It's one of the consequences of blogging and spending far too much of my day in front of an internet capable computer that I think, almost on a daily basis, "The world is getting smaller". In a lot of ways this is very true: I can now communicate instantly with friends and strangers over the whole world. Hell, our whole attitude to information has changed over the past decade. It now feels pretty alien to me to be without instant access to an encyclopedia, news, worldwide current opinion and instant communication. In a lot of important ways the world is getting smaller.
So why this post?
Sometimes you find something that just blows the whole world wide open again. This was one of those days, just take a look at this graph:
It shows the number of blog posts in different languages, as recorded by technorati.com. The most recent numbers (March 2006) tell us that 37% of posts are in japanese, 15% in chinese, 4% in Spanish, 3% in italian, 3% in portugese. (data from here)
This leaves me with one very puny looking number. I only speak English so as of March '06 I can understand a scant 31% of the blogosphere. What does this mean? There are whole communities of people, from cultures I'm not familiar with, engaging in discourse just like this (or completely different! I don't know!). They live their lives, work their jobs, fall in love, watch movies, listen to music, and I'm actually completely incapable of understanding what is going on!
This graph just underlined that in my life there was an assumption that as an english speaker I would be able to navigate the high seas of the internet perfectly, and find any information I needed. This is the same assumption that meant that all the important foreign sites will have been translated to English for me and I'll have no problem keeping on top of everything that goes on, the whole world over. These little blogosphere statistics shoot my assumptions in the face (and then probably do bad things to their corpses). Suddenly the internet is a mysterious and interesting place once again.
One one hand scientific information and encyclopedias (encyclopedae?) will always be available primarily in english but on the other hand the real meat of human interaction; the brawling, sprawling mess of people just being people is 69% inaccessible to me.
Suddenly the world feels just a little bit more mysterious, and I like it.
p.s. In proofreading this post I just realised that I made a genuine, self-reflective post without even a pretense at humour. That is seriously a first
So why this post?
Sometimes you find something that just blows the whole world wide open again. This was one of those days, just take a look at this graph:
It shows the number of blog posts in different languages, as recorded by technorati.com. The most recent numbers (March 2006) tell us that 37% of posts are in japanese, 15% in chinese, 4% in Spanish, 3% in italian, 3% in portugese. (data from here)
This leaves me with one very puny looking number. I only speak English so as of March '06 I can understand a scant 31% of the blogosphere. What does this mean? There are whole communities of people, from cultures I'm not familiar with, engaging in discourse just like this (or completely different! I don't know!). They live their lives, work their jobs, fall in love, watch movies, listen to music, and I'm actually completely incapable of understanding what is going on!
This graph just underlined that in my life there was an assumption that as an english speaker I would be able to navigate the high seas of the internet perfectly, and find any information I needed. This is the same assumption that meant that all the important foreign sites will have been translated to English for me and I'll have no problem keeping on top of everything that goes on, the whole world over. These little blogosphere statistics shoot my assumptions in the face (and then probably do bad things to their corpses). Suddenly the internet is a mysterious and interesting place once again.
One one hand scientific information and encyclopedias (encyclopedae?) will always be available primarily in english but on the other hand the real meat of human interaction; the brawling, sprawling mess of people just being people is 69% inaccessible to me.
Suddenly the world feels just a little bit more mysterious, and I like it.
p.s. In proofreading this post I just realised that I made a genuine, self-reflective post without even a pretense at humour. That is seriously a first
