Chris Edwards, [HREF1] Digital Projects Leader, Asia Pacific Cluster, Scholarly Information Services/Library, Menzies Building No 2, Australian National University, [HREF 2] Acton, ACT 0200. e-mail: Christopher.Edwards@anu.edu.au
This paper examines influences that language and culture may play on the volume and quality of online information and poses significant questions about the 'value' of content to different linguistic and cultural groups. By examining statistics on web content and Internet usage and then considering these along with telecommunication data and cultural understandings, the paper constructs a birds-eye view of content in our ever-evolving online world and deliberations are made about the values placed on content by individualistic and collective cultures.
The paper aims to expose what could be seen as a flaw in the 'pay per view' model that treats information as a commodity, rather than an opportunity to freely share global knowledge. The evaluation and conclusions presented in this paper form some cogent 'building blocks' that others might consider when developing strategies in the disciplines of research, education, global marketing, business, and communication and library services.
Throughout the English-speaking world there is a common misconception that English is the language of the Internet. It certainly looks that way when 68.4% of content on the Internet is in English. But when you consider that (as at September 2002), only 36.5% of Internet users browse the web in English and that English is the 'native' language of less than 9% of the world’s population; this puts a different perspective on it.
There is currently a phenomenal growth of content in languages other than English and increasing online subscriptions from new users in developing countries such as China and India where telecommunication infrastructure is rapidly being improved.
Language and culture are inseparably linked. So, to what extent might these factors influence how and why online information is valued the future? What patterns can we see, what trends can we predict and what effect might culture play on the value placed on online information?
It is my opinion that, when it comes to analysing statistics and attempting to predict or influence future trends, the influence of cultural background is often either partially or completely ignored by marketers, academics and business practitioners.
The paper will explore the following themes:
In terms of Internet subscribers, the Asian region is predicted to overtake the United States as the world's largest online marketplace by 2005.
According to Gartner, growth of Internet subscription rates has begun to plateau in the USA, while Internet subscriptions continue to grow rapidly in Asia. The region has some of the lowest Internet access rates in the world, and prices are still coming down as result of competition and/or government direction. Rapidly improving infrastructure appears to be contributing to this growth. (Pastore, 2002)
Whilst Gartner Dataquest's prediction appears sound; it may be conservative. Extrapolation and analysis of raw data can provide a good guide in many circumstances, but for a better picture we should also consider what impact cultural influences may have. (Peckinpaugh, 2000) [HREF3]
Of the Asian countries referred to by Gartner; India, Japan, China and South Korea, all are collectivist societies and as such are culturally different to the USA and Australia.
In a collectivist society, there is great value placed in consultation with others, which is not the case in an Individualistic culture such as that found in the English-speaking world.
Non-English speaking collective societies such as those in the Asian region appear to be holding all the aces at this period in the information age.
Technically advanced collectivist societies such as South Korea have:
As many people access the Internet in more than one language, the data referred to in this paper does not represent the percentage of individuals online, but rather the percentage of users accessing content in each language, irrespective of their geographical location. Some users will access content in more than one language.
There are large linguistic groups in some countries that speak a local dialect at home and the country's official language at work. For example, according to US census data, in 2000 there were 45 million people in the U.S.A. for whom English is not the language spoken at home. (Pew, 2001)
It has been assumed that speakers of a language such as Chinese at home, no matter where in the world will have a propensity towards Chinese cultural traits.
The use of language is not bounded by geography; and there are fundamental social and cultural characteristics that continue to prevail in migrated linguistic groups. Therefore language is used to represent cultural group.
Looking at the population of users in each language group and the volume of content available online in each language, clear patterns emerge.
Figure 1 shows the change in the use of languages on the Internet between December 2001 and September 2002, a period of only nine months. (2001b) [HREF5] (2002d) [HREF6]
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Figure 1: Variation in online population by linguistic group between December 2001 and September 2002
Theoretically, in a totally equal world, the percentage of content on the Internet should be split evenly for all languages; because each document would be available in each language.
Figure 2: Web content by language (2002a)
If 68.4% of content is in English and 36.5% of users access the web in English, then users of English have the most difficult problems in terms of cataloguing, searching and indexing.
This leaves 63.5% of the world’s online population with 31.6% of the content. Therefore, if metadata standards are adhered to, it would be logical to assume that users of languages other than English should have significantly more chance of finding the information they are seeking out to the smaller pool of online data.
