It’s self-evident that the internet has done much to bring different cultures together, helping to facilitate or event create trends that transcend boundaries and languages. This is especially the case with social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, through which people can access each other’s posts, videos, music, and other outputs freely and easily.
In order to better understand this cultural globalization, the MIT Center for Civic Media that has launched What We Watch, a website which tracks global video watching trends based on collected public data from YouTube’s Trends Dashboard. Through its neat interactive map, you can view how culture spreads through YouTube videos, and can even pinpoint where a particular video is trending and which countries and regions tend to share the most similar tastes.
Foreign Policy has an article on the project that includes a few interesting case studies — for example, some videos (such as Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball”) seemed to be popular across many different countries, while others were limited mostly to those with shared languages and cultures. The results are pretty interesting:
While Argentines, Colombians, Mexicans, and Peruvians tend to watch the same videos as one another, Portuguese-speaking Brazilians are outliers in Latin America, having more in common — at least when it comes to YouTube — with Australia, Canada, and Sweden, among others (though not, it seems, Portugal).
Turkey — that bridge between East and West — favors popular videos in Europe, like this One Direction video, to those in the Middle East, which include several clips from Arab Idol and a music video by Elissa, which was trending in Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Oman, and Saudi Arabia, among others. (Admittedly, language likely plays a significant role here.)
The project is in part a way to find videos you might not have come across in your own country. But the map’s creators also want it to capture how culture spreads: Which videos blow up, and what paths do they take? Just how did the Dutch start watching a video by Alfaaz featuring Yo!Yo! Honey Singh, for instance? Why do some videos, like this ridiculous British ad for cereal, never win over a global audience,while this very sweet ad for Google Hangouts has garnered widespread global popularity — except in the United States, which appears to be its intended target?
Two countries that could serve as bridges, researchers found, are the United Arab Emirates and Singapore — both notable as small countries that share a lot of content with a wide range of nations. Both have large expatriate populations as well as large numbers of “guest workers.” “We can imagine a video popular in India making its way to Yemen through the United Arab Emirates,” researcher Ethan Zuckerman wrote.
It’s pretty neat stuff, and definitely worth checking out. You’ll also get to view these most popular videos yourself, so you can better see what your fellow global citizens are into — and whether you can relate!
Sarvodaya 
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