Wow:
More than one billion people in the world have access to the Internet, with a quarter of them with broadband, or high-speed connections, according to a survey.The report by the firm eMarketer said the milestone of one billion was reached in late 2005, and that nearly 250 million households had broadband connections.
The firm estimates that of these people, 845 million use the Internet regularly.
I know this means that the vast majority of the people on the planet still do not have access to the Internet -- as well as other such coolnessess as clean drinking water and reliable birth control -- but still: a billion people. A billion people interconnected. It’s not like the moment, whenever it was, when a billion people first had access to a telephone. That represented potential connection: you could, theoretically, call anybody else who had a phone, but for the connection thing to work, in a culturally meaningful way as well as in a technical way, you needed to have a reason to call someone as much as you needed the number at which to reach him or her. You had to already know with whom you wanted to communicate and what good they might do you -- from the good of calling a distant loved one just to hear the sound of his or her voice to the good of, oh, calling a newspaper reporter to blow the whistle on some corporate or governmental malfeasance -- in order for the social exchange to be achieved. Calling a number at random and attempting to communicate with whomever answered was unlikely to do much for you, and would probably piss off the recipient of such a call if he or she were unwilling to speak with you, which would probably be the case.
But the Internet, though... You can be one of those billion people and go online from anywhere in the world without a thought about what you’re looking for or why, and you can explore. With a few clicks of a mouse, you can be exposed not just to all manner of new ideas but to whole new ways of thinking. Other people who are online -- like the proprietors of Web sites, from individuals with something to say to corporations with something to sell -- are already there precisely because they want to communicate with you. They’re desperate to tell you why this politician is an idiot and that pop star is amazing and this widget will make your life easier. You can find places to commiserate with people whose problems are just like yours, and places to meet people with problems you never even imagined people could have.
(I’m pretending for the moment that many of those 1 billion people are not having their online experience limited by government censorship of the Net. We’ll find a solution for that, I’m confident.)
To call it information overload is to suggest that the deluge of information is unwanted or unpleasant... but how many new users get hooked on the flow almost instantly? I know I did, and when I first got online I was dialing in to individual BBSes before everything was linked up on the Web, and that comparatively tiny trickle was delightfully overwhelming. I can’t even imagine what going online for the first time today must be like.
I read a book recently that imagined it for me: Geoff Ryman’s extraordinary SF novel Air. It’s set in the near future as a new technology called Air is about to take over information exchange -- it’s basically the Net in your head all the time -- and a test of Air, which hooks up the brains of the entire planet for a moment, gives an illiterate but insightfully smart woman in a farming village in rural Karzistan that still hasn’t gotten on the Net a hint of how tidally her people are going to be swamped by they are once again left behind by new technology. When the test fails to go terribly well for the planet and the deployment of Air is delayed, Mae uses the new breathing room to rush her village into the 21st century, discovering the Net of the year 2020 -- not unlike it is now, but with more audio and video and hence plenty of opportunity for someone who can’t read or write to participate -- and what it can do for her and her people. Air the book is many things (a beautifully evocative character drama, for one: Mae’s efforts are not entirely appreciated by her family and neighbors), but apropos of global connectivity, it is an inspiring story of how more communication does not necessarily have to result in the watering down of the uniqueness of local cultures, and can, in fact, enhance them and ensure their survival. And Mae’s first exploratory forays online illustrate how you don’t even have to know what you’re looking for to benefit from the Net. She makes some amazing and unexpected friends online, people she would never have had any contact with, people who would never have known she existed, and they help one another in ways neither of them could have expected.
It makes ya wonder what all those lonely Internet users in Ireland are so lonely about...
(Technorati tags: Web, Internet, Geoff Ryman, culture)
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