Only One Quarter of the Planet To Be Online By 2012 206
Stony Stevenson writes "Researchers are predicting that one quarter of the world's population will be connected to the internet within the next four years. According to the report by Jupiter Research, the total number of people online will climb to 1.8 billion by 2012, encompassing roughly 25 percent of the planet. The company sees the highest growth rates in areas such as China, Russia, India and Brazil. Overall, the number of users online is predicted to grow by 44 percent in the time period between 2007 and 2012." Is it just me or does that seem incredibly small?
yes, it's small (Score:3, Interesting)
Not a fair normalization... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It may be small... (Score:5, Interesting)
OK, I'm going to go completely outside the box for a moment and risk getting mocked for this, but what the hell...
What if we did get people without food and clean water online?
There is enough clean water for everyone. There is enough food for everyone. It isn't getting to the people that need it for various reasons; corruption, war, market failures. The common thread in these is a lack of correct information; corruption involves people deliberately misrepresenting information, war makes it dangerous to collect information, and market failures are normally trigged by bad information.
Areas where people starve are normally pretty opaque to information and that makes it harder to help people. If we were to give people in these areas better means of communication might it help allocate resources to solving the problems of food, water etc? It would be similar to how mobile phones were used to let the world know what was happening in Burma not long ago. Better information means better action.
Re:It may be small... (Score:3, Interesting)
Chances are there are already people who are living where the food and water are, and they will shoot you (or confine you to a refugee camp) if you try to move there and compete for those resources.
Re:It may be small... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:It may be small... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It may be small... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:It may be small... (Score:3, Interesting)
How do you propose we get Internet access to these people? We can't even get food or water to them. You listed corruption, war, and market failures as reasons for that but then you ignore them when you start talking about the Internet. Food and water don't need much infrastructure for transport, just people. Unfortunately, the Internet doesn't work like that.
Re:It is small, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
There is no middle ground. You will not see a day laborer hitting up a cafe to check his email. Just no.
Re:It may be small... (Score:3, Interesting)
I kind of like people... Being one and all.
I'm as misanthropic as the next basement dweller, but I have some issues with forced sterilization, and mass murder. I can understand (if not fully agree) with people who think that other species/ecosystems have as much right to exist as we do, but when we even even further decided that they have MORE rights, then I get a little confused. Aren't we just another species, and our cities/town/ghettos just another ecosystem?
The way I see it, the best way to improve conditions for everyone and everything is education. The more educated people are, the less children they have, the less they buy into extreme religious dogmas (which can be detrimental to human conditions). Education is also good for organization, which is essential for improving conditions, since most of the 3rd worlds problems can be attributed to bad governments.
Education would also increase the use of birth-control, both by giving people foresight, and by limiting bad religious dogmas against it. Which would lead to a decrease in population growth (many UN charts already show it evening out in the near future), in a couple decades perhaps Africa would be showing the same trend of much of the first world, falling populations.
Of course on problem with this is that these newly educated society would want the west's toys, meaning rabid (typo for rapid, but they both fit) industrialization, and all the problems that causes (see China).
But then to get a good education, the third world would also have to have stable governments first. Which is a somewhat a circular argument.