I'm back in South Africa. So what's the main difference? Well, you might not think so but the Internet is what I feel most. I am in the offices of Heartland Publishing now, even though we have a notebook computer at home. Why? Because the system here has ADSL. At home, and almost everywhere, the computers dial-up. When you come from Korea, dial up is a pretty funny notion of the internet. It's like 1970's TV, black and white, and maybe 3 channels.
Broadband allows you to use your computer more than you might your TV. And with Broadband, Google comes into its own. Throw away your dictionaries, throw away encyclopedias and newspapers, and even magazines.
Once you're watching your intertainment (internet entertainment - downloaded movies, music, news etc)on your computer, you may find you don't even need to go to the movies or buy CD's. You'll find you want a better, faster computer, and something called an iPod.
In Korea even the kids at school, virtually all of them, have their own websites. It's something like blogger, but it's their version, and they call it Cyworld.
Koreans have a huge games market, and they love their computers so much, that internet cafes are a dime a dozen. Kids and adults mostly just play extremely realistic, and addictive games, some chat and socialise online.
A South Korean man recently played video games for such a long time, 50 hours I think, he eventually died of exhaustion. His mother reportedly asked him to come home and eat, and one imagines he said, 'One more game', or 'Just let me finish this game'. The game certainly finished him off.
But if you have a dail-up connection, then you're back in another world. Here's Jarred Cinman's experience of Broadband, but going further West:
Jarred Cinman recently travelled to the United States and Canada for a month where he had the opportunity to experience a different kind of Internet. What you might call the Internet as a basic service.
It's no secret to South Africans that we have it hard as far as Internet connectivity goes. I'm not going to labour the same old point. We all know the story.
What I never appreciated until I lived it for a month, however, are the everyday consequences of this technological millstone. America is an opportunity to play at “imagine a South Africa without bandwidth limitations”. What would that be like?
Computers and Internet
The first noticeable difference is the pervasiveness of computers in homes. According to US Census in 2003, 61% of American homes have computers. This was up more than 10% since the similar 2001 survey.
That means – especially in New York and California where I was travelling – that when you walk into a home, there is pretty much guaranteed to be a computer available.
Sitting like a shadow alongside this statistic on the bar chart is 54% of households having Internet access, of which more than 50% in 2002 was already broadband connections. That has gone up significantly since then.
It's hard to overstate how different this makes the Internet there. In South Africa a small percentage of people now have ADSL or wireless access at home. The rest are using good old dial-up, the Internet equivalent of the long-drop toilet. Apart from the speed, the psychological difference of an “always on” connection is huge. Need something? Walk over to the desk, fire up Google, and there it is. It's a one or two minute exercise.
And that makes all the difference.
Google and Google Maps
Google doesn't run the world...yet. But it's hard to imagine a world without them. Nowhere, but nowhere, is this more visible than in New York City.
We've probably all played around with Google Maps and Google Earth by now. Crawling down our saturated international pipes, we've watched in wonder at how you can see a map of any square inch of ground in the United States, plot directions from Point A to Point B and – most impressive of all – view satellite photos which can be zoomed down to see the missing roof tiles on your house in Oklahoma.
Of course, South Africa is mostly not on the map, so to speak. No mapping is available here yet, and the satellite images are restricted to parts of Cape Town and Midrand (for some unimaginable reason).
Not until you're living in the Matrix itself can you imagine how fundamentally this stuff changes your life. Example: my friend's wife needed to take their son to a doctor on morning in a place she didn't know. Sitting on the couch in their lounge with a laptop and wireless network connection, he pulled up the map on Google and within 2 minutes had detailed directions from his apartment.
If that wasn't enough, he then pulled up the satellite view in Google Earth, and then tilted the landscape to an oblique view. Then added the 3-D buildings into the mix. Google has mapped out Manhattan and surrounds with 3-D CAD-like structures. He then let the system virtually drive his wife from their apartment, through the city, to her destination. Landmarks and all along the way.
This would be a good science fiction story if it wasn't real and happening. And it's not just a toy. I used Google Maps perhaps 50 times on my trip. If I'd had a laptop or PDA with a wireless connection I could have used it continuously whilst walking the streets of New York or San Francisco.
The next layer, which Google has added parts of already, is localised directory information on the map. Going to the Guggenheim? Well, there it is on 5th Avenue but you may also like to know that two blocks down is a Starbucks. And three blocks up is...you get the idea.
Amazon.com
If we should and must continue to hurl abuse at Telkom, we should not forget the miserable state of our postal system.
In the US, you can order anything you like from Amazon.com, and send it via normal US post. It arrives within a couple of days, and it never, never gets stolen or vandalised en route. As a result, it costs negligible amounts to shop and deliver.
Once again, this isn't news. But when you see it in action, you realise again the potential the internet represents. Once again, take the example of my friends in New York. With a new baby, it's not easy to get out to the shops in a busy city (the same argument holds in Johannesburg). So most evenings I was there, they simply bought clothes, toys and the like online. I was there for five days, long enough to see several orders placed and several orders arrive by post.
In South Africa, this kind of shopping is generally reserved for CD's and books, and perhaps groceries (though this still hasn't really caught on anywhere in the world). There, you name it, you can buy it online. And it's not got anything to do with sophistication of the consumer or the culture of mail order. It's got to do with the fact that when the person you buy from sticks the thing in the mail, it arrives on the other end. The idea that it won't enters no-one's mind (unless you're a visitor
from South Africa, of course).
Online Socialising and Dating
The pervasiveness of computers has also made another geeky vision of the world real: the world of online meeting, friendship and dating. Well, not online dating, but online as a vehicle to getting a date.
Once again, South Africa has it's own version of this. But – and here's the theme – it's just that much more difficult, expensive and inconvenient. And as a result, it attracts only a particular niche of
users.
In the States, usage is huge, and services like MySpace, Friendster and many others are meeting points for hundreds of thousands of people of all walks of life. A friend who has recently moved to California has met many of his new friends in this way – and they're just regular people. Regular people in a land where the Internet is everywhere.
The Web
Being in the Web development industry, I leave the last word for this old topic. I have been in this industry my whole career in this country, and frankly a lot of the sites I've been involved in have had less than spectacular usage figures.
In the US, the Web is a way of life, full stop. Everything you need is there, and people know it, and they take advantage of it. When a company builds a website in the states – almost no matter who they are – they can be sure people will be visiting it. A lot of people.
All the old nonsense about how fundamentally the Web will change the world has, in a way, come true. It hasn't demolished the old economy - that really was nonsense – but it has become the old economy's newest face to it's customers.
And everyone has a Website. Every club, restaurant, shop, business. They're all updated, and they're all accurate, and there's a very good reason. Because if you don't have accurate information, 50 people will call you on it that day.
Once again, it's not that the Americans are smarter than us or more advanced than us in any way. They just live with electricity, water and the Internet. No-one even stops to think that it's cool. It's just there.
And this, with a little luck, is the future that is around the new telcom operator, 3G, wireless and other corners for us. And it's every bit as compelling as it sounds.
-- Jarred Cinman is Product Director at Cambrient, a content management
company
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