Will Geographic Location Always Be Important?
Posted: July 15th, 2011 | Author: Michael Moore-Jones | Filed under: Thinking Out Loud, Web/Tech | Tags: Facebook, Geographic Location, New Zealand, Orkut, Telecommunications | 1 Comment »The fact that the Internet and mobile technology is meant to make physical location irrelevant is a bit of a misnomer. It has the ability to make geographic location irrelevant, yes, but in reality it isn’t happening. Here I’m going to take a look at both social networks and mobile phones, and just discuss how geographic location is still very important.
In New Zealand, there are three mobile telco’s: Telecom, Vodafone, and 2Degrees. You’d think that what mobile phone carrier you choose doesn’t have anything to do with your physical location as prices are the same country-wide. But what is quite obvious in reality is that your geographic location essentially determines which mobile telco you use. If you’re in Wellington, you use Telecom. If you’re in Auckland, you use Vodafone.
Look at social networks. Obviously Facebook is the winner, and crosses most continents. But then there are weird pockets where users in certain countries mostly use a social network different to Facebook. The obvious example is Brazil, where Orkut is still much larger than Facebook. The very premise of a social network is that it allows you to communicate regardless of your physical place. But here we have social networks being adopted not on interests or age, but on geographic location.
The answer as to why this happens isn’t that hard to work out. It’s societal laws. People will sign up to where their friends are online, and their friends are usually always in the same country as them. So it really isn’t a surprise that this is occurring.
But then we need to ask: will it always be that way? Many of the benefits that people see in the Internet actually relies on the fact that geographic location isn’t important. So will we see over time a decreasing importance in geographic location of users? Or could it remain an important fact that people actually hold onto?
My personal belief is that physical location will remain important to a certain extent in people’s use of different social networks (let’s let this include things like mobile phone telco’s). Despite the Internet breaking down physical barriers, it doesn’t necessarily mean that people will care less about their physical location. It’s something close to all of our hearts – and it plays a role in many of our decisions.
Who knows, in ten years geographic location may be totally irrelevant. But at least for that period of time I think it will still be important.
Thoughts?
