The World of the Internet

Access to the Internet is becoming more of a concern for me as my dependency upon it, perhaps hazardously, is growing. Of course, its hard to measure how much of this dependency stems from elements beyond my control (digital business in globalization), yet a substantial chunk of it is independent personal use.

The Business 2.0 section of CNN.com has come up with a map of internet saturation in every country of the world (though its a bit hard to navigate) - Percentage of People Online. It follows that the dependency of a population must have something to do with these statistics, and if you choose to make the inference, economic prosperity.

Another relatively obvious, but interesting consideration is that mobile phone saturation levels are much higher. Europe nearly has more cell phones than people. The significance of cell phone growth in Africa has been said to have been about as important "as a democratic change in leadership". And in India, the percentage doubled in 2006.

Meanwhile, Internet access on a mobile phone is becoming easier and more standardized by the day.

As using a mobile phone is apparently easier than using a computer (as the saturation levels point out), the future of internet access would seem to be even brighter. More people and more business will continue to "log on" (and by the way, does anyone say "log on" anymore?)

More...

• Sweden: the apparent leader in population online
  
• Are we too dependent? The latest power outage in California exposes some weaknesses. I even heard it called "a disturbance in the force".
• Earlier post on the mobile phone