Flow of Online Content from Production to Consumption in the Context of Globalization Theory

Abstract

Some studies have regarded globalization as a process of cultural homogenization, while others see it as one of cultural heterogenization. This conflict stems from their focus on either the production or consumption side of cultural products based on globalization theories bifurcated into political economy and cultural studies. This study covers the production, distribution, and consumption sides in online content flow and examines the effects of economic, geographic, and linguistic factors. This question is explored through the study of longitudinal changes in the number of Internet hosts from 1995 to 2010, online network connectivity among 174 countries, and geographic distribution of the top 300 web domains. The results suggest that the economic factor was most likely to have an impact on the flow of online content from production to consumption, but that its impact weakened over time. In addition, geographic proximity accounted for the bilateral relationship between countries. Limitations of world-system theory are also discussed.

Evolution of the International Hyperlink Network

“…During the data collection process, LexiURL (Thelwall, 2009) was used to automatically send numerous scripts to Yahoo and organize the returned data. The same data sets were previously used in different contexts: the ego network of the .com domain (Chung et al, 2014), international online content flow (Choi & Park, 2014), and Rosen et al (2011) Internet hyperlink n/a Lee and Park (2012) Interlink of world class university 2010 Hsu and Park (2012) Authorship, subject topic, website format. 2010 Chung et al (2014) Dotcom web community 2009 Choi and Park (2014) Internet host 2010 Barnett and Park (2014) Internet hyperlink, bandwidth, shared website 2010 Barnett et al (2015) Internet hyperlink, international student flow 2010 Huang and Sun (2015) Homeowner forum n/a Ruiz and Barnett (2015) Ownership of up and downstreams 2011…”

A Global Approach to the Spatial Diversity and Dynamics of Internet Domains

“…Content development and consumption can be considered in terms of spatial diversity. As noted by Mark Graham (), the development of information and knowledge has always been spatially diversified, and today, significant inequalities in online content (virtual representation) exist between countries due to economic, linguistic, and geographical factors (Choi and Park ). Despite the apparent boundlessness of the Web, its geography (borders between states) encompasses different languages, cultures, climates (for example, the impact on purchasing preferences), and standards of behavior and consumption (Goldsmith and Wu ).…”

“… Given the problems with estimating the origins of gTLDs, it is worth noting that all (Choi and Park ), or some (for example, 50 percent of the .com domains) are sometimes attributed to the United States (Shiode and Batty ). …”