Figure 3
When we compare the percentage of users with the percentage of content available in each language, it is clear that the volume of information in English is significantly outweighs the volume of English language users.
The logical question to ask is, "Why is there so much English language content
on the Internet?"
The primary reasons could be:
Chinese and Korean language material is diametrically opposed to the English experience. The Korean data is interesting because South Korea offers users the most advanced online user experience (with half of the population on broadband access). Furthermore, unlike Chinese or Japanese, Korean is a language that is rarely used outside Korea and is not considered an international language of business.
Collectivist cultures are more trusting online than individualists and this is evident in studies of perceived risks when online shopping between Korean and US consumers. Security of online information was found not to be as important to Koreans as it was to US citizens. (Park, 2002) [HREF7]
But, online transactions between collectivist and individualist cultures may be fraught with misunderstanding about the way business should be conducted.
An understanding of what passes for proper behaviour directly stems from cultural background and this has an effect on the collectivist perception of the commercial value of online information. Many examples can be found relating to copyright:
Copyright, dating back to the British licensing act of 1662, is largely a concept of the individualistic society and is not recognised by collectivist societies that are more likely to want to share within their group than charge a fee for them. Copyright as we perceive it, is not yet a common practice in collective social structures; this is evidenced by the Indian film industry where copyright laws exist but even pirated local videos are openly available.
In another example, Pepsi would not have been in the difficulties if they had entered their Sichuan joint venture with an understanding of the culture of the people with whom they were partnering. Pepsi alleged that the venture's chairman Hu Fengxian expended moneys on luxuries without its approval. When Pepsi officials visited the plant to inspect financial records, local company employees threatened them. Further to the story, an article in The Age stated, "China's courts often protect rather than punish fraudsters." (2002b)
What both Pepsi officials and the journalist from the Age have failed to understand is that Pepsi was operating with individualist values in a collectivist business arrangement.
Unlike the USA or Australia, which are individualistic cultures, Koreans and Chinese, are collectivist cultures.
'Individualism pertains to societies in which the ties between individuals are loose: everyone is expected to look after himself or herself and his or her immediate family. Collectivism as its opposite, pertains to societies in which people from birth onwards are integrated into strong, cohesive in groups, which throughout people's lifetime continue to protect them in exchange for unquestioning loyalty.' (Hofstede, 1997)
Collective societies have a dependence relationship that is practical and psychological and this paper proposes that this cultural characteristic will have a significant effect on the growth of the Internet.
Some key differences between individualistic and collective societies are listed below:
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Collectivist |
Individualist |
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Collective interests prevail over individual interests |
Individual interests prevail over collective interests |
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Laws and rights differ by group |
Laws and rights are supposed to be the same for all |
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Dominant role of the state in the economic system |
Restrained role of the state in the economic system |
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Press controlled by the state |
Press freedom |
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Harmony and consensus in society are ultimate goals |
Self-actualisation by every individual is an ultimate goal |
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People are born into extended families or other in-groups which continue to protect them in exchange for loyalty |
Everyone grows up to look after him/herself and his/her immediate (nuclear) family only |
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Identity is based on the social network to which one belongs |
Identity is based on the individual |
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Harmony should always be maintained and direct confrontations avoided |
Speaking one's mind is a characteristic of an honest person |
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Management is management of groups |
Management is management of individuals |
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Relationship prevails over task |
Task prevails over relationship |
Selected examples from (Hofstede, 1997)
Another significant factor in the behaviour of collectivist and individualistic cultures is a cultures propensity for avoiding uncertainty. This is significant because it can be an indicator of the rate of acceptance of new concepts such as the technological change.
Figure 4 plots nations by their individualist and the collectivist cultural traits along with the nations propensity for avoiding uncertainty.
Figure 4 (Hofstede, 1997)
USA, GB, AUL (Australia) NZ and Canada are all English speaking nations with similar cultural characteristics. They are nations of individuals whose cultural upbringing leads them to cope well with change and uncertainty.
Collectivist societies such as China, Korea and Japan tend to be more likely to avoid change until a collective decision has been made and the element of uncertainty has been minimised.
It is my belief that because of the dominant role the state plays in the economic system and because of the nature of collective interests prevailing over individual interests; members of collectivist societies have far fewer options when it comes to choice of ISP. This is relevant because having fewer ISPs makes the industry easier to control, easier to manage, easier to provide service and cheaper to maintain. It gives the ISPs enormous buying power to purchase top quality infrastructure and technical expertise, which adds up to services becoming cheap and affordable for all.
