Slashdot Mirror
The Internet Shifts East
Logic Bomb writes: "The San Francisco Chronicle has an article discussing the World Intellectual Property Organization's prediction that in less than 10 years, Chinese will be the most widely-used language on the web. Assuming the Internet becomes a truly global entity, this is an obvious (and mathematically correct) conclusion. On the other hand, the implementation of the Internet in places without certain civil liberties provides an interesting challenge to typical Western (idealist) notions about what the Internet does for society. Would you even consider the average wealthy Chinese citizen with online access truly 'on the Internet'? And how is the Internet supposed to draw people together when the same old language barrier still exists?"
"Do you have any idea how many people live in Chinese cities? Hundreds of millions."
Mind if I move your bong, Sherlock?
The largest city in the world only (Tokyo) contains about 28 million people, followed by New York with about 20 million, not the "hundreds of millions" you're hallucinating about.
Here, ride the snake with some stats, ya moron:
Top 10 Most Populated Cities On Earth
Bowie J. Poag
Well, for starters ... I work for a chinese import/export/do anything else for money - type of company in Markham, Ontario, Canada. We do a great deal of our business in chinese as well (i am a gwai lo) and most of our customers are chinese. Lately we have been mostly exporting computer equipment rather than important, as the market has taken a massive twist -- they will pay us *any* price for the very hardware that was made in china in the first place ... but that they could never afford. Pentium and 486 computers (especially linux compatible ones) are bought up by the container load as fast as we can get them... and they want them badly! That is where the internet growth is. The internet grew in big business... yes. But the internet really caught on through email, even before the internet ... fidonet.
... culturally normalizing effect, because it actually *stifles* the free transit of ideas because people jsut don't know what alot of the words are ... and the majority of chinese can barely read or write whatever language they do speak. The key to wealth in china is through education. This is partly the problems behind the Cultural Revolution and various other things at other times in China ... in china, both information and the spread of information have a massively destabilizing effect.
... Like other countries with poorly developed and highly regionalized languages, especially those who rely so heavily on cultural and systematic tradition there is little to no new communication and even basic human function can be stifled.
... because translation via automated means to chinese is basically impossible, and even then only the rich and elite could ever udnerstand what is actually *written*.
... henry ford was right on the money when he said that workers needed to be able to afford whatever they are making!!!
There are two major problems with Chinese internet.
1) The chinese language is extremely effective at keeping people under the control of the nation. The chiense language from a linguistical standpoint is incredibly primitive and basically useless. Its chief advantage is that chinese are proud of their language and assume that other languages are equally hard to learn.
The issue here is that it is an evolved symbolistical character set which is *very* difficult to use effectively on a computer
also, it has a
2) Chinese people do not communicate (no hong kong people)
So what I am sayign is, legions of identical chinese language websites will do very little to change the status quo in china. Access to outside information is of little use either
Additionally, remember how many people had to suffer for that plastic toy or television set you just bought. Underpricing through inhumane labour has destroyed our ability to sustain our markets, and it has created a general hatred of the US outside of china
The long term solution here is to 1) destabilize the chinese economy to prevent it from becoming reliant on handouts and technology-indebtedness
2) encourage the use of real languages like Hangeul (check it out, its amazing) Russian, English or any other decent alphabetic language
3) Provide content that is easier to read, i.e. less buzzwords, shorter words, less crap.
4) Provide translated websites with limited content to give "hints" and get people excited, i.e. giving them incentives to learn a decent language.
My analogy of china is a bunch of people who each know about 1% of the cobol language, walking around doing the dirty grudge labour for the masses of the world who know C++, Perl, etc.
Anyways, that is my flamebait for today.
RageMaxis
--- ask me about nihilism, I will have nothing to tell you.