Data on Internet and social media usage

One of the interesting things about the Internet is actually how difficult it is to find out detailed and accurate information about its usage, especially with respect to social media. The International Telecommunications Union does, though, provide some useful high level data.  Given all of the emphasis on the apparent ‘ubiquity’ of Internet use, these provide some very salient reminders that in 2011

• some 35% of the world’s population use the Internet – which means that 65% still do not!
• although 45% of Internet users are under 25, 75% of the world’s under-25s still do not use the Internet.
• there are twice as many mobile-broadband as there are fixed-broadband subscribers across the world

It is not just connectivity, though, that matters.  The available bandwidth and speed of connectivity are also crucial.  The following ITU graph (click on image for larger version) thus illustrates the enormous contrasts that still exist in this respect:

Whereas more than 95% of fixed broadband connections in South Korea have advertised speeds of ≥ 10 Mbit/s, some 98% of connections in Ghana, Venezuela and Mongolia have speeds of ≤ 2 Mbit/s.

Of equal concern is the observation that the least developed countries are being left further and further behind in the race for digital connectivity.  In a striking report on the role of ICTs in the “least developed countries”, the ITU  shows this particularly graphically in the chart below (click on image for larger version), which illustrates the percentages of people who are Internet users:

This shows, for example, that the difference between the percentage of Internet users in the “developed” and the “least developed” countries in 2000 was only about 25 people per 100, whereas by 2010 it had leaped to more than 68 people per 100.  Despite growth in the number of Internet users in the developing countries, they were likewise still 50 people per 100 behind the “developed” countries in 2010.  The differences between rich and poor are thus getting dramatically bigger rather than lessening.

As 2012 gets underway, let us all commit ourselves more strongly than ever before to ensuring that these trends are reversed, and that the world’s poorest and most marginalised are indeed able to benefit from the ICTs that so many people living in the richest countries of the world now take for granted.

One aspect of data on Internet usage that I find particularly frustrating is the difficulty of finding accurate information on social media usage.  This is especially important when there is so much rhetoric about the ways in which such media are transforming social, economic, political and cultural life.  It seems to me that, once again, this may well be true of the world’s richest 10% or so of people, but is scarcely true of the majority!

Facebook, for example, is renowned for how little information it shares, with its statistics page only giving very sparse information about five categories of data, including the ‘fact’ that there are 800 million active users.  But what does “Active Users” mean?  According to Facebook it is people who have returned to the site in the last 30 days, although we are told that half of these (c.400 million) use Facebook every day.  If the world’s population is taken as being ‘approximately’ 6.984 billion, that means that about 1 in 17.46 people are using Facebook every day.  Before we get too carried away with the enormity of this figure, we should recognise that this is only 5.7% of the world’s population, which means that a huge 94.3% of the world’s people do not use Facebook daily!

It is likewise not that easy to find out detailed data from Twitter, although officially some 177 million Tweets were sent on 11 March 2011.  In the above vein, though, it should be noted that this is equivalent to only 1 per every 2.5% of the world’s population (some useful sites providing more comprehensive visual summaries of data on Twitter include MarketingGum and digitalbuzz, although these are becoming rather dated; see also report on CMSWire). In September 2011, Twitter announced that it had 100 million active global users logging in once a month – but again this only represents 1.4% of the world’s population!

When we read about how Facebook and Twitter are going to change the world, we therefore need to think very carefully about whose world, and the kind of world they might create.  To be sure, digital technologies have enormous potential to serve the interests of the poorest and most marginalised, and the numbers of users of services such as Twitter and Facebook are indeed increasing impressively, but with such low levels of global reach they are not yet the dominant force that many would claim them to be – or indeed some users might like to think they are!  So, how many people have more than 1000 followers on Twitter?!

The World Bank ‘releases’ its data

Yesterday, the World Bank announced the good news that it is making all of its statistical information available freely to anyone who has access to the Internet. As World Bank Group President Robert B. Zoellick commented, “I believe it’s important to make the data and knowledge of the World Bank available to everyone,” … “Statistics tell the story of people in developing and emerging countries and can play an important part in helping to overcome poverty. They are now easily accessible on the Web for all users, and can be used to create new apps for development”. The database includes some 331 of the World Development Indicators (WDI) covering 209 countries from 1960 to 2008 translated into Spanish, French and Arabic.

However, this reveals what is very much a ‘World Bank’ view of the world.  The data are only partial, and should never be seen in some ways as ‘hard facts’.  There is a real danger that sources such as this may be used uncritically to give misleading views of international development.  Take education for example. There are only 5 indicators that show up when a search on “Find an Indicator” is done for “education” among the 331 indicators made available in this way:

• public spending on education as a % of GDP
• public spending on education as a % of government expenditure
• ratio of female to male enrollments in tertiary education
• ratio of girls to boys in primary and secondary education
• trained teachers in primary education as a % of total teachers

However,  using “Topics”, one can find a further 24 indicators about education, and this provides a much more balanced view of global education.   On delving deeper, it is possible to access a still more detailed set of data from the databank itself.  Here, there are some 1247 different time series on educational data, and they can also be downloaded for free.  This is indeed a valuable resource.

Another problematic feature of the main public database is its maps.  At first sight, these could be seen to be  helpful visualisations of the data, but they are fundamentally misleading, because they use proportional symbols to represent % data – the higher the percentage, the larger the circle.  While such symbols are fine for absolute data (such as total GNI), they are inappropriate for showing ratios such as percentages for a spatial territory (such as % enrollment in secondary education).   For such data, it is much more appropriate to use choropleth maps that shade the areas in different densities.

These criticisms having been noted, we should applaud the World Bank for sharing its statistical understanding of the world in such an accessible way.  It tells us as much about the Bank as it does about development.

Is this a normal distribution?

One of the challenges I have taken on is that of trying to make statistics and quantitative methods interesting to Master’s students, most of whom are highly committed to qualitative and ethnographic approaches.  This must imply that either senility, or madness, has taken hold a little early…

So, in an effort to enliven things today, I thought that we would use ourselves to illustrate a frequency distribution…

Judge whether this is normal or not – and then pick out who is enrolled in the Master’s course on Practising Sustainable Development, and who on the Course on Cultural Geography!

Thanks Bjorn for the photo…