Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 6.1 Map of world mobile phone penetration rates, 2010. Source International Telecom-
munications Union
A critical consequence of mobile phones, and a central medium of communi-
cation for vast numbers of people, is text messaging. In 2010, 74 % of the world's
mobile phone users, or 3.85 billion people, engaged in texting, sending a total of 6.1
trillion messages, or 192,000 per second (International Telecommunications Union
2010
). Everywhere, teenagers took the lead in adopting texting, decisively choosing
this medium far more than their elders as the core of their interpersonal interactions
(Bolin and Westlund
2009
; Lenhart et al.
2010
). In the United States, where 93 % of
the population uses a cellular phone, the average user sends 534 messages per
month, and one in three teens sends more than 3,000 per month (Lenhart et al.
2010
).
In the developing world, texting has become a popular substitute for voice traffic
because it is much lower in cost. Instant messaging services such as Twitter have
also grown explosively. Starting with its foundation in 2006, Twitter had 140 million
users worldwide in early 2012; the world sends more than 340 million tweets and 1.6
billion search queries per day. The Twitter website, one of the most heavily visited
on Earth, hosts a service largely used by older persons, although it has become a
vehicle for celebrity self-promotion as well.
The textbook example of the network society is, of course, the internet.
Computers have been used for the exchange of personal information since the
creation of USENET in the 1970s. In December, 2011, roughly 2.2 billion people, or
32 % of the planet's population, were logged in. A sizable body of scholarship has
traced the social and spatial contours of cyberspace and need not be reiterated here
(Kellerman
2002
). For the purposes of this chapter, the centrality of email, which is
by far the most common application of the internet, should be noted. Cheap (or free),
instantaneous, and asynchronous, email allows both one-to-one and one-to-many
modes of communication, but also strips information of its context and for many
people induces information overload. Email is the most widely used medium of
communication in the business world (the typical corporate user exchanges 110
messages per day), and has become central to both professional and personal
success. Thus, in 2012 the world had more than 3.3 billion email accounts and sent
144.8 billion email messages per day (Radicati
2012
).
