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About 40% of World Population Online, 90% of Offliners In Developing Countries
New submitter lx76 writes:
The International Telecommunications Union does research on telecommunications in society worldwide, from cellphones to internet use. Since 2009, on a yearly basis, they've released their research findings in a report called the Measuring Information Society Report. This year's report is over 200 pages long, illustrated with abundant graphs and tables (PDF). It's not a light read. But one of the interesting numbers is an index showing the divide in global connectivity. From the report: "Over the past year, the world witnessed continued growth in the uptake of ICT [Information and
Communication Technology] and, by end 2014, almost 3 billion people will be using the Internet, up from 2.7 billion at end 2013..... Despite this encouraging progress, there are important digital divides that need to be addressed: 4.3 billion people are still not online, and 90 per cent of them live in the developing world."
The report continues, "As this report finds, ICT performance is better in countries with higher shares of the population living in urban areas, where access to ICT infrastructure, usage and skills is more favorable. Yet it is precisely in poor and rural areas where ICTs can make a particularly significant impact." Projects like Google's Project Loon have their work cut out for them."
The report continues, "As this report finds, ICT performance is better in countries with higher shares of the population living in urban areas, where access to ICT infrastructure, usage and skills is more favorable. Yet it is precisely in poor and rural areas where ICTs can make a particularly significant impact." Projects like Google's Project Loon have their work cut out for them."
Look kids, racism!
No seriously, that's some racist-ass shit. Fuck you, and your imagined colonial past. Things are substantially better now in the vast majority of developing nations than they ever were under colonial control.
Birth rates are down, death rates are down, education rates are up, diseases are getting eradicated, and assholes like you just want to imagine you know what's best for everyone.
There are a lot of people in developing countries without safe drinking water, access to medical care, adequate nutrition and many other serious problems. While it is sometimes difficult for the lucky few in better off countries to understand, they might just be a few things that are more important then having Internet access.
where the AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, ... warlords are protecting their turf and blocking access by rural Americans?
It's not a few that are really developing and a lot that aren't, but the contrary. For example, if you look at how well Nigeria has dealt with the current Ebola crisis, you pretty much have to acknowledge that they have improved a lot since the 1960's. In the same way, Uganda today is not sliding downhill from some Idi Amin glory days, quite the contrary. We could fairly describe a few states as failed - that's not a racist term per say, it's a rational assessment if used correctly, but when people talk about developing nations like 9 of 10 are never going to develop instead of the contrary, that's an abuse of terms like 'developing' and 'failed state'. There's also this meme that foreign aid is just pumping money into corrupt regimes that will never actually improve the lot of their populaces, and again, that's more the exception than the rule.
There's also a difference in comparing a failed state with a successfully developing one in 21st century terms and comparing it to its colonial past or some general colonial era. You can take the real numbers for famine deaths caused by the British raj in India and Irish potato famine deaths of about the same time, and with fair statistics, nobody should ever complain about anything Stalin did to the USSR again,unless they are prepared to compare Queen Victoria with Hitler and Stalin, to her disfavor. That's your colonial era, without even knowing the figures for Africa and how much they would make the totals worse. Somalia today probably has it about as bad as they did in the colonial era, but not worse. That's bad, a drastically failed state - there's no need to claim that somehow it's even worse than what Belgum did to its colonies or other cases which were unimaginable hells - by the time things get any worse than that, everyone is dead.
Who is John Cabal?