defining difference (and distance) in virtual space

P.M. Forni, whose old-fashioned ideas about civility and the erosion of it I've quoted before, has an interesting observation about the "flattening" of space online.

"Recognizing and accepting difference is the premise of our recognizing and accepting value. Unfortunately one major aspect of their experience with the Net inclines our students not to perceive difference. On the Net every single thing is equidistant from every other thing and from the person at the keyboard. It takes the same amount of time and the same effort to access anything you wish. [He's incorrect about that, but ok, let's provisionally accept the bigger point...] When everything comes from the same source - the mysteriously endless and spaceless warehouses of the Net - everything reveals itself under a varnish of equivalence."

My major disagreement with Forni is that he equates "difference" with "difference in quality." He is an aesthete, and he is looking to develop habits of discrimination: we recognize masterpieces, for example, and in so doing, we recognize that other works are NOT masterpieces. Fair enough.

Yet much of difference does not equate to lesser or greater value, and of course geographers in recent decades have theorized extensively about differences that do NOT imply greater or lesser value - race, gender, etc. etc. Much of what we teach in World Regional Geography is implicitly underlaid with a goal of getting students to appreciate diversity WITHOUT making a value judgment. Thus Americans are not better than some other nationality because we are richer or have more stuff or have more freedoms or supposedly more equality, for example. We are trying to teach a culturally-situated appreciation of other ways that will help students to live in a world of difference and to understand and appreciate the lifeways of others.