Planet Internet
There isn’t one Web anymore. Many different webs are emerging around cultural boundaries. Welcome to a multipolar online world!
Back in 1994, Internet was a village. You could know all the streets names, all the habitants addresses and habits. English was the one and only language, and the whole ecosystem’s map could still be fitted on a homepage. Internet experts were people able to understand the intricacies of HTML and to remember unsexy URLs (yahoo.stanford.edu) gathered through random surfing.
Then the village became a country, organized around a few poles like Ebay or Amazon. The maps became obsolete with the birth of effective search engines like Webcrawler, Altavista or Hotbot. Internet was still very homogeneous, full of common rules and codes (the netiquette), hampered by various technical limitations (browser compatibility, 28k modems, 640*480 screens). English was still the ultra dominant language. Kings had mastered the secrets of clever searches, able to find the right way to navigate the 50 first results to find the best resources.
Then the city became a continent. Millions and millions of people, Google emerging out of the newly messy network, organizing pages in a way that was gaming the gamers who couldn’t simply repeat a word a million times to sit on top of the rankings. French started to emerge, Japanese and Spanish too. Cultural differences blossomed, and local players were gaining traction and respectable audiences. Technology was getting its acts together, finally providing ways to reach multiple languages, devices, and cultures. Leaders were those able to cope with an increasing amount of information, who managed to filter the relevant from the irrelevant and were able to repackage multiple sources in an easy to understand and adapted way.
Internet is now a planet with different continents, each having a different culture, a different structure, a different set of players. See this list of dominant communities per country gathered on a recent BBC article:
MySpace (United States, Australia, Mexico, and Italy), Bebo (Ireland and New Zealand) , Cyworld (South Korea), Friendster (Indonesia, Philippines, and Singapore) , Fotolog (Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay), Hi5 (Colombia, Ecuador, and Thailand), Mixi (Japan), Orkut (Brazil, India, and Paraguay) , Skyblog (France, Belgium, Senegal), Studiverzeichnis (Germany, Austria) and Vkontakte (Russia).
Social networking sites are exposing a formerly hidden reality: the fact that the web now matured into a network of distinct ecosystems.
Does that mean the end of global sites? Probably not. But just like in politics, where the emergence of China and India will end the West’s unilateral dominance, multi polarity is brewing on the Internet. We expected it to happen because of technology, money and innovation (Yahoo and Microsoft to counter-balance Google). Instead it’s the world’s oldest frontiers - language and culture - showing up to balance things out.
PS: I thought about that when I read Bruno’s post about William Gibson, a famous science fiction novelist who has “given up on trying to imagine the future” because we have “hit a speed and complexity that make the future inscrutable”. Things grow and become more complex with time. Internet is a good example.
Links:
Lunch over IP: William “cyberspace” Gibson gives up on the future
BBC: Pull down the walled gardens
