Well, and another milestone in my blogger experience. Thanks to the wonderful work done by Google Analytics i can see where is (almost) every person that reads the blog. The Geo map overlay of the last 500 visits are shown in the picture:
I know u cant see nothing in this view, please click on the image for appreciating the pretty orange points that represent your computers on the map. Actually the localized distribution of the people reading the blog is not surprising at all. Yesterday the Internet World Map 2007 was released in http://ipligence.com , from there this image was extracted:
It can be seen how the people hitting in this blog are confined to the areas of high density of the net. The data are quite shocking, large areas of the planet (and some of them very densely populated, Indonesia and India as the main example) are almost empty...but for putting some numbers to it, is good to recall the table ipligence provided:| Geographic Area | Number of Addresses | % of Addresses |
| Africa | 40.241.664 | 1.519% |
| Antartica | 15.620 | 0.001% |
| Asia | 371.297.015 | 14.015% |
| Caribbean | 1.681.866 | 0.063% |
| Central America | 2.557.340 | 0.097% |
| Europe | 569.838.903 | 21.510% |
| Middle East | 12.011.131 | 0.453% |
| North America | 1.481.754.661 | 55.932% |
| Oceania | 76.417.711 | 2.885% |
| South America | 93.409.304 | 3.525% |
Some striking data are: 1. fifteen thousand IPs in Antarctica?! (that was a surprise to me) 2. Taking into account that the population of US is only the 5% of the world total, they hold the 55% of addresses 3. Africa has the 13% of the world population and only 1.5% of the IPs...and so on. Because of this, is obvious that the most of information on the net is in English, which means that a person with no knowledge of English cannot retrieve most of the data, which is a massive language barrier. Furthermore, the levels of illiteracy in many developing countries make Internet an Utopian land for many (not very extreme estimations are that 30% of people in Egypt are illiterate). Others, simply do not have access the technology as many cannot afford a computer or even paying in an internet cafe. These fact is one of the main problems of the so called "Digital Divide", which refers to the gap between those who benefit from digital technology and those who do not (please visit digitaldivide.org for a more detailed description of this global problem). Anyway those who can read and write and have access to the tech dedicate most of their online time in playing games, chatting, porn and downloading...Even in developed countries many times educated people do not make a great use of the vast amount of resources available; there are many many PhD students in European Universities that still make their research in Google (not even the scholar version).
So why is all this mess??? we have been lucky enough to be blessed with one of the most powerful cultural advances (if not the most) of all human history: the computers and the net. The last time that a similar cultural revolution took place was with the invention of the book (through the Arabs that stole the paper technology from two Chinese prisoners :P and then improved greatly the fabrication processes) and the invention of the movable character print by Gutenberg. The time that passed from the moment of the inventions until the majority of people could benefit from that massive cultural tool were centuries. So it happens now, we have an amazing tool without instructions. The people of my generation were educated in a system developed for the old world by educators that thought that www was some association of world wrestling. They did not know, they never taught us. We had to discover ourselves, to explore a vast unknown land with no much guidance...and we still are. I understand it can be very discouraging to search in the net, spending time in distinguishing between useful data and crap... it can be quite overwhelming, but that cannot be an excuse...lets go and use already discovered resources, discover new resources we did not know, use them wisely, identify new resources, use the tools to spread knowledge, to collaborate, to bridge through national borders. Do not forget that, until very recently, information was a rare precious thing. My parents in Spain could not get newspapers from France 40 years ago, and today we can read the news in real time or speak with people from many different countries just with a click.....enjoy the wonderful opportunity that is to have access to information. Enjoy the wonderful opportunity that is to have access to information from this side of the digital divide.
So why is all this mess??? we have been lucky enough to be blessed with one of the most powerful cultural advances (if not the most) of all human history: the computers and the net. The last time that a similar cultural revolution took place was with the invention of the book (through the Arabs that stole the paper technology from two Chinese prisoners :P and then improved greatly the fabrication processes) and the invention of the movable character print by Gutenberg. The time that passed from the moment of the inventions until the majority of people could benefit from that massive cultural tool were centuries. So it happens now, we have an amazing tool without instructions. The people of my generation were educated in a system developed for the old world by educators that thought that www was some association of world wrestling. They did not know, they never taught us. We had to discover ourselves, to explore a vast unknown land with no much guidance...and we still are. I understand it can be very discouraging to search in the net, spending time in distinguishing between useful data and crap... it can be quite overwhelming, but that cannot be an excuse...lets go and use already discovered resources, discover new resources we did not know, use them wisely, identify new resources, use the tools to spread knowledge, to collaborate, to bridge through national borders. Do not forget that, until very recently, information was a rare precious thing. My parents in Spain could not get newspapers from France 40 years ago, and today we can read the news in real time or speak with people from many different countries just with a click.....enjoy the wonderful opportunity that is to have access to information. Enjoy the wonderful opportunity that is to have access to information from this side of the digital divide.
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