Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
called the ''father of the World Wide Web,'' played a key role in this process. Soon
thereafter private web browsers sprouted like mushrooms, including Netscape,
Internet Explorer, and Firefox. The number of websites grew exponentially, from
roughly 1 million in 1990 to more than 4 billion in 2011.
The microelectronics revolution initiated enormous decreases in the cost of
computers and exponential increases in their power and memory. Of these, the
continued decline in the price of personal computers (PCs) looms large. Following
Moore's Law, which speculates the cost of computers falls in half every 1 years,
PCs have become increasingly ubiquitous in many countries, and relatively fast,
low-end machines are readily available for relatively modest sums. Indeed, fiber
optics arguably transformed the internet from a communications to a commercial
system, accelerating the pace of customer orders, procurement, production, and
product delivery (Malecki
2002
). Spurred by declining costs, deregulation, and an
increasingly tech-savvy public, the growth of the internet has been phenomenal;
indeed, it is arguably the most rapidly diffusing technology in world history.
Global access to the internet is deeply conditioned by the density, reliability, and
affordability of national telephone systems, which form the heart of the archi-
tecture of cyberspace. For this reason, the distribution of internet hosts also mirrors
the enduring legacy of the superpower bifurcation during the Cold War: Soviet-
backed regimes distrusted the telephone, which allows two-way communication,
and preferred television, which allows only one-way flows of information.
With rapid declines in the cost of computer technology, a glut of fiber optics
that led to dramatic falls in communications prices, easy-to-use graphical inter-
faces, and the clear potential for all sorts of as-yet unheard of applications, it is no
wonder that internet usage worldwide began to grow exponentially. The number of
users soared from roughly 10 million in 1990 to more than 2.25 billion in
December, 2011 (Fig.
2.3
), an average rate of increase of almost 14 % per year.
The distribution of the world's internet users in 2011 (Fig.
2.4
) reflects the size of
different national populations and their internet penetration rates. Four countries—
China, the U.S., India, and Japan—had more than 100 million users each, although
with more than 513 million users China exceeds the next three largest countries
combined. With other countries with significant pools of users such as South Korea
and Indonesia, approximately 922 million internet users were located in Asia, or
almost half of the world's total (Table
2.1
). In contrast, the world's poorest region,
sub-Saharan Africa, had relatively small populations of netizens. These broad
regional differentials were reflected in the linguistic structure of the internet as
well (Table
2.2
). While English remains the premier tongue used today on the
Web—the digital lingua franca of 536 million people—Chinese, spoken by 445
million netizens, is the second-most heavily used language, and growing rapidly,
followed by Spanish (153 million users). Other languages such as Japanese,
Portuguese, German, Arabic, French, and Russian are also significant.
Internet use (''penetration'') rates varied considerably by country in 2011
(Fig.
2.5
). Whereas the vast bulk of the populations in economically developed
countries use it, including near-universal rates in Scandinavia, penetration rates are
markedly lower in the developing world (but growing by leaps and bounds).
