Over at Iberian Notes (2003/10/16 15:15), John Chappell is worried because La Vanguardia keeps plugging the notion that Americans are … worried. LaVa is wrong, but its chronic confusion on this issue is actually a compliment. Let me explain.
Yesterday Ramón Salaverría posted a response to comments I made about a book he’s published. While I maintain that what he has produced is more likely to be of use to academics than to those interested in the practical realities of online journalism, what I find interesting is his comment that none of his students – remember, these are meant to be the future communicators in this society – has a blog.
I haven’t got time to get the figures this morning, but I believe that it is true that Spain couples a comparatively high level of internet penetration with a comparatively low level of individual content creation. Why is this?
followthebaldie.com’s guide to wealth and unhappiness
Throw away your therapy books, dump the pills, get some Brazilian Arabica inside you:
- You need to worry. People who aren’t worried don’t get out of bed in the morning. Whatever La Vanguardia says, folks in Barcelona do worry a lot (probably more than in Lagos, although perhaps not as much as in Manhattan). This is a good thing.
- You need to be able to do something about your worries, otherwise you still won’t get out of bed in the morning – for all the wrong reasons. In Spain, there are still too many institutional and cultural checks on innovation and change. This is a very bad thing. It is also the reason why lots of Spanish people download lots of porn (I think they’re the European champions) but very few blog.
- Given these two preconditions, you still need to get down and do something. And that’s where I sign off for today.
Sorry to be a bore, but, if you haven’t already, you really should read Landes’ The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: 
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I’m not sure about this, because I don’t have the figures, and I’m pretty much a “figures” kind of person, but I wouldn’t say there’s a low level of content creation; you just have to look for it. There are millions of personal web pages, and pages belonging to associations, NGOs, quarters, little towns… BBS-like fori are also very active, and free-software sites too. Blogs… well, there are fewer blogs than, say, Poland, but… er… higher quality :-) . Tongue in cheek here meant, of course.
It’s very difficult to figure out how much individually produced content there is and how to weight it, so there’s a strong temptation to fall back on known stats and prejudices re old-style popular writing – stuff like the Dutch writing verses for each other when that bad old bishop from Spain comes over at the beginning of December, the quick-hack survey by a sysadmin at a Dutch ministry that shall remain nameless that found that 30% of civil servants were writing novels during working hours etc etc.
The most recent headline figure here was the September survey by SoftCatalà which put God’s second language at number 23. That figure is tilted vis-a-vis Spanish by the relatively high level of economic development of Catalunya and by the large sums Catalan local government has shotgunned at local web firms in order to create significant degrees of content. I don’t know how much of that content is actually used.
Syndic8’s numbers are interesting, but nothing more than that. I assume your Polish reference is to the US National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education which rates Polish as the third language out there. Its webmaster is called Maciej Ceglowski. I think he deserves some kind of medal.
Metrics, metrics… but at least they’re better than chat programmes featuring bullfighters.
Yep, that’s right… but Spain is fifth, whish is not a low level of content creation, right? Of course, it depends on what you compare it too. And that’s just quantity, not quality.
Spanish, not Spain. I think the Dutch-Catalan comparison is instructive given that both have a strong statist tradition and Catalan GDP per capita isn’t a huge way behind Dutch. Yet a global Dutch-speaking population of maybe 22 million has got roughly 14 times as many pages up there as a global Catalan-speaking pop of perhaps 8 million. That’s a huge difference in productivity. I think it’s all down to the old Weberian thesis, and I’ll try to translate part of the diaries of a C17th Dutch itinerant non-conformist preacher to Catalan next week to demonstrate what I’m on about.
Aren’t you confusing productivity with rate of adoption?