With the bazillions of people in the world, why is it that 98% of the people I encounter online are in the U.S., and a tiny remainder are in Europe? Even when I see people online from Japan, China, Russia, or so on, they’re Americans or Europeans living in those other countries on business.
Where are the billion Chinese online? Where are the Japanese? Brazilians? Mexicans? Spain? Russia? Indians and Pakistanis?
Is it just that the types of messageboards and websites that I go to don’t attract those people because of cultural differences? Is it that their websites are out there, but they’re in kanji or urdu or tagalog or portuguese so they don’t turn up when I’m searching for “The Arcade Fire” or “Uncanny X-men?”
Web users are out there in every country in the world. The problem, as you mentioned, is that they are mostly using websites in their native language. If you do google searches, it is generally going to pull up pages in English. You can set google to search for websites in many, many other languages. Those are generally filtered from your daily view. Lots of web tools allow you to set the default language. Try it for yourself and see the difference.
I recently fixed a computer for a Ukranian teenager. I asked her to show me the web sites she visited. She pulled up tons of Russian sites with a Russian font. I had never seen those before.
I can’t say I have noticed this, but I have noticed perception of it in others. On the atheist board I lurk on, I am always seeing people being congratulated on such flexible views for an American. They then tell their fans that they are actually Austrian, or South American, or some such. One of the fan sites I often visit for an American cartoon is made by a Japanese fan, and another cartoon site has fanart submission from a published German comic-strip writer. She also does a great comic strip about a single women, avalible in English here.
I think it is due more to the fact that it is easy to assume anyone on a board is American, till being told differently. Just look at all the cases of people here who have to point out that they are Canadian!
Got to an internet cafe in an Asian country, even a wealthy place like Hong Kong, and you will see part of your answer. The sign on the door will likely have “world wide web” down near the bottom somewhere in smaller print. Up top will be their main sellers, which are things like online gaming. That sort of stuff is bigger culturally over there than it is in the West. You don’t see an awful lot of people simply surfing the web, unless it’s to go to their hotmail accounts. They also love their ICQ and similar programs. So, there’s a much bigger Asian presence on the so-called “hidden internet” than there is on the web.
The main reason for OP’s problem is of course the language. If you don’t know anything else than English, you are bound to visit only English-language sites and (especially) messageboards, which effectively makes the vast majority of the net sort of invisible to you. This works also the other way: although most Internet users - but not all - know some English, and many of them even have it as their second or third language, it’s still the most natural to communicate by your own language. The culture further widens these gaps: Arcade Fire puts out good music, but only a small fringe of indie fanatics have heard about them in Europe. Even so, though, if you use for example Google’s or Yahoo’s advanced search, you will find tens of thousands sites in languages other than English from countries all around the world that at least mention The Arcade Fire.
Other’s already have brought statistics; here’s an outdated bit of info from CIA Factbook that shows how America’s fraction of world Internet users is declining. Pretty much everyone else is growing. State policies are a big factor in which countries have large presence on the net. There are so many Koreans using Internet because in South Korea practically everyone has had a high-speed connection for several years now. Similarly Sweden has broadband networks everywhere. On the contrary, French weren’t too eager to jump on the Internet early 90s since France already had a well-fuctioning Minitel network to use.
Many US-based English-language ranking sites are naturally a bit biased against foreign parts of the web, but still, if you take a look at Big-boards you’ll see that there are many very sizable communities there with hardly any Americans and Brits in. A good resource is Alexa ranking which should give some idea about what actually is popular. There’s been lots of talk about Alexa’s spyware-like information gathering methods, but its ranks are pretty accurate nonetheless.
Yup. Here you go - lots of Norwegians discussing things at sol.no - probably not somewhere english-speakers would visit often. However, education standards in Europe being what they are, it wouldn’t surprise me if a good proportion of Norwegians could visit the SMDB and be mistaken for USians/Brits.
There is a huge, huge “bbs” type board that pretty much dominates the online presence/culture in Japan. Of course, I can’t remember the name of it right this moment. But that’s where you’ll find a vast number of Japanese online users.
There’s also the time difference to consider–I have a link to an app that shows me the latest 40 pictures posted to LiveJournal. When I get up at 5:00 in the morning, most of the pictures are from Russia. 5:00 in the afternoon, U.S.
