| Chapter : | Introduction |
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faded rapidly on the manufacturing and technological innovation front, the country opened up the frontiers of Internet connectivity and consumer-related digital activity. Even though many of the most innovative applications connected to digital media have come from outside the United States of America—think of Skype (brought to market by Swede Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis from Denmark), the mobile Internet (Japan’s DoCoMo was successful long before the iPhone came along), multiplayer games (South Korea produces many of the best), and many other now-commonplace services, all of which gained commercial footing outside the United States—it is North American firms that dominate public awareness of the Internet. The world knows much more about Apple and Steven Jobs than it does about Softbank and Masayoshi Son, Japan’s richest man and one of the world’s greatest victims of the dot-com meltdown. Bill Gates and Microsoft are much more widely recognized than Stan Shih and Taiwan-based Acer, one of the world’s best producers of consumer electronics. The annual Consumer Electronics Showcase in Las Vegas garners more media attention than the remarkable slate of computing-related exhibitions offered each year at Tokyo’s Big Site venue. Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook dominate debate about the value of social media, and Twitter dug shallow roots into the American psyche before spreading around the world, but comparable achievements by Robin Li (Baudi), Jack Ma (Alibaba),6 and Ma Huateng (Tencent) have barely scratched the surface of digital awareness internationally. The “killer applications” of the Internet and e-commerce—AOL, Netscape, Yahoo!, Amazon.com, eBay, Hulu.com, Netflix, YouTube, iTunes, and the like—all launched in the United States before finding markets and audiences outside the country, but they have been preceded, copied, surpassed, or emulated throughout East Asia.7
Digital media is no longer an American phenomenon, and it never truly was one. The technology has taken root globally—sub-Saharan Africa was, in 2011, the fastest growing mobile Internet market in the world8—and digital technological, service-based, and content innovations are coming from many countries. Indeed, the advent of an inexpensive,