By Zaid Hassan

Our industry is not global, it is excruciatingly provisional and regional. The new media industry is global - it just isn�t as global as it likes to pretend it is. Behind the glitz and the cosmopolitan glamour of London and New York the new media industry is itself painfully insular and as small as any 18th century backwater village.

Our websites reflect this homogenous view of the world, you know the one size fits all navigation, the one language fits all content - dictated by the central office, dictated by Moscow, resulting in Moscow rules design. It�s almost as if a proverbial iron curtain hangs around these islands, put into place by a totalitarian mind-set that is petrified of what would happen if our designers discovered another world. This has ossified our attempts to consciously move our design innovation to other audiences and other countries.

Most of the globalisation that exists in the new media industry is a result of previously globalised businesses, the backbone can basically been seen as part of the global telecoms industry - which itself is a complex mesh of cross-holdings, ownership and investment across national borders. The internet certainly did not introduce the idea of globalisation to the telecoms industry. Similarly with the Bangalore phenomena - the modern software industry is around fifty years old and the global outsourcing of software development is a natural progression of a much older industry.

So why is there an underlying feeling that the new media industry is the epitome of global? That�s because it just so happens that the regional and provincial clusters of the industry are situated in extremely cosmopolitan, diverse and global cities and the fact is that they are connected to each other by a global backbone. This is incidental globalisation - the various regional centers of the industry make no more conscious use of this backbone then any other industry on the planet, indeed less than many industries such as the car manufacturing industry - which for better or worse is truly global.

We need to learn to differentiate between incidental globalisation and conscious globalisation, we need to understand the opportunities as well as the threats of globalisation and as with everything else in life it is a matter of balance.

Conscious globalisation within the new media and internet tech industry came during the boom years, when we saw companies like March First, Razorfish, iXL, AGENCY.COM and others move across the pond from their NYC roots - in an attempt to counter the perceived saturation of the North American markets. This was at best a brave attempt and at worst ill-conceived and badly thought out, either way it is the only real move to globalise the new media industry. This search for new profits in the old world of Europe was often conducted with imperialist indecency, every independent design agency in town received a call from the roll-up boyos, very little thought was put into the cultural difficulties of smashing together a rag-tag group of agencies under one banner and real money was spent expanding into Europe.

Could that money have been better spent? Undoubtedly, but how? What can we, the Brits, learn from these experiences? What we can learn is how to cope with and respond to cultural diversity a lot better, how to treat it as an opportunity for innovative design.

By 2010, the white population in London will be a minority. By 2100 the same will be true of Britain. In Copenhagen 25% of the current school population are from minority groups. Seven out of ten French immigrants live in and around Paris. Trends show a continued majority of cross-border mergers and acquisitions to be purchased by Western European firms. By 2002, the labour market of talent with IT and networking skills in Western Europe will fall 37% below employment demands.

In contrast, Interactive London �99 discovered that the London new media industry had the following demographics:

White 85.7% black-Caribbean 2.5% black-African 2.5% Indian - 2.5% Chinese - 0.8% Other 5% Unspecified 0.8%

The industry in London is embarrassing in its lack of diversity. As the new media industry moves away from cozy homogenous insularity the nature of the demands made will change dramatically. How will white, middle-class, Clerkenwell based, Phillip Starck inspired Creative Directors react to the visually rich (garish?) web design demanded by Indian audiences? You know, the 300 million middle-class Indians who are going online faster then you can say cascading style sheets. In turn how will our offshore Indian designers cope with the minimalism of Anglo-Saxon creative briefs? Or will British designers never design for an Indian audience? Or will we never outsource design?

Less exotically what are the differences between the European design aesthetic and the North American? Has anyone thought carefully about the differences in visual aesthetic between cultures?

Who�s going to answer these questions?

The melting pot of the US industry produced �the end of history� (ie everyone wants to be a Yank), mergers, consolidation and roll-ups as its conscious attempt to globalise, and these are not strategies that can answer difficult questions on cultural diversity. On the other hand the salad bowl of culture we�re all accustomed to in this country should mean that we approach the challenges and opportunities of globalisation with an easy familiarity - that we don�t is a shame.

First published in Create Online October 2001.