Young ESLs had to always learn to look for whatever scraps of outside (mostly american) culture they could find, but the internet has made it much easier to not only connect with the handful of other young, bored-out-of-their-minds-with-your-country's-culture people, but also have much easier access to incredibly attractive foreign cultural exports which always made anything and everything in your country look like cheap garbage for cavemen.It'll never cease to entertain me that one of the most xenophobic and culturally conservative nations on earth is single-handedly responsible for connecting about as many totally disparate people under a common interest as both major world religion's combined.
I didn't learn english because I had some aspirations of better working opportunities or because I was some kind of FUCKING NERD who just had to get As on every subject. I learned it with the simple goal of being able to consume the freshest, hottest online content which is always in english. With native online spheres always being outdated by at least 5-10 years it basically became a must just to be able to consume the best content around and also have this sense of escapism by interacting with foreigners who have different ideas and mindsets from your own and aren't the same moronic apes who you interact with every day.
Third worlders may be xenophobic and extremely patriotic a lot of the time, but there is a large contingent of social outcasts who wish they'd been born anywhere else...