It never fails to amaze me and frustrate me at the same the myopia that seems to surround the tech blogosphere and to a certain degree the internet at large. The myopia I am referring to is this belief that something is a certain in the United Stated it goes without saying that it is the same for everyone in the world.
Guess what - it isn’t.
The most common places this happens is when folks start talking about internet availability; as well as internet speeds, and e-commerce. It is the second that I am forever bumping my head up against whenever I talk about wanting to buy things on the web but am hampered by the fact that I use PayPal for everything.
First come the comments of why don’t you just use a credit card. Well I hate to break it to but not everyone in this world has a frikken credit card and I am one of them. Then comes the invariable suggestion that I just use a debit card or some other form of bank payment. At which point I gladly offer up the fact that those things only work if you live in the U.S. which I don’t. It’s not like Canada is a backwater country - well it might be but that is another story - but we’re lucky enough that PayPal lets us transfer to Canadian banks which is why for some it is the only alternative.
Even though I have talked about this before in both posts and comments here on WinExtra I still find it surprising when smart people automatically jump to the conclusion that what works in the U.S. works everywhere as happened in a comment exchange on FriendFeed. Sure this may not seem like a big deal and really it probably isn’t - if you live in the U.S.
For those of us that don’t however live in the U.S. this myopia can get to be a really irritating thing that makes the rest of us in the world feel like we are always standing on the outside looking in. While the U.S. may have really good deals on mobile internet there are still countries that have data caps on normal broadband internet - if they even have broadband to begin with.
The Internet might be a global village but there are times when it seems like everything in that village is being looked at from a U.S. point of view.
Conversation Tags: Internet, U.S.
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Daggmano
Sydney, Australia.
52nd state of USA
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