Net Sprachraum: Understanding and enhancing how online speech areas are made and interconnected.

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Both human- and computer-based efforts shape the way people exchange, explore and prioritise their voices. As a result, digitised linguistic and geographic materials become the necessary conditions for the way online speech areas (or Net Sprachraum) are made and interconnected . This concept of online speech areas fills the gap, and resolves some tensions, between the concept of “networked individualism” and “nationalised cyberspace”, pointing to some of the significant recent Internet development, including Chinese-speaking and Arabic-speaking Internets, as net speech areas that play central roles in realising and shaping the way how the Internet is truly inter-connected, both within and across, languages and regions. Continue reading

Geo-linguistic factors matter when Google and Baidu compete for global reach

Though I have argued elsewhere that geo-linguistic analysis matters to understand the inter-linking dynamics of the World-wide Web, it is often overlooked by skeptics who believe that the World-Wide Web will be eventually dominated either by English and Chinese language. The recent news events that Google plans its very first Asian data centers in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore, and Baidu just got Beijing’s approval to test the overseas market in Thai-speaking and Arabic-speaking worlds, should provide some indications that geo-linguistic factors matter. Geo-linguistic factors matter not only to understand the dynamics of Internet, but also shift the dynamics of Internet. Continue reading