This belief is evident when the ratio of ISPs to users in Australia, USA, Korea and Japan are compared. In the USA, users have a ratio of 1 ISP to every 23,500 users. In Korea, the ratio is 1 ISP to every 2,418,100 users.
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Figure 5, CIA (2002).
In the past year in the Asia-Pacific, the number of DSL lines has risen by 18.6%, (2003a) [HREF8] as Asia races to join the online world.
Working under the assumption that mobile phone use may correlate with the take-up of the Internet as another form of communication that would be attractive to collectivist cultures I found, not surprisingly, that there are marked differences in the use of mobile phones between individualistic and collective societies.
Figure 6: Shows comparison of online population that was evaluated. Japan and South Korea representing collectivist societies and Australia and USA representative of individualistic societies.
Figure 7: Population against internet subscribers.
When two developed, largely individualistic societies, Australia and the USA are compared against two equally well developed collective societies, South Korea and Japan, some interesting trends are evident.
Figure 7 shows that when each countries total population is graphed against the number of Internet users, all four are roughly equal, with around 50% of the population having access to the Internet.
Figure 8: Population against mobile phone ownership
When population is compared against mobile phone use there is a marked difference. The collective cultures of South Korea and Japan have significantly higher percentages of the population owning mobile phones whilst the individualist USA and Australia have significantly lower ratio of phone ownership. This may, in part, be indicative of the collectivist need to consult with each other.
It is possible that as the online market continues to develop we will begin to see collectivist online subscriptions following similar models as that of mobile phone usage. If this is the case, then there will be greater numbers of Asian online users per head of population than will be the case for individualistic English speaking cultures.
If the Korean model is typical of what we can expect in future of other collectivist countries such as China and to a lesser extent, British influenced India; It is my belief that that the English speaking online population will be at a significant educational disadvantage in the future if it continues to treat information as a commodity, rather than view it as a resource to be shared in the community.
South Korea; the most technically developed, online community, (2003b) [HREF9] has the highest ratio of users to population (2001d) [HREF6] and from all accounts and from what we can gather, it has the highest ratio of 'quality content' to 'number of users'. (Lan'kov, 2002)
The South Korean government encourage online participation by offering financial aids for computer purchases, support and community computer literacy education programmes. (2002c)
Korean users are amazed by amount of information that has been placed on the Net by Korean agencies. (Lan'kov, 2002)
Unlike their English language counterparts, Korean media and agencies provide free access to all current and archived information. Only some business-related databases and market analyses are charged for.
The 'Korea Integrated News Database' (KINDS) [HRE10]
KINDS is a news portal that provides free full text access to:
The site requires a user to register and this is used for accurate tracking and service delivery improvements.
Figure 9
Non-English speaking collective societies such as those in the Asia Pacific region potentially hold the aces in the information age.
The great weakness of the English speaking individualistic based societies in the online world is that in their eagerness to make money from the sale of information as a commodity, they cripple access to information resources to all but the wealthy. Whilst collective societies such as China and South Korea may gain collective strength because of a cultural propensity to see the Internet as an opportunity for knowledge sharing.
Pastore, M. (2002) Asian Internet Market to Surpass United States. New York Times, New York.
Peckinpaugh, D. (2000), Framing the Postmodern: Language, Culture, Commerce and Consciousness. Vol. 2003 David Peckinpaugh. Available online [HREF3]
Pew, (2001) 50% of Hispanic Adults Now are Online, Pew Internet & American Life [HREF4], 8/3/2003
(2001b), Global Internet statistics by language, Internet Archive, Global Reach [HREF5] 8/3/2003
(2001d), Global Internet statistics by language, Global Reach [HREF6] 7/3/2003
Park, C. (2002) A Model on the Online Buying Intention with Consumer Characteristics and Product Type AusWeb02, Novotel Twin Waters Resort.[HREF7]
(2002a) Vilaweb.com, as quoted by eMarketer.
(2002b).23/8/2002 Cautionary tales undermine China's eastern promise. The Age. Melbourne.
Hofstede, G. H. (1997) Cultures and organizations : software of the mind, McGraw-Hill, New York.
(2002c), The Computer and Internet Use Survey 2002, Korea National Statistical Office.
(2003a), Over 36 million DSL lines worldwide, Point-Topic.com [HREF8] 10/3/2003
(2003b), Telecommunication Indicator Reports, [HREF9]
Lan'kov, A. (2002) (Ed, Edwards, C.) Canberra.
