Eh. It’s not America’s fault its soft-power works so well, nor that Europeans apparently prefer flocking to US (and Chinese, bizarrely) social media instead of coming up with their own. There is also a good rationale for the in-detail reporting on US politics, considering it’s by and large the protector of the status-quo in Europe (though I’ve read European reporting on US internal politics is very lacking).
But yeah, it’d be great if, under this Europe-first atmosphere, media (on- and offline) also start focusing more on Europe.
It’s not that some European startups haven’t tried. Americans came up with it first, so it’s the first mover and network effect rule at play, I guess. Facebook is defacto communication across large swaths of the world.
We actually had a Facebook-like social medium called Hyves in the Netherlands, which was very big until Facebook also took off here, indeed probably because of the network effect. I’ve never been a fan of online social networks as a concept, though, so I didn’t like either :p
Maybe we will now get our own evil oligarch-run social network monopolist!
Eh. It’s not America’s fault its soft-power works so well, nor that Europeans apparently prefer flocking to US (and Chinese, bizarrely) social media instead of coming up with their own. There is also a good rationale for the in-detail reporting on US politics, considering it’s by and large the protector of the status-quo in Europe (though I’ve read European reporting on US internal politics is very lacking).
But yeah, it’d be great if, under this Europe-first atmosphere, media (on- and offline) also start focusing more on Europe.
It’s not that some European startups haven’t tried. Americans came up with it first, so it’s the first mover and network effect rule at play, I guess. Facebook is defacto communication across large swaths of the world.
We actually had a Facebook-like social medium called Hyves in the Netherlands, which was very big until Facebook also took off here, indeed probably because of the network effect. I’ve never been a fan of online social networks as a concept, though, so I didn’t like either :p
Maybe we will now get our own evil oligarch-run social network monopolist!