Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
estimates that 60 % of that country's users are Asian. Among the seven emirates
that constitute the UAE, Dubai and Abu Dhabi have taken the lead in facilitating
internet growth (Kalathil and Boas
2003
). More impoverished Arab countries, in
contrast, exhibited much lower rates, ranging as low as 9 % in Sudan and 4 % in
Iraq.
Because personal computer ownership rates are relatively low in the Arab
world, and because ISP access charges are often high, most Arab internet users
rely upon internet cafes for access rather than individual ISP accounts (Wheeler
2004
). Their popularity varies among Arab countries. Jordan made the Guinness
Book of World Records for the largest local concentration of internet cafes any-
where: more than 200 are clustered on a single street in Irbid (Wheeler
2006
).
Cafes are also popular in Algeria and Morocco, which have more than 3,000 and
2,120 of them, respectively. Cafes are particularly important for those who lack
dial-up access at home, and as Wheeler (
2004
) notes, they constitute ''informal
communities, where users come and go, activities are not measured and monitored,
where the effects of internet use are difficult to assess.'' Users spend an average of
12 h per week on-line, often in chat rooms. An important alternative to cybercafes
is publicly-funded internet community access points such as Tunisia's Publinet
centers and Jordan's Knowledge Stations (Wheeler
2006
).
2.4.9 Sub-Saharan Africa
The global space of flows and ''information highway'' seem to have largely
bypassed the African continent. By virtually any measure, the region remains the
least connected in the world, the bottom-most tier of the global digital divide.
Whereas 32 % of the world's people used the internet at the end of 2011, in sub-
Saharan Africa the average internet penetration rate was only 11 %; home to 850
million people, 12 % of the world, Africa has less than 5 % of its internet users.
Hobbled by widespread poverty, economic stagnation, illiteracy, an inadequate
telecommunications infrastructure, often unreliable electrical systems, lack of
technical skills, and frequently indifferent governments, Africa was late to join the
digital revolution, and the internet is still relatively uncommon on the continent.
However, despite these obstacles, cyberspace on the continent is still growing by
leaps and bounds. Like other information technologies, the internet has diffused
unevenly across the African continent (Wilson and Wong
2003
; Oyelaran-
Oyeyinka and Lal
2005
), simultaneously reflecting and transforming long-standing
regional inequalities. Thus, South Africa has long been the most prominent
member of Africa's information revolution. Throughout Africa, great social and
spatial inequalities in internet access exist within each country: telephones tend to
be concentrated in urban areas, where companies derive economies of scale in
service provision, although in many African countries the bulk of the population
lives in rural ones. In South Africa, for example, only 8 % of the country's internet
