The World Wide Web in reality
Our tiny digital world is a rocky landscape for social media. In contrast, galactic laws reign on the English-speaking Internet.
Do you use a Chinese site? Or a Dutch one? Why not? How often do you visit LeMonde.fr? Do you read sites ending in .at? Few people are aware that the Internet is split into language groups, countries and political villages. In each group, each region, each village, the balance of power is different, and everywhere people politicize for all they're worth.
Welcome to Switzerland
Even if the politically impossible were made possible and every Swiss person were reached with a super web service, this would still not be a particularly capital-intensive undertaking. With the stingy surfers and the Rappenspalter advertising budgets, you can hardly make more than one or two bucks per user. But the web is not primarily about money. It's been clear since Obama at the latest: it's about politics first. Every YouTube trifle is measured right and left. Every tulip grower's message is scrutinized for its SVP, SP, FDP, CVP friendliness.
And all the political figures have long been present: the conspiracy theorists. The hippies. The world changers. The ones who always think everything is bad and do nothing themselves. The know-it-alls. The cynics. The Fudi citizens who spy on the street behind the curtain of "media criticism" and secretly scratch every car with a screwdriver that exceeds the parking time by a minute. Good old Switzerland.
Nothing Web 2.0
It is not citizen journalists, but well-known politicians who lead the field of bloggers. Blocher and Leuenberger are the only really well-known bloggers outside the Swiss blog camp. The two political opas are also among the few who don't just blog about blogging, but actually offer their own topics.
Our digital dwarf state is a rocky environment for social media: The wisdom of the masses, which flourishes on Wikipedia, for example, moulders away here. Not because there is a lack of wisdom, but because there is a lack of mass. The Swiss market is too small for models that rely on superscaling. Common Web 2.0 functions only work in the .ch area if you are Bluewin, a major newspaper or a blogging Federal Councillor. Otherwise, the same people always comment on their own blog, often using several pseudonyms. Some even run several Rumpelstiltskin blogs and applaud themselves all day long.
Galactic laws
The English-language Internet is governed by completely different, almost galactic laws. Of the 1.4 billion Internet users, an English-language site can theoretically count on almost a billion potential surfers. With the unpredictable quantum leaps that repeatedly turn everything upside down on the English-language web, new suns and solar systems form almost daily; suddenly Google is there, suddenly Facebook shines brighter than a thousand suns.
This is fascinating and makes some hobbyists dream of cosmic money. However, in 99.99 ... percent of cases, these dreams remain dreams. Most of the time, there is a problem in the political sphere. In the big web, big politics is made first. Google is not a company, Google is an empire. Due to the cosmic laws that govern this huge market, such an empire can suddenly collapse or be conquered within weeks. That's what happened to Altavista, and right now the presidents of MySpace, Yahoo and eBay are trembling.
The only way to reach a large audience is with an electoral political smash hit (the slogan "Everything free for everyone" works wonderfully) and the support of insiders in Silicon Valley. Social media and social graph applications were created in a large political arena, made for this galactic political arena and used most efficiently by politicians; the spread of digital friend technology has not privatized the Internet, but politicized it even more. Even if the Swiss-German Internet has almost nothing else in common with the big one, the next wave of digital personalization (and thus politicization) will soon flood it too.
Oliver Reichenstein is an information architect who lives and works in Tokyo.
Welcome to Switzerland
Even if the politically impossible were made possible and every Swiss person were reached with a super web service, this would still not be a particularly capital-intensive undertaking. With the stingy surfers and the Rappenspalter advertising budgets, you can hardly make more than one or two bucks per user. But the web is not primarily about money. It's been clear since Obama at the latest: it's about politics first. Every YouTube trifle is measured right and left. Every tulip grower's message is scrutinized for its SVP, SP, FDP, CVP friendliness.
And all the political figures have long been present: the conspiracy theorists. The hippies. The world changers. The ones who always think everything is bad and do nothing themselves. The know-it-alls. The cynics. The Fudi citizens who spy on the street behind the curtain of "media criticism" and secretly scratch every car with a screwdriver that exceeds the parking time by a minute. Good old Switzerland.
Nothing Web 2.0
It is not citizen journalists, but well-known politicians who lead the field of bloggers. Blocher and Leuenberger are the only really well-known bloggers outside the Swiss blog camp. The two political opas are also among the few who don't just blog about blogging, but actually offer their own topics.
Our digital dwarf state is a rocky environment for social media: The wisdom of the masses, which flourishes on Wikipedia, for example, moulders away here. Not because there is a lack of wisdom, but because there is a lack of mass. The Swiss market is too small for models that rely on superscaling. Common Web 2.0 functions only work in the .ch area if you are Bluewin, a major newspaper or a blogging Federal Councillor. Otherwise, the same people always comment on their own blog, often using several pseudonyms. Some even run several Rumpelstiltskin blogs and applaud themselves all day long.
Galactic laws
The English-language Internet is governed by completely different, almost galactic laws. Of the 1.4 billion Internet users, an English-language site can theoretically count on almost a billion potential surfers. With the unpredictable quantum leaps that repeatedly turn everything upside down on the English-language web, new suns and solar systems form almost daily; suddenly Google is there, suddenly Facebook shines brighter than a thousand suns.
This is fascinating and makes some hobbyists dream of cosmic money. However, in 99.99 ... percent of cases, these dreams remain dreams. Most of the time, there is a problem in the political sphere. In the big web, big politics is made first. Google is not a company, Google is an empire. Due to the cosmic laws that govern this huge market, such an empire can suddenly collapse or be conquered within weeks. That's what happened to Altavista, and right now the presidents of MySpace, Yahoo and eBay are trembling.
The only way to reach a large audience is with an electoral political smash hit (the slogan "Everything free for everyone" works wonderfully) and the support of insiders in Silicon Valley. Social media and social graph applications were created in a large political arena, made for this galactic political arena and used most efficiently by politicians; the spread of digital friend technology has not privatized the Internet, but politicized it even more. Even if the Swiss-German Internet has almost nothing else in common with the big one, the next wave of digital personalization (and thus politicization) will soon flood it too.
Oliver Reichenstein is an information architect who lives and works in Tokyo.
