Who’s Connected How?

How are we supoosed to know what we are looking at? The United States has 73.4 under its name. Is that % with internet access or cellphones per 100 people? 

How is Taiwan not noted? They’ve got about 110 cell phones per 100 people.

Funny…I spent about 1 minute attempting to figure out the puzzle of these stats and gave up, but not before I read the previous three comments and exited with pleasure: in that brief minute, those exact three things also occurred to me too.  Poor presentation people!

Took me a while to figure this out. Should do 2 different charts.Why do so many people have more than 1 cell phone in those countries? I’d be interested to know what causes that. I can’t imagine having more than 1 cell phone.

Read the key in the bottom left corner. It’s top and bottom ten countries in each category. Yellow is for cell phones (per 100 people), green is for internet access (%). 

This map is really interesting – just take a few minutes to carefully read all the keys. The orange shows the 10 countries with the greatest number of cell phones per 100 people.  It is not a percentage.  If it says 130, that means that there are 130 cell phones per 100 people in that country.  It would be interesting to think about what causes some countries to have SO many cell phones – obviously there needs to be some minimum level of technology to support the phones (whereas those 10 countries in yellow that have the fewest number of cell phones per 100 people most likely have limited infrastructure or money or perhaps a government that resists building cell phone technology).  But there probably also needs to be something else that pushes such high cell phone use in the ‘orange’ countries.  For example, perhaps land line infrastructure is limited or very expensive.  The dark and light green countries show something else- they show the PERCENTAGE of people in that country that have access to the internet.  We could do a similar exercise of thinking about why some countries tend to have such high or low access (and why there is SUCH a stark contrast between rich and poor countries).An interesting addendum to this map would be an analysis of why certain countries have such high or low cell phone/internet access, and what the implications are for international social justice and development. /vanessa

We need definitions. What do we mean by “internt access”? People who have internet access in their homes? If that’s what is meant,  73.4% seems about right for the U.S. But what about public libraries and internet cafes (there still are a few in the US). That would likely push America’s number much higher.