A major impact of the Internet has been a standardisation of culture. Often, the Western, globalising cultural trend that rules the Net is taken as the standard against which local cultural traditions are weighed both consciously and unconsciously.Local cultural traditions are losing out in the long run in the era of standardisation that has been ushered in by the Internet. So though the Net is ‘participatory’, it is ‘polarising’ as well. It encourages diversity of thought and expression on the surface but, below the surface, there is the urgency to conform to a certain set of standards.