two countries border one another if and only if they have a language they can use in common.

This year’s WeMedia conference, for all its good points, missed this point almost entirely. Here’s hoping that the next one doesn’t.