The Multicultural Internet – Parallel Worlds? Book Review

INTERNET DEVELOPMENTS

THE MULTICULTURAL INTERNET – PARALLEL WORLDS? REVIEW OF GERARD GOGGIN & MARK MCLELLAND (EDS.), INTERNATIONALIZING INTERNET STUDIES Peter Gerrand

Internationalizing Internet Studies. Beyond Anglophone Paradigms, edited by Gerard Goggin & Mark McLelland. (Routledge, New York, 2009, 343 pp., RRP Paperback US$39.95, ISBN-78-0-415-87842-5; Hardback US$110.00, ISBN-978-0-415-95625-3). To what extent can the Internet serve the non-Anglophone world, especially those using nonLatin scripts, such as Arabic, Chinese, Hindi or Russian? The versatility of Unicode means that the Internet’s web pages can now show any of the 90 or so scripts used to communicate in any of the world’s living languages. However, such is the cleverness of web browser design in making the global seem local, monoglot users of the Internet are rarely made aware of the layers and layers of online information that are routinely available in the rest of the world’s 250 or so actively written languages. For example, Wikipedia, that stupendous collaborative magnum opus from the world’s gift economy, has currently 271 parallel versions, each in a distinct human language, including Latin and the ‘artificial’ languages Esperanto and Volapük. While English leads the pack with (at the time of writing) 3,110 million articles, this represents only 21.5% of the 14,445 million articles written and accessible in all available languages. The majority of the remaining 78.5% are not available in direct translation into English, although articles on prominent historical, cultural or contemporary political topics (often heavily reduced in detail, outside their home language) are usually contributed also in the world’s dominant languages, especially if they are of interest to scholars and/or tourists. A new field of study, Internet sociolinguistics, is concerned with the use of human languages on the Internet. But while the twenty papers collected in this book, Internationalizing Internet Studies. Beyond Anglophone Paradigms, occasionally get interested in the Internet’s sociolinguistics, the primary emphasis of its editors is that of cultural analysis, challenging the conventional wisdom that the contents of cyberspace are truly global, rather than in practice ‘local’, constrained by language, local politics and local culture. The papers cover societies across all continents except Africa and Latin America, both larger (e.g. China, Japan, Iran, Russia) and smaller (e.g. the Welsh, Palestinian, Finnish and Catalan communities), with three papers on the broadband-intensive, mega-blogging society of South Korea. The editors’ starting point is that the cultural and linguistic diversity of the Internet has been insufficiently acknowledged in monographs or previously edited collections of scholarly articles surveying the Internet. This was undoubtedly true when they issued their Call For Papers in January 2006, but by the time of publication in 2009 is no longer the case, as conceded by the editors, who have acknowledged The Multilingual Internet (Danet and Herring 2007) amongst more recent publications on Internet sociolinguistics. However, the diversity of cultures on the

TELECOMMUNICATIONS JOURNAL OF AUSTRALIA, VOLUME 60, NUMBER 1, 2010 MONASH UNIVERSITY EPRESS

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Internet is such that a hundred collections like these two could be filled with useful research articles, and no doubt will be over the next ten years, stimulated in part by this particular volume. What becomes obvious from reading this collection is that for most citizens, language barriers create semi-porous compartments between their own society and others, slowing down the diffusion, and sometimes distorting the meaning, of new terminology and trends. But on the positive side, these barriers create room for local creativity, including new social uses of the Internet; and they can also diminish the cultural domination of the Internet by the USA, a recurring theme within this book. Several innovations of the non-Anglophone Internet are illustrated within this volume: the pioneering use of mobile phones for Internet browsing in Japan, and Japan’s unique contribution to text messaging, where the Japanese language’s three scripts are mixed to create novel effects; Korean society’s virtual gift-giving via Cyworld’s mini-hompies, and the phenomenon of ‘scooping’ by Korean bloggers;1 China’s 500 million registered users of QQ instant messaging services; and Russia’s ‘funny story’ website anekdot.ru, where the ability to read and contribute uncensored political jokes and anecdotes seems to have served as a safety valve for Russian society since 1995. Of particular interest to me was Ljiljana Gavrilovic’s paper on ‘Serbian Minority/Refugees on the Internet’. She shows how the choice of domain names for Serbo-Croatian language websites (some 7 million pages in total, including both Cyrillic script – used to define Serbian ethnic identity – and Latin script – ditto for Croatian) by ethnic minority groups in all the post-Yugoslavia Baltic states, reveals in many cases a denial of the current political reality of belonging to their new nation-states, through either adherence to the obsolete ‘.yu’ of Yugoslavia (dissolved in 1991), or preference for the supra-national global domains of ‘.com’, ‘.net’ or ‘.info’. This reminds me of the practice of the regionally nationalist Catalonian universities in the 1990s of exploiting a loophole in the allocation of the supposedly North American ‘.edu’ education domain, to register their websites under ‘.edu’, as though they were North American universities, rather than associate in any hierarchically inferior manner with the ‘.es’ country code of Spain! Of course once the ‘.cat’ domain became operational in 2006, they promptly transferred their websites to the new domain representing global Catalan language and culture – but more importantly, Catalan identity. Elsewhere in this collection, Susanna Paasonen reports that the term ‘cyberspace’ has been problematical in Finland, where it has been associated with the kind of punk science fiction genre in which the original term was invented (by William Gibson). She ventures to argue that ‘cyberspace is no longer seen as synonymous with the Internet by anyone other than scholars writing in a certain language’. But of course ‘cyberspace’ has never been synonymous in English with the Internet’s prime meaning of ‘the network of networks’; it has been a convenient term to evoke all the contents one can find by browsing the Internet, and until another term arises with that meaning, it is here to stay. It should be noted that the book also deals with quite fundamental issues: how the Internet is inaccessible to people unable to read or write, and the official efforts to censor whistle-blowing human rights websites in China and Iran. There is also a useful tutorial paper by Gerard Goggin on international responses since the 1990s to US dominance of Internet governance.

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THE MULTICULTURAL INTERNET – PARALLEL WORLDS? INTERNET DEVELOPMENTS

Finally, it would be unprofessional of me not to draw attention to one minor flaw in this otherwise admirable collection. Several authors, including the editors, have drawn upon the statistics of InternetWorldStats.com to assert the erroneous conclusion that the percentage of English-language users on the Internet had dropped from an initial 100% dominance to a low 29.5 % by 2007 ‘and falling’ (p.4). Use of these statistics sadly demonstrates the semi-porous barriers between academic disciplines, in this case between sociolinguistics and cultural studies, which – like language barriers – lead to delays in changing the accepted ‘common wisdom’. In fact, the InternetWorldStats language statistics are based upon speaker-population figures, not on any measurements of actual online use. They use the same flawed methodology as the former Global-Reach website, whose coloured graphs and piecharts were nevertheless so impressive that they were reproduced for some years in OECD and UNESCO reports.2 This methodology, which leads to estimates of potential (but not actual) use of the Internet in different languages, was critiqued in July 2007 by the author in a paper published in a major sociolinguistic journal (Gerrand 2007); the Global-Reach website (Global-Reach 2007) was pulled down four months later.3 The limited diffusion of that article has not stopped several other marketing companies from producing similar false results, using the same defective methodology, online. Regrettably there have not been any accurate estimates available for the use of human languages on the Internet since 2003, for reasons given elsewhere (Gerrand 2009, 77–79). However, all circumstantial evidence points to English remaining the statistically, as well as culturally, dominant written language of web presence on the Internet up to the present. This conclusion does not diminish the importance of this book in improving our understanding of the cultural, political and scholarly use of the Internet by the non-Anglophone world – especially as English remains, in the global context, only a minority language, albeit the widest-used (by perhaps 25% of the world’s 6 billion population). Books like this one provide useful windows into many of the vigorous, creative, linguistically compartmentalised, parallel worlds on our planet.

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I'd rather not provide explanations of the exotic terms 'mini-hompies' and 'scooping', to avoid stealing the book's thunder. Those impatient to find out can use Wikipedia. The Global Reach website showed (erroneously) that English use on the Net dropped from 80% in 1996 to 27% in 2005. More accurate estimates by O'Neill et al (2003) of web presence, based on real measurements from statistical sampling, showed that the proportion of English language webpages stayed fairly constant at 72% from 1999 to 2002 (the only years they took direct measurements). No-one has performed any such statistical sampling since then, regrettably. According to the Internet archiving website www.archive.org, the last appearance of www.global-reach.biz was in October 2007.

REFERENCES Danet, B. & Herring, S.C., eds. (2007). The Multilingual Internet: Language, Culture and Communications Online (New York: Oxford University Press).

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Gerrand, P. (2007). “Estimating linguistic diversity on the Internet: a taxonomy to avoid pitfalls and paradoxes”, J. Computer-Mediated Communication, Vol. 12 (4), July 2007, article 8, pp. 1298–1321, available at http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue4/gerrand.html. Gerrand, P. (2009). Minority Languages on the Internet. (Saarbrücken: VDM-Verlag). Global-Reach. (2007). 'Global Internet Statistics (by Language)'. 30 March. Retrieved 01.08.07, from http://www.global-reach.biz/globstats/index.php3. This site was pulled down by December 2007. O’Neill, E. T; Lavoie, B. F; Bennett, R. (2003). 'Trends in the evolution of the public Web: 1998 – 2002'. D-Lib Magazine 9(4).

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THE MULTICULTURAL INTERNET – PARALLEL WORLDS? INTERNET DEVELOPMENTS