91Èȱ¬

One branch of a global corporation has helped me to explore the online planet: Google Translate. Its ability to translate websites in seconds is helping me to read and understand music blogs from all over the world. (Music might be universal, but it helps when I know that Jacques/Paolo/Dembe/Kim is saying, "These beats are fresh, dude.") However, it's disturbing that Google can promote global conversation, regardless of language, and then cave in to corporate and political censorship re. China.

I think that 'the web' - or all the applications running on the net - may be influenced by many cultures so that 'on average' it's not a western thing, however that fact will be lost on most people.

As others have noted, we operate in tribes. It's been documented that most of us limit our activities to relatively few sites. So while it's perfectly possible that most websites in the world will reflect, say, African values one day, most Brits will continue to spend their times on the ones that they feel more comfortable with. So they won't notice that 'most of the web' deals with things they aren't interested in in languages they don't understand. (I think this is a good thing, incidentally.)

All sorts of people, and Hans Rosling gives some great examples on TED.com, argue that 'Africa' is not a single place but a collection of disparate peoples and cultures. 'The web' might reflect values we identify as African, but people in Ghana and people in Namibia will probably be using it in different ways.

I think the problem is you're asking questions about the whole thing, focusing on averages, instead of the different cultures and 'ecosystems' existing within the whole. What's wrong with accepting the net as an essentially infinite new playground in which there is room for everyone to do their own thing and find/found communities that meet their own needs.

I don't think there's enough communication between tribes to really say that any one has widespread impacts on the majority, but you might find a few.

One suggestion is that certain values considered to be European/socialist have become part of an equation that was initially dominated by American culture. I'm talking about Tim BL originally designing the web to be free and open, as he continually campaigns for less control in the face of attempts by US interests to ensure that they dictate the future. And Linus Torvalds coming up with Linux, the alternative to the closed proprietory standards of Microsoft.

Would Apache have come into being without these people establishing the principle? Maybe, as there is a sub-set in the USA that doesn't subscribe to the majority view. But the issues people have raised with Wikipedia indicates that 'ownership' is often protected in the USA more aggressively than in Europe. Didn't Bill Thompson write articles a while ago about the battle between US and EU approaches to copyright and patents? Especially software patents. Tim and Hans have both made impassioned cases for the release of raw data collected by taxpayer-funded organisations and it's interesting that the American president dubbed (by the 91Èȱ¬) potentially 'too European' for some American tastes has a commitment to information-sharing.

A probably irrelevant note: Twitter didn't take off in Taiwan, but Plurk is gaining popularity fast. Plurk crowd-sourced translations of their website and as of today there are 33 options to choose from, Twitter currently offers a choice between English and Japanese. Despite the hyperbole about giving power to the people, very few organisations seems to grasp that the people are scattered around the world and don't want to be told what languages a service needs to be provided in. In terms of who can use it, Twitter is making decisions at the top of the organisation while Plurk has left the decision to the users. It'll be interesting to see how that pans out.