Web2.0 Learning Lab

In my previous post, I wrote about Germany’s surprisingly restrained approach to social media. Although 93% of German adults use the internet, only 51% use social media. South Korea presents an almost opposite picture: 99% of adults use the internet, and 80% use social media. As a Korean, this difference feels very real. In Korea, being online is not just a tool for finding information. It is closely connected to entertainment, relationships, trends, beauty standards, and even personal identity. Of course, this hyperconnected environment has many benefits. Social media allows people to exchange information quickly, organize communities, discover creative work, and participate in public conversations. However, it also means that unhealthy ideas can spread, evolve, and become normalized just as quickly. Bruns (2008) describes online users as “produsers” who do not merely consume content but continually create, modify, and circulate it. Unfortunately, this collaborative process does not g...

 When we think of Germany, “technologically behind” is probably not the first phrase that comes to mind.  Germany is known for engineering, innovation, and a highly developed economy. Yet its social media habits reveal a surprisingly different story. According to Gramlich (2024), 93% of German adults use the internet, but only 51% use social media. That is a 42-percentage-point gap—the largest among all countries included in Pew Research Center’s recent survey. In other words, Germans are clearly online. They just do not seem especially interested in spending that online time posting, sharing, liking, or scrolling through social media. This becomes even more interesting when Germany is compared with its European neighbors. Countries such as Belgium, France, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom have similarly high internet-use rates, but around two-thirds or more of their adults use social media. Germany therefore does not simply follow the broader Western European pattern. Th...