US will fast become a minority in terms of users online. In fact, The rest of the world will pass the U.S. in Web users later this year. So most of the world’s netizens will be from outside the US and yet only one in five web pages will be in a language other than English. The rest of the world actually won't pass the U.S. in Web servers for several more years, which indicates the culture and content of the Net will be dominated by the U.S. for years to come. The next five countries projected to come online in force will be Japan, Taiwan, Germany, Australia and the United Kingdom. With the exception of the last two, they are non-English speaking nations. But I don’t expect a sudden increase in the number of foreign pages. All of those nations have felt the brunt of Americanisation. For Japan, almost every website you visit will have an English translation. Japanese school kids now have to learn four alphabets! Katakana – the more traditional calligraphic style, kanji and hiragana – the more everyday colloquial ‘alphabets’ and ironically Romanji, which is basically learning to use the western alphabet to phonetically spell out Japanese words. Even without knowing English, most Japanese will at least be able to sound out our alphabet. The stampede of Americanisation is not helped by the fact that it is considered ‘cool’ to emulate America in Japan. Corporate American identities from Coca-Cola to Disney to Macdonald’s to Nike have ensured that the US maintains her influence. This real world branding has also transferred itself into the digital domain. Wherever the real world leads, the virtual is soon to follow. Net consumers are much more likely to trust a flashy, well-designed site from an established bricks and mortar and probably American company, than some poorly constructed homepage from Kazakhstan!So the Internet does have extremely great potential and I hope that it will eventu...
