Almost Half the World Will be Online by End of 2016 (indiatimes.com)

By the end of this year, almost half of the world's population will be using the internet, partly because of growth of mobile networks and internet access becoming affordable to many, a United Nations agency said. From a report:In the world's developed countries about 80 percent of the population use the internet. But only about 40 percent in developing countries and less than 15 percent in less-developed countries are online, according to a report by the U.N.'s International Telecommunications Union (ITU). In several of Africa's poorer and more fragile countries, only one person in 10 is on the internet. The offline population is female, elderly, less educated, poorer and lives in rural areas, said the union, a specialized agency for information and communication technologies. Globally, 47 percent of the world's population is online, still far short of a U.N. target of 60 percent by 2020. Some 3.9 billion people, more than half the world's population, are not. ITU expects 3.5 billion people to have access by the end of this year

Comments

Re:what does 'online' really mean, anyways?

[Kjella]

it's probably just the classic case of watering down statistics to manipulate this into this some sort of seemingly still existent 'technical divide' problem in this world.

Africa still has countries like Niger with 20% literacy and you think the 'technical divide' is just a hoax, says most about you. China is approaching first world levels with 96.4%, India is still way behind at 72.1% but they are pulling themselves out of the mud. Africa is still a big cluster fuck. Sure one in ten means most people will know someone who they can ask for help, but since most access in the third world is mobile I doubt anyone will part with their cell phone for long except to close family even if they could use it. And it's probably on limited and relatively expensive plans so you don't get to use it frivolously.

Of course, being literate doesn't mean much unless you can put it to good use. I mean it's nice to be able to read textbooks, letters, package labels and instruction manuals but most truly poor people live on rural subsistence farms with little of that. Having Internet access is a great way to make being literate even more useful, you can learn more and find out things for yourself. It makes giving your kids an education more valuable. At the same time I don't think you should underestimate the challenge of going from the pre-industrial era to 21st century knowledge workers, the jobs are unskilled manual labor.