Much has been said about China leapfrogging ahead of the West in mobile payments and other mobile-first technologies. However, the downside to skipping the PC stage (and hence the open web) is often overlooked. Below, I highlight two unintended consequences of jumping directly to a mobile-first environment: 1) disincentives for creating knowledge, and 2) barriers to building weak ties.
Writing on the Internet can be broadly categorized into two types:
- “Quick takes/reactions”
- triggered by emotions or news events
- not intended to be read beyond the first minutes or hours after publication (short half-life)
- most suited for social media timelines
- “Knowledge/reflections”
- not tied to particular news events
- intended to be read long after publication (long half-life)
- most suited for blogs
Take two of my blog posts as an example. The post comparing different Chinese-English translation services has garnered 30k views as of May 2021, but 2/3 of them occurred after a year of publication. Similarly, half of the traffic to the post visualizing countries’ UN voting patterns came a year after publication. My tweets, on other hand, are probably only ever read the moment I hit “send.”
As much as people in the English-language world lament the decline of blogging, there is still the infrastructure and the reward system that support writing of the more reflective kind. A WordPress blog takes seconds to set up, and, more importantly, search engine indexing allows for content discovery – Writers know that their long half-life work will be read and that they are not competing for eyeballs alongside the quick takes.
The Chinese Internet, however, is the polar opposite. Search engines are practically nonexistent, and people read primarily by scrolling through social media timelines rather than visiting web pages with URLs at the top.
One might blame the censorship apparatus for handicapping Chinese search engines, but I’d argue that the dearth of long half-life writing is mostly the consequence of China jumping directly to mobile and the mobile-first Internet companies (rationally) creating walled gardens around content.
In the English-speaking world, consumers from the open web era demanded portals that listed web pages, and Google flourished as an index of everything there was to see online. But in a mobile-first environment, the gateway to information became the few “super-apps,” which naturally erected w
