The "World" in "World Wide Web"

To a generation that came of age during the extinction of landlines and rise of smartphones, millennials know life is practically not worth living unless you can share it (digitally) with your friends, acquaintances and people you met a long time ago and can't remember where/when. A recent article in Harvard Business Review suggests that cultural differences can determine what kinds of information social media users share and who they share it with. These conclusions were drawn from Trendstream Global Web Index, a survey of more than 50,000 users of social platforms in 18 markets.

So how did North American countries measure up to others? Well, much the same as our comrades across the pond and down under (Europe and Australia) - of the users who have internet access, most maintain social networks and upload photos/ video, but only a small percentage maintain a microblog, such as Twitter. And although it seems the United States is socially obsessed, Brazil, Russia, India and China show the highest overall level of engagement with online networking tools.

North American users also seem to adhere to the good ol' American mantra "bigger is better," and tend to use social media platforms as a way to mass communicate to hundreds of online friends. Apparently Asian nations believe "less is more" and tend to treat blogging and social networking as a tool to connect with a select group of friends and family. For example, while users in North American countries are likely to have hundreds of friends on Facebook, Japanese users often have an average of 25 friends on mixi, a social networking site that never caught on in The States.

Surprisingly, users in other nations do not find themselves online for hours when they intended to log on just to tweet about the weather. The data revealed the prevalence of social networking does not correlate to any other online behavior. For example,although France and The Netherlands show similar levels of social media use, only 25 percent of French users report using internet banking while 87 percent of Dutch users do.

What does this really tell us? We're all going online to get and share information, just in different ways. Not a big surprise there. Do you fit into the category of the typical U.S. mass communicator?