Why are 19 of the World’s Top 100 Websites Google?
For those of you that haven’t seen it, this is an amazingly cool(and geeky!) watch:
Basically, instead of using hands and numbers to tell time, you simply count the number of lit-up segments. It looks very alien-like and futuristic. But the most wonderful thing about this watch is this: it transcends culture and knowledge. A child, or an alien without any prior knowledge of mathematics can easily learn to use this watch- “The day is divided into 24 parts. Each time one of these lights up, another part has passed”. This cross-cultural, obscure little watch raises a lot of thoughts about other technologies like, say, the Internet. Unlike this watch, the Internet is much more monocultural. Why are URLs all in English and not Unicode? Why are 19 of the world’s 100 most popular websites Google?
The distribution of Internet users worldwide is not as America-centric as you might think. It is Asia, with over 389 million Internet-connected individuals that has the most Internet users worldwide. North America is in second . China alone accounts for 132,000,000, which is why “The Chinese Google”, Baidu, is #4. But other than the smattering of Chinese websites in the list, the top 500 most popular websites remain dominated by American companies. And no matter how multicultural those companies may try to appear(Google US and Google China changed their logo today to celebrate the Chinese New Year, while other Googles like Google UK or Google Germany did not), the fact remains that the Internet is largely America-dominated, with American design philosophies and principles. Just compare #9 qq.com with old Yahoo or #4 baidu.com with AltaVista. There are so many ways to design a search engine or portal, and they went with what worked- the American model. Oh, and notice how they have .com domain names?
I’m not one of those “America-hatin’ liberals”, or trying to discredit American innovation or design. I just think that, as the Internet is such a global medium, it needs to have a more global interface. Just like the designer of the watch, someone needs to think outside the box and design a completely different interface, one not based on what works for American websites, but one that will work for an alien coming to a computer for the first time without any knowledge or assumptions. Something that feels..natural, not just to American, but to all humans. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go figure out what all of these blinking Js and Ls on my watch mean.
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[…] 2007 We were talking last night about this exact same subject, and Neomeme is dead on with the questions he’s asking about internet distribution. So Asia is the hotbed of Internet use? When was the last time you ran […]
Spooky. It’s about three hours since we put the bong down and stopped talking about this exact subject. The responsibility for why we’re all ’speaking’ English lies at the door of hardware/OS manufacturers; Microsoft are really big and ubiquitous; the English language itself - man, it’s easy: look, even the computer speaks it - and all of our social bookmarking/interaction sites.
Web 2.0 as most of us see it is pretty incestuous. Bring on the true democratization of the web. I for one am getting fairly tired of the ‘we have no data for Africa or China’ argument.
Btw, you’ve been dugg (http://digg.com/software/Why_are_we_all_speaking_American)
Interesting point, but the watch still betrays a Western ethnocentrism: The idea that the day is divided into 24 hours which are divided into 60 minutes which are divided into 60 seconds. I am not sure this would be immediately obvious to an alien, or say to a highlander from Papua New Guinea.
Escargot: not entirely true. The 24-hour day is biologically rooted in the behavior of humans and some other primates, just like the 30-day month is rooted in the behavior of the moon and the 365-day year is based on the Earth’s rotation around the sun. That’s why it is “natural”. If there was Western ethnocentrism, we would see time and date take on base-10, just like every other unit of measure.
The “sunrise-to-sunrise” day is of course biologically rooted (although, as an interesting side note, humans deprived of the usual environmental cues tend towards a daily rhythm that’s 25 hours long…), but there is nothing natural about sub-dividing that day into 24 hours. Many cultures have come up with other ways of dividing a day into smaller units. This particular watch actually measures time in units of 1/12th of 1/2 a day, 1/4 of 1/12th of 1/2 a day and 1/15th of 1/4 of 1/12 of 1/2 a day. I can’t find anything natural about that
I’m not just nit-picking here: I think that all new technology comes with built-in biases, which are assimilated by cultures who adopt the technology. For example, I would argue that our notion of the hour was a consequence of early clock design, which divided the face of the clock into twelve parts, not the other way around (notice it’s much easier to dissect a circle into 12 parts rather than 10; it’s also a much more natural gear ratio). We recognize a quarter hour as a convenient unit of time not because it corresponds to some natural time interval, but because it happens to correspond with the position of the minute hand on the four cardinal points of the clock face.
Why do cultures adopt new technology? Because it works. Would Renaissance scholars have been able to do Arabic Algebra with Roman numerals? Sure, but it’s easier with Arabic numerals. Could Chinese authorities devise a URL scheme that works not only with Unicode, but also with the Chinese character set? Of course they could, but it’s much easier with the existing scheme. Could they design a uniquely Chinese looking search engine? Nothing in CSS, HTML or HTTP prohibits this, but, as you put it, “they went with what worked.”
I think it’s easy to overstate the effects of globalization and cultural imperialism based on a survey of form rather than content. Chinese rock music, although it sounds very similar to American rock music, has a much different cultural significance. I don’t have the facts to back it up, but my guess is that users of Google China search for very different things than users of Google Germany, or Google USA.
You make a lot of good points. Here’s one thing users of Google China can’t search for: images of Tiannanmen square
This one makes sence “One’s first step in wisdom is to kuesstion everything - and one’s last is to come to terms with everything.”
[…] many of them incredibly innovative, almost all of them at an unbeatable price: free.Not long ago, 19 of the top 100 websites in the world were Google. Add in other Google acquisitions, and now you see Google owns 26 of the […]