Digital Divides

In reading one of the articles this week, The use of social media in the Republic of Georgia and a discussion about American academic freedom with electronic communications (Noniashvili, M., Batiashvili, M., & Griffin, G. 2014), one of the many surprising facts I learned was how few people in Georgia were "internet subscribers". The article reports that approximately 500,000 people, or 10% of the popluation, have internet access (2014). Of this 10%, Facebook is the most commonly used socail media platform, with Twitter and LinkedIn growing in usage as people become more accustomed to technology (Noniashvili, M., Batiashvili, M., & Griffin, G. 2014).

Curious to see how this related to other developing countries, and even how statistics have changed since the article was published, I wanted to see what else I could find. I came across this article from Pew Global, entitled Social Media Use Continues to Rise in Developing Countries but Plateaus Across Developed Ones; Digital divide remains both within and across countries.  The title really shares a lot of what the article describes. There has been a continued increase in internet access and social media usage in developing countries since the previous study, whereas percentages have really leveled off in developed countries; there is still a large gap in access between developed and developing countries.  

Here are some graphs depicting the major findings:

A few takeaways from these graphs as well as the article for me: social media usage was reportedly so much lower in Europe than in other countries; smartphones are extremely common followed by flip phones while landlines are pretty much being passed over, and the gap between the percentage of use of social networking sites in developed (60) and developing (53) countries has become more narrow over the past few years.

It's important to note how much we rely on the internet for business and education. Accessibility all over the world is crucial to help developing countries grow and thrive, it's also important to remember that the US isn't at 100% either. Eric's blog on access sheds some light on that as well. The last piece of this article shows growth from 2013; Georgia is not one of the countries surveyed so unfortunately no update there, you can see data from other countries however.