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For more than a generation now, the favorite motto and mantra of the PC (that's "politically correct," not "personal computer") crowd has been Think Globally, Act Locally. Idealistic yet pragmatic, no? You typically find it bumperstickered on Volvos and Saabs.
What makes the Web so delightfully iconoclastic is how it takes these perfectly charming PC cliches and turns them completely inside out. On the Net, it's Think Locally, Act Globally. The millisecond you launch a site into cyberspace, you are completely, utterly, totally, immediately global - whether you like it or not. You have to Think Locally, with care, precisely because Web actions are inherently global. Anyone doing business on the Web is an instant multinational. Who was it who said, "All politics is local?" On the Internet, all commerce is global.
How convenient. Relentless globalism is the theme that haunts virtually all discourse about the future of business. General Electric chairman Jack Welch can't even burp without his gaseous expulsion sounding a little bit like "global markets."
You would think that the Web - which has World Wide as its first two names - would be the ideal medium for global enterprises to explore global marketing. But hop to sites of the very companies that are supposed to embody the ideal of global brands - General Electric, Sony, Coca-Cola, Nike - and what you see is less cultural imperialism than globliviousness. Based on their Web presence, you would never know that these companies are international leaders in their markets. To be sure, there's the occasional FedEx that absolutely, positively understands that its site should be as international as its service. However, it's frankly surprising how few sites respect the reality that the Web is a more global medium than satellite TV news.
Yes, it's true that North America has an overwhelming head start in the networking of PCs. On the other hand, the rest of the world is catching up, and boasts some pretty nifty demographics. If we really believe in the Web's potential, shouldn't sites be designed with some idea of appealing to Asian, European, and Latin American markets?
With branch indices for Canada, France, Ireland, the UK, Germany, and Japan, Yahoo is aggressively marching its brand around the globe, but few search engines have reached out to the entire world. True, neither Asia nor Europe has anything like America's webfrastructures, but Lycos or Excite could really carve out a dominant role as intelligent intermediaries for international searchers. The same holds true for the shareware domain. Is it really too early for the typical Web site to respect internationalism? Or is America simply lazy?
The most obvious obstacle to appropriate internationalization is language. German ain't Hindi ain't Mandarin. Today's sites are grounded in language, and American sites today tend to be heavily, heavily text oriented. Even though the HotWired Network enjoys an international audience, we'd be hard pressed to pass off Packet as something designed with global participation in mind. Most sites truly reflect their national origins and languages. This one is pretty darned American.
The most straightforward - though extraordinarily costly - approach is to serve your browsers multilingually with conditional HTML. If you were as global as Microsoft, you would show off your world domination with a pulldown navigation menu, as it does on its home page.
On the client side, all kinds of multilingual browsers are hitting the market, including Tango from Alias Technologies and Accent Software Intl Ltd. There are even efforts to machine-translate Web pages.
The Holy Grail of machine translation notwithstanding, I will argue that language is going to play less and less of a role as the Web becomes more and more global. Though VRML, damned by bandwidth, has yet to usher in a brand-new age of spatial communication, we will slowly see a shift from language-centric to iconic communication. Just as we have global traffic signs, we'll have global Internet icons. After all, what are the GUIs for the Macintosh System 7 and Windows 95 for, anyway?
We'll see design-intensive Web sites that rely on clever icons and representations to induce click-throughs and interactions rather than wordy lists of choices. Scott McCloud's superb book Understanding Comics offers a brilliant analysis of how new genres of iconic representation might evolve. Within the next 18 months, we'll see corporate Web pages striving for global presence become more comic-like.
The Web should follow in the footsteps of Hollywood, which now derives more than half of its moolah from the international market. Now really, just how much translation does the typical Ah-nold or Stallone blockbuster require? Nobody green-lights a Hollywood movie these days without calculating how it will do overseas. Indeed, the biggest-budget films are financed, cast, and shot with global markets in mind. Think locally, act globally.
Indeed, the head of the French movie company Gaumont once told me (in a tone of disgust) that, "American movies succeed because they are global; French movies succeed because they are French." He was right, of course. The French always are. But guess which country will create the next genres and formats for accessibly global Web commerce and interaction?
