Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
often expensive, inappropriate and reliant on non-existent infrastruc-
ture such as electricity and telephone landlines. While earlier patterns
of global ICT penetration could partly be explained by the traditional
'core-periphery' model of development, as the geography of telecommu-
nications networks tended to be linked to the location of offshore capital
and urban elites, recent evidence suggests that digitization is destabi-
lizing these traditional geographical polarities (Moriset and Malecki,
2009). The 'digital revolution' in ICT, which refers to the introduction
of new digital media platforms like the Internet, Wireless technologies
and 3G mobile phones, provided a major turning point in the applica-
tion of ICT for development purposes. Much of the contemporary work
exploring the impact of ICT in the global South has focused on the
inequalities of ICT diffusion which has produced a 'digital divide'
between the global North and South, and within countries and cities.
The rapid spread of digitized information and communication technolo-
gies has the potential to engender widespread changes in labour mobil-
ity, social networking, production and knowledge transfer, although the
intersection of socio-economic status, age, gender, generation and geog-
raphy tends to increase the gap between the information 'have mores'
and those who 'have less'. One of the most important characteristics of
the global digital divide has been the capacity of different media plat-
forms in connecting poor, isolated communities.
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Internet Access in the Global South
Much of the literature on the digital divide has focused on the contin-
ued existence of a N-S divergence in Internet access. Although the
Internet has been an important tool in mobilizing new social move-
ments and enabling communities to campaign on social justice and
human rights issues, its overall impact has been limited in some
regions. Until recently, the reliance on Personal Computers (PCs) and
fixed telephone lines for accessing the Internet has restricted access in
the poorer countries of the world. Country averages for fixed line tele-
phone services have reached 60 per cent in Europe, but only 30 per cent
in the global South and 10 per cent in the world's 'least wired'
region - Africa. Although two billion people now have access to the
Internet worldwide, only 21 per cent of people in the global South are
online. Regional figures mask internal disparities within nations as
South America's Internet access ranges from 80 per cent in Argentina
to under 30 per cent in Bolivia and Peru. Although Internet penetration
