Due to our newer found ability to communicate globally through the internet as, not only larger groups of people, but as single individuals, countries available to the internet have begun to evolve (in multiple ways) more rapidly. Of course, this brings us to the issue of ‘information poverty’ and the hard fact that many areas globally do not have the access to this enhanced communication, thus stunting the growth and separating them dramatically from the rest of the world. We (the people of the current times) can no longer look at land mass and population as a weighable statistic for future economic development, but must now look towards a slightly different aspect, the unseen virtual ‘land masses’ that are formed only by internet ‘hosts’. In Norris’s figure 3, “Distribution of Hosts”, the world changes dramatically, for only 40 percent (rough visual measurement from Norris’s hosts’ data) of the globe is keeping up with the technology.[1] Due to the aggressive growth created by the internet and its global users, this will leave many countries in the dust! This also brings up another question; how ‘world wide’ is this World Wide Web really?
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[1] Pippa Norris, “Information Poverty and the Wired World,” The Harvard International Journal of Press 2000
I like your last question, "how ‘world wide’ is this World Wide Web really?". It seems we come to believe that "World Wide Web" is really "world wide" because we use the term "world wide".
ReplyDeleteThe fact that the web isn't as "world wide" as we would expect causes nations with the most access to benefit from globalized communication. These are nations that are already in power, thus they can retain their strangle hold over the worlds global agenda.
ReplyDeleteGood point, One of our class mates mentioned in his introduction that he was writing from china(?) I believe... and it was very hard for him to access the interenet. Like anything else, it is a controlled space.
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