Briding of global digital divide

I was looking at some archival stats on Internet usage.

Compare the Top 10 Internet languages in 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 and the latest (Dec 2009 for me, your mileage may vary as that link is dynamic).

Look at the 2004 numbers: it is very much the core, developed, First world, China aside.

Still, its pitiful penetration numbers aside... what was (is?) wrong with France, Spain and Portugal? Their penetration numbers are China-like (~10%), whereas the rest of Europea was around 50%.

Now, look at 2010. In addition to China, whose penetration number have improved greatly (from 2004's 8% to 29.7%), note the inclusion of Arabic (17.5%) and Russian (32.3%). 

Oh, don't get confused with langauges and countries. I was for a moment shocked with low penetration numbers for French, Spanish and Portugal, but remember - those languages are spoken in many periphery, developing, Third World countries in Africa and Latin & South America- thus the pitiful results (here are EU stats, and here is a breakdown for Spanish language, for example).

One of the most interesting numbers, for me, is the diminishing percentage of English-speakers as the % of Internet users - from 35.9% in 2004 to 30.1% in 2009.

And how about tripling of Internet users totals in non-Top 10 languages (from 100m to 300m), or nearly doubling of Internet users totals (from 800m to 1,400m) in that period?

Around 2006 the stat site started to report "Internet Growth for Language (since 2000)". For 2006, it was 128% for English, 346% for Chinese, 436% for non-Top 10 languages, and 189% for all languages. In 2007, Arabic enters the chart, with 940% growth (!). For 2009 we have 251.7% for English, 1162% for Chines, 2297% for Arabic, 525% for non-Top-10 languages and 400% for the world.

Global digital divide still exists, no doubt about that.  But it is being bridged, as the rest of the world is catching up. 'bout time...

PS. Here's an interesting take on this from The Economist.

Preeliminary survey results