A utopian college campus comes to mind: smiling 20-somethings handpicked from engineering nodes around the world, sporting distressed jeans and trendy sneakers, pinball across the manicured lawn.  The internal lights of the modern, glass-paneled buildings reveal an illuminated fishbowl of even more hipsters - lording over tech nerd-dom: one ashen from the glow of his computer screen, a few standing arms crossed, engaging in conversation next to whiteboards, others gathering around a single PC, laughing.

Santa’s factory also comes to mind. It’s hard to stand in the center of the Googleplex, Google Inc’s $319 million headquarters in Mountain View, CA, without having the jovial adrenaline rush of sharing a secret. So this is where the magic happens.

The employees – called Googlers - seem to be sustaining that rush.  A well-lit main entrance with primary-colored walls houses a billboard-sized flat screen television, projecting a stream of real-time search queries from around the world; evidence of Google’s mastery of the world’s information.

The traditional workplace has a pot of lukewarm coffee, a stack of flimsy Styrofoam cups, and the occasional batch of cookies made by the sweet human resources lady. But within a competitive talent-driven world, Google has chosen to pamper its elves: free Naked juices (retail value: $3.50), complimentary food of the expensive Northern California variety (avocado turkey burgers, tofu salads, curry chicken), and individual electric scooters for travel to meetings around the Googleplex.

“If you’re happy in the working environment, if things are just there for you that are gonna make you work more effectively,” 23 year-old Google employee Geoff Vitt says, “and for me it definitely works, I mean. Some of the stuff, I don’t need, but I definitely love it, you know? Free food, free whatever, it’s awesome.”

The original building feels as modern as the company it houses. There are individualized 12-foot acrylic pods that have replaced the traditional cubicle; these transparent igloo-like structures are clustered to improve workflow and conserve energy. When Google outgrew the first building, it bought most of the neighborhood to make room for the company’s rapid expansion to 8,000 employees Even today, eight years into Google’s existence, the atmosphere lacks the tense ‘X-the-screen-because-the-boss-is-coming’ attitude and has an egalitarian feeling. Maybe even an idealistic feeling. It’s hard to tell who the bosses ever are, since most everyone is young.

“To come out here and see one of the more powerful companies in the world, where your boss is in a tee shirt and jeans - not just tee shirt and jeans, tee shirt and like ripped jeans and weird shock shoes,’ Vitt says, ‘that was definitely odd.”

“What is keeping you from contacting someone who’s 22 in an Arab country?” I remember hearing Anne Siddiquie, the 24-year old curator at the Museum of Islamic and Muslim Culture in Jackson, Mississppi, say last fall. “I think it’s partially not understanding the need or importance of communicating with people from another country-and just not caring.”

It sounded like a rhetorical challenge, but one worth exploring – if for nothing more than a chance to test and play with exciting innovations on the Internet. So after 36 seconds of Googling, I discovered SaudiJeans, a blog written by a 22-year-old King Saud University student named Ahmed Al-Omran. His pragmatic observations of global political order and social commentary on McDonalds adaptation to Saudi culture in a blog post titled “Do Not Supersize Me” were both impressive.

The author photo revealed a slender, brown-skinned face with Starbucks barista-like glasses that gave the impression of a ruddy intern at a D.C. think tank. Not the image I would have drawn from the mainstream media. A turban-wearing fundamentalist holding an AK-47 would have felt more appropriate.

I was reading his blog, clicking through pictures of Riyadh, and getting a sense of his opinions and thoughts on Muslim young adult life in Saudi Arabia – all while sitting in my dorm at Boston College. That night I sent him an email.

By the next morning Al-Omran had responded with answers to most of my questions. “I don’t think America can win the World Cup, not in the near future anyway.” He wrote. “The interest in football, or as you might call it soccer, is much less in America than almost any other part of the world, which is, from my point of view, a weird thing actually.”

It became hard to imagine the more than 7,500 miles separating us, or the Clash of Civilizations ideology that was supposed to be separating us. They didn’t seem to exist. His idealistic life visions (he’s the founder of an Arab blogging community hoping to offer the world a better view on what’s really happening in Saudi Arabia and the Middle East) and a general uneasiness about the future implications of a cultural misunderstanding between Americans and Muslims (more terrorism) – gave the impression of a liberal American university student.

He didn’t feel like the “enemy.” But maybe that’s because I recognized, as he said, that communicating online could “help us to understand each other in order to build relations that are stronger and healthier based on common interests and not on the difference of (ideological) forces.”

Al-Omran speaks and writes perfect English.  If he didn’t, our cross-continental communication would have been impossible. But even three years ago our conversation may not have happened at all. Talk to most Americans today and they might still think it’s impossible to communicate with people one-on-one in the Arab world – and that’s wrong.

“I read some blogs by Americans,” Al-Omran says. “Reading such blogs alters my view on Americans as a whole and gives me a better understanding of American politics.”

I paused to acknowledge Al-Omran’s global perspective. The revelation was inspiring: If he could explore a new culture over the Internet, what’s holding us back?