Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Outside of India, South Asia contains much smaller pools of users in Pakistan
(29 million users, or 15 % penetration) and Bangladesh (5 million users, or 3.5 %).
In both countries, patriarchal barriers and gender roles firmly limit women's access
to cyberspace. Despite the Pakistani government's rhetoric about closing the
country's digital divide, enhancing human capital, promoting exports, and
attracting foreign information technology investment, very little has been done in
practice. Karachi and Islamabad remain the best-connected points in the country,
termini of international fiber optic cables. Rural Pakistanis, however, live in an
endemic state of information poverty (Ameen and Gorman
2009
). While internet
use has grown rapidly (59 % annually), the infrastructure has had difficulty in
keeping up with the surge in demand. A few government-sponsored telemedicine
clinics operate in rural areas, and some universities have established distance-
learning programs (Mujahid
2002
). Bangladesh fares even worse, with a very low
telephone density, high illiteracy, acute shortages of computer skills, and virtually
no broadband, problems compounded by the relative lack of Bengali content on
the web.
2.4.8 Arab World
Roughly 320 million Arabs comprise about 5 % of the world's population. With an
average Internet penetration rate of 25 % in 2011, or 79 million users, the Arab
world lags behind the world average, particularly industrialized regions. There
exist to date remarkably few systematic attempts to understand the Arab world's
internet geography (see Warf and Vincent
2007
). Understanding the nature and
impacts of the internet in the Arab world is made difficult in part by the widespread
Orientalist misconceptions about Arabic culture and society found in the West:
like all societies in the age of intense and rapid globalization, Arab societies are
complex mixtures of the traditional, the modern, and the postmodern (Fandy
1999
). Considerable diversity may be found among Arab states in terms of internet
usage. Typically, Arab states with the best-developed internet systems are those
that have diversified their economies from petroleum, have competitive telecom-
munications markets, relatively equalized gender roles, numerous cybercafes, and
high rates of wireless phone usage.
In 2011, roughly 79 million people in Arab countries (including non-Arabs,
e.g., Berbers and foreign nationals) logged on. In absolute terms, the largest
numbers were found in Egypt, by far the most populous Arab country, which had
21.7 million users, Morocco (15.6 million), and Saudi Arabia (11.4 million).
Penetration rates were highest in the Persian/Arabian Gulf states, particularly the
UAE and Qatar, which, with 69 %, rivaled the rates found in many countries of
Europe. Like many Gulf states, the UAE has a large immigrant population from
South and Southeast Asia; Privacy International (
www.privacyinternational.org
)
