There was a good (not on-line) FT article on this topic yesterday. It suggested the following:
1. Chinese tend to "roam the web like a huge playground," whereas Americans and Europeans use it more as a giant library.
2. Chinese users are more likely to use the web for entertainment and less for business, relative to Europeans.
3. Chinese users are younger and less educated.
4. Chinese users don't like to type ("Typing is a pain in Chinese") and thus they use the mouse much more for navigation.
5. "Most portals have reacted by filling their pages with hundreds of colourful links competing for attention — creating a cluttered and disorderly view to the western eye but making life easier for Chinese users."
The article may come on-line eventually, if so you can find it by googling that last quotation.
Addendum: Daniel Lippman finds the link.
The article is up:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f3c9ddc8-0574-11df-a85e-00144feabdc0.html
It’s not a reflection of cultural differences, the way the Chinese government manipulates the internet, the massive internet gaming and entertainment industry in China, or the significant economic and ‘class’ differences between China and the west, and ignore any similarities between this and some developed Asian nations and their emphasis on web entertainment. It’s just that they’re at an “earlier stage of adoption.”
Here’s an observation, though I don’t know if it represents any causal effect: Google’s “style” is the extreme opposite of what #5 suggests. Moreover, Google almost requires typing to function well. And, Google is leaving China. Could Google have just been looking for a reason to pull the plug?
So the Chinese are using the internet exactly like Americans 10-15 years ago. I see nothing interesting about this. They’ll catch up just like every other area of technology.
#1: Other than people asking you to be quiet, how is a library not like a playground?
for an example of #5 check out sina.com: http://www.sina.com.cn/ or tom http://www.tom.com/
The visual “clutter” is also related to the way chinese characters are processed. Once proficient, it takes less time to read them and they are far more concise than alphabetic languages. This means that the high “clutter” format is very prevalent, just look at a chinese newspaper or glossy, they are quite extreme in this department as well.
The same can be seen in Japanese websites which often look much cruder than even Chinese ones, I don’t know Japanese beyond reading the kanji, but this is my impression.
Add the pain of typing in Chinese, which is really hard to describe, is a big factor. This had never occurred to me but I can see some truth here.
I think 80% percent of those who navigate online(chinese) are teenagers.And if they are teenagers it is normal that the first thing they have in mind is to have some fun.I work at a dll file extension research company and I must say sometimes you need to disconnect and find something that makes you happy.
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