Global Convergence
There’s an interesting article up on Reuters that brings home just how far along we’ve come in extending our online profiles to the wider world. The author discusses the pros and cons of the expanding phenomenon of social networking. Competing and complementary technologies are everywhere, allowing us to connect with each other in as many ways as we have time to maintain.
In the article, Jeff Jarvis says, "Revealing a little bit of yourself is the only way to make connections to other people and that is how the Internet works."
I agree, that revealing something about yourself gets people interested. They identify with you. You’re reaching out to other people like you, right?
What about the international reach of these revelations?
Consider this:
South Korea has over 80% broadband penetration, with millions playing online games and using services such as cyworld.
China has around a half-billion mobile phone users and is about to overtake the US as the largest broadband market. QQ is the largest social network in the world, with over 250 million users and 500 million accounts. And almost 30 million concurrency.
Japan’s largest social networking site, Mixi, sees its more than 10 million users spend an average of four and a half hours per visit. That’s not counting accessing the site from mobile phones, which is a very large part of Japanese time spent online.
The African continent, long ignored by the tech world, has more than 200 million mobile phone subscribers.
Second Life, HiPiHi, and other virtual worlds whose reach is and will certainly increasingly be global, are creating communities of people who’ve never met yet see each other in physical form everyday, and those communities reflect the changing world around us.
So who are you really talking to when you post a video on YouTube? Upload a new picture to Facebook? Promote a new song on MySpace? Update your Twitter feed?
Someone in Copenhagen might identify with the Bloc Party song playing on your page. Your blog post about sculpted prims in Second Life may be of interest to someone in Beijing. Maybe the only person who likes the pictures of your pet turtle on Flickr lives in Auckland.
You’re talking to the entire world. Get used to it.
Not only are we heading toward convergence of technologies, we’re smack dab in the middle of a convergence of cultures.
