Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 2.3 Growth in world
internet users, 1990-2011.
Source
internetworldstats.com
2500
2000
1500
1000
500
0
Internet penetration rates (percentage of people with access) among the world's
major regions, ranging from as little as 0.2 % in parts of Africa to as high as 96 %
in Scandinavia. By the end of 2011, penetration was 77 % of the U.S. population.
Inequalities in access to the internet internationally reflect the long-standing
bifurcation between the First and Third Worlds. While no country is utterly
without internet access, the variations among and within nations in accessibility
are huge. Given its large size, the United States—with more than 245 million
users—dominates when measured in terms of absolute number of internet hosts.
The world's highest penetration rates (Table
2.3
) are found in Iceland (97.8 %),
followed by Norway (97.2 %), Sweden (92.9), and Luxembourg (91.4 %); Eastern
Europe lags considerably behind, and in Russia only 44 % of the population uses
the internet. In Asia, access is by greatest in South Korea (82.7 %) and Japan
(80 %); about 38 % of China is hooked up, although the numbers there are
growing rapidly, and already amount to more than 513 million users. In Latin
America, the largest numbers of users are found in Brazil (79 million, or 39 %)
and Mexico (42 million, 36.9 %). The internet in the African continent is largely
confined to South Africa, although it is growing explosively there. In all cases, per
capita incomes are the key; the internet can only be used by people with resources
sufficient to own computers and learn the essential software. Variations in the
number of users is also reflected in the geography of internet flows (although flow
data are much harder to come by than are place-specific attribute data): 75 % of all
international traffic on the internet is either to or from the United States, fueling
fears among some people that the internet is largely a tool for the propagation of
American culture.
The most salient feature about the internet may be its exceedingly rapid rate of
growth. Very few technologies in world history, with perhaps the exception of the
mobile phone, have exhibited such explosive rates of adoption. As penetration
rates soared around the planet, millions of new users have been brought on line.
Figure
2.6
portrays national differentials in the growth of internet usage. Explosive
growth is readily evident in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, where growth
rates between 2000 and 2011 exceeded 10,000 % (and sometimes reach absurdly
high rates such as 182,900 %, albeit from a very small base). In contrast, growth
