330M Americans are less than 5% of the 7B people of Earth.
While you are correct in stating that influence is correlated to affluence, and access to the internet is one measure of affluence, it is not the only measure (for example, South Korea has higher broadband penetration than the USA). American influence is declining due to numerous factors, and affluence is only one of them.
The social compact in America, the presumption of liberty, has eroded to almost the point of incredulity. Americans are now the most incarcerated people in the history of the world. The constant international meddling and aggression undertaken post WWII has alienated and angered many peoples around the world, and this has caused America to lose a great deal of influence as a nation. Resentment and anger is hardly influence.
While you equate being American to being white, this is less and less so, and the influence of caucasians is not being diminished concomitantly with being American. In every survey I am aware of people of every race view caucasians of the opposite sex more positively than any other race, for whatever reason (statistically. Not everyone feels this way, but a majority of them do). This is not even remotely true if the question is asked about Americans, rather than whites.
China, as the most populous nation, has begun recently to surpass America in various technical fields, such as quantum computing, supercomputers, and paleontology, and is at least hard on American heels in almost any field you name. China has 5 times as many engineers as the USA, so this trend is likely to continue.
I made a typo, thank you for pointing that out.
As far as the first part of your comment, listing A truth does not negate other truths. Plus, to be honest, I'm not going to waste my time writing an entire exegesis of American influence on a Steemit article.
For the second part of your comment, you're listing points based on a strawman argument. I NEVER equated being American to being white. I believe that you know this. In the future, I would very much appreciate it if you would not attribute false statements to my name.
You are of course quite correct about one truth not negating others. As I am quite comfortable wasting my time with superfluous exegeses on Steemit, I wrongly assumed everyone else is too. Apparently what they say about assumptions is all too true, at least about me (not implying it would apply to you in this example =p) so I thought I might add a bit to the reasons for the real decline you reference.
There were several comments in your post that dealt with race, and perhaps I misunderstood your meaning.
This "This is where hegemony comes into play. While whites are nominally a global minority, they roughly split internet and social media engagement with Asians. In other words, whites "play above their heads," to borrow a football/soccer terminology. In contrast, Asians "play down."", since your post was about American hegemony, seemed to equate whites with Americans.
I did not intend to misrepresent your statements. However, from your response to my comment, I clearly misunderstood them. Given that I must have misunderstood the quoted statement to equate whites with Americans, I now don't understand how it relates to American hegemony, at all, as it references only race, yet uses the language from the title of your post referencing hegemony.
Perhaps you could clarify it for me?
Edit: I just want to point out that I am in no way racist. I reread my comment, alarmed at your reply, and see that it might easily be misinterpreted by some folks to be some kind of white supremacist claim of superiority.
I did not intend it to be so, but rather to emphasize the dichotomy between the two major topics I noted in your post, racial and American hegemony.
To be frank, I wanted to articulate that I did not equate American-ness with whiteness because I don't want people to accidentally or inadvertently assume that I'm against white people, or that I have an agenda against white people. The best people in my life happen to be white! :)
Now, if my argument was poorly communicated, that is a criticism I will gladly address. By hegemony, I refer to the "American way" being assumed upon others, or being referred as a default assumption.
Where race comes in is that the reality of American hegemony is, and looks, completely different from actual reality. This is a VERY simplified version of a complex topic -- and as you now know, I hate wasting time on an exegesis of any topic! :) -- but if world dynamics were simply tethered to nominal strength, Asians would dominate the discourse simply because there's so many of them.
Right now, in terms of social media dynamics, Asians and whites of all nationalities roughly split integration. However, as per capita integration grows internationally, I believe that the dynamics will definitely shift eastern (Asian).
In that situation, American hegemony loses its teeth. Although this hegemony doesn't have a color, so to speak, it is definitely western influenced. But the broader point is that the eastern influence is growing rapidly, and thus the assumptions of the "American way" will likely (in my opinion) fade significantly several generations from now.
This is admittedly an inelegant way of communicating my thoughts, but I hope I helped clarify. Also, my video brings further details to this general discussion.
I confess I am rather a reader than a viewer of videos, and apologize that I didn't even notice you have a video up there! I'll watch it now..
Still at sea regarding the language that seemed to trip me up, but I gather from your reply that we are on the same page, at least. China, particularly, is poised to recreate the world order in it's image (I just hope they adopt a rational alphabet, suited to keyboarding. Chinese script is beautiful (is it also a form of kanji? I believe that word applies to scripts of the type...) but I don't have room for a keyboard with thousands of keys!).
Just one point to add @valued-customer ... I did NOT think that your original post was racist, or had racist undertones. I also do not think anyone else took it as a racist remark (although obviously, I can't speak for anyone but myself).
In reality, I wanted to make sure that you didn't think I was racist towards whites; that's why I wanted to clarify my arguments! :)
Well, at least we aren't racists! /me looks around the room suspicously...