Page 280 - Culture Technology Communication

“Culture,” Computer Literacy, and the Media 263

on the Web free of charge. One difference, however, is that many
newspapers in the English-speaking world offering otherwise free
access nonetheless charge a fee to download archived articles.
What does this mean for CMC? First, the greater number of
banners on Korean Web pages indicates that Korean advertisers be-
lieve that the Web is an effective way to reach customers. Although
Japan has a large number of Internet users, the paucity of banners
indicates that Japanese companies prefer to spend their money on
other forms of advertising. Web newspapers thus have a certain
mass appeal in Korea that they do not have in Japan. Second, the
layout of Korean Web pages is more “accessible” to people who are
familiar with the print edition. Japanese Web pages look more “com-
puter-like,” which could make them intimidating to readers accus-
tomed to print media or colorful Web sites.
Other frequently accessed Web sites, such as search engines and
free e-mail services, reveal interesting differences between Japan
and Korea. Both nations have native-language Yahoo! search engines
and several other local native-language search engines. The categories
in both versions of Yahoo! are the same. Yahoo! Japan offers a wider
range of news and other information than Yahoo! Korea. Most of the
Reuters news in English appears in Japanese along with Japanese-
only news. The financial section of Yahoo! Japan allows for real-time
quotes of individual stocks and a variety of financial information.
Yahoo! Korea does not have extensive news or financial information
because Yahoo! is relatively new to the Korean market. Both nations
have home-grown search engines—goo (<http://www.goo.ne.jp>) in
Japan and naver.com (<http://www.naver.com>) in Korea—and a
number of free Web-based e-mail services modeled after hotmail. The
Korean hanmail.net (<http://www.hanmail.net>) boasts over a million
users of its free e-mail service.
Population and economics have a direct relationship on the
amount of information available on the Web. The Japanese market
of 125 million people is larger and richer than the Korean market of
45 million people. According to the Courrier International (1998),
Japanese is the third most common language on the Web after En-
glish and Spanish. Korean is the fifteenth most common language,
but it is the only Asian language besides Japanese and Chinese
among the fifteen languages listed. Korea has a smaller GNP per
capita than Japan: $9,511 versus $33,800. The standard of living for
middle-class city dwellers is closer, however, than these figures in-
dicate because the high cost of living and crowded housing condi-
tions in Japan reduce the standard of living. When calculated for