Cross–Cultural Text Divide
For more than three decades, international and cross-cultural marketing research has focused on the standardization versus adaptation debate, which has resulted in the popular classification of "culture-free" and "culture-bound" products. The Internet is a new channel of communication in addition to traditional media such as newspapers, radio, and TV, through which marketing communication such as advertising or public relations can be spread. Marketing may therefore depend on Internet consumption. Worldwide Internet consumption data over the last decade show remarkable national differences in the numbers of Internet users.
In early 2000, for example, most Internet users still lived in North America (147.5 million), followed by Europe (91.8 million) and the Asia Pacific Basin (75.5 million) according to diverse sources (NUA Internet Surveys, retrieved from http://nua.ie/surveys/how_many_online/index.html; CIA World Factbook—http://cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/index.html).
In early 2005, the percentage of the population using the Internet ("active web users, at home") was, for example, in the USA, 48%, in Canada and Australia, 46%, in Sweden, 53%, in Germany, 36%, in the UK, 38%, in France, 26%, in Spain, 22%, in Japan, 29%, and in Brazil, for example, only 6% (Nielsen NetRatings, retrieved from http://www.nielsennetratings.com/news.jsp?section=dat_to).
Although those figures change continuously over time (and differences between different sources and their definitions of Internet usage exist—online access quotas, for example, are not valid indicators of real usage), there is a clear continuum of descent from high Internet usage in the (developed, western) North to low Internet usage in the (often less developed, non-western) South. The diffusion of the Internet from its country of origin, the USA, to other countries of the world depended and continues to depends on several hard factors such as technical infrastructure and income per capita, for example economic development.
This may be one reason for the Internet's differing popularity in the North and the South—that is what I mean by saying “Spaces across the Digital Divide”.
