Thank you very much. These were indeed very worth spent 15 minutes ;)

I knew your model was just to describe a scenario, but I wondered how to possibly make it more realistic (-:

Out of curiosity, if you have the dataset already ready and 15 spare minutes, try this primitive analysis. Let’s not consider linear or logistic trend but just absolute magnitude and give the meaning of “shrinking” just as “reducing”. For each country calculate this:

X=│(Xt-1)-(Lt-1)│-│(Xt)-(Lt)│

where X is the country under analysis, L is the leading country, t-1 is the value of 2007, and t the value of 2008. Both subtractions should be taken as absolute value. Plot the results as you did with your example and see what it come out, my intuition may be completely wrong (-:

Sorry if I misled anyone, but I did not pretend to describe a “model”, but just to picture how whould a shrinking divide look like. And to make it clearer, I made the radical assumption of shortening distances by half (it’s always useful to go to the extremes to make examples more clear).

But, definitely, that was no model, no forecast, no anything: just a didactic device ;)

Thanks, very interesting post! I liked your approach but I wonder how much your hypothetical model can fit into the reality. We know that a technological adaption – as mobile penetration – usually follows a logistic trend (or a similar one, e.g. Gompertz curve), therefore assuming that last year the digital divide have reduced by magnitude of half could be possible only if an economy is over the inflection point of the curve. And I suspect that that situation is unlikely for most of the countries.

Does it make any sense to you? If so, can somehow your model embed this trend? Possibly my comment is plain wrong (-:

A symptom of this trend is the shrinking atomic unit of consumption – described by Google’s Marissa Mayer (to the US congress, interestingly): http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/05/atomic-unit-of-online-consumption.html

Best,

Glenn Friesen
@glennisaac

I think changes are possible, but we shouldn’t take them for granted and achieving some goals will require quite some efforts.

The forces that have moved the world haven’t changed since the beginning. Power and strenth superiority have dictated the most important events in history. ICT meant in its start, as for many new communication environments, an opportunity to define some secanrios of freedom and equal opportunities, but the power of strong actors is dictating the rules placing pressure on the politicians to restrict freedom inside the Internet. Democracy will take place in the same conditions as always. People, citizens will have to fight to protect their rights and interests by counterbalancing economic powerful interests, with the power of votes and open fora.

The case of thecopyrights’ protection forced by the media companies (not the authors), the difference of quality and prices of Internet access, in the different countries, according to non social reasons, but to mere speculative ones; and the understanding that some carriers like Telefonica or Vodafone that they are the masters of the network and those who provide services and increase the traffic load in the network should pay for it (instead of getting payed for attracting more users and providing usefulness to the network – say Google), are examples of how the expected free communication highway is becoming another selective communication environment.

Nothing’s different after 60,000 years. Isn’t it so?