Digital divide separates world's rich from poor

More than a fifth of world’s population use Internet

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You update your status, post photos and videos for everybody to see, follow news updates in real time, and write your blogs to a wide audience.
      At least in principle this is part of the everyday routine already for more than 1.5 billion people, who all use the Internet.
      That is more than a fifth of the world’s population.
      The story of the Internet’s global growth is without parallel.
     
As recently as the mid-1990s, only about 16 million people worldwide, or around 0.4 per cent of the planet’s population, used the Internet.
      The growth curve has risen steeply ever since, and today already more than 400 million people worldwide enjoy the speed and bandwidth of a broadband connection.
      According to Internetworldstats.com, which compiles the user statistics, Internet usage is most common in the Northern European countries, where more than 80 per cent of the population use the Net regularly. The Australians and Canadians are equally avid Internet users.
      Finland, too, belongs to this group.
      According to Statistics Finland, 83 per cent of the country’s 16- to 74-year-olds have used the Internet within the last three months.
      Up to 80 per cent of the users even say that they use the Net daily or almost daily.
     
Nevertheless, a large majority of the world’s people still cannot afford sufficiently powerful computers or broadband connections to effectively accommodate the Internet’s ever-developing social media applications.
      The planet's rich and poor remain disconnected from one another. The digital divide separating their worlds endures.
     
In Myanmar (the former Burma), governed by a military junta, only a minute portion of the population, a mere 0.1 per cent of them, uses the Internet.
      In the West African Sierra Leone, which is still recovering from a long civil war, only 0.7 per cent of the people have access to the Net.
     
The digital divide is present within Europe as well.
      The nations of Northern Europe stand clearly apart from countries such as Portugal and Greece, where less than half of the population use the Internet.
     
In rich countries the Internet usage is already so common that the user figures are starting to level off, as there is no more room for growth. In poorer countries, on the other hand, the growth rate is still explosive.
      For example, in Zimbabwe the usage of the Net grew twentyfold in a period of eight years.
      For Nigeria the corresponding figure was nearly fiftyfold.
      Also the growth rate of the global data transfer figures has been head-spinning.
      According to the company Tele Geography, the amount of transferred data within the Internet grew by 53 per cent in 2007-2008. The growth was brought on especially by the increasing flow of video imagery and music.
     
The digital divide means that poorer countries do not have sufficient technology or knowhow to share in the online coexistence.
      For instance Eastern Africa still has not been connected to the worldwide fibre-optic cable network.
      In these countries ordinary folks can access the Net primarily at Internet cafés that use slow and expensive satellite connections.
      Perhaps the situation will change when a subsea fibre-optic cable connection to Eastern Africa is finally set up this summer.
      The cable will make connections ten times faster and will lower prices significantly.
     
In addition to the correct hardware, the closing of the digital divide also requires increased education and knowhow.
      Without these the online experience’s most essential ingredient - the production and sharing of one’s own content - is going to be difficult.
     
The expansion of the Internet also comes with new social challenges.
      For example the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), which is one of the specialised agencies of the United Nations, has awakened to the fact that children and teenagers the world over spend more and more time involved in the online social networks, where they are vulnerable to new kinds of risks.
      In Kenya, in turn, there are fears that the subsea fibre-optic cable will bring in its wake not only broadband connections but also increased cyber crime.


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Cisco: Finnish Internet connections not close to fastest in Europe (12.9.2008)
  State support proposed for high-speed broadband (18.9.2008)

Links:
  Digital divide (Wikipedia)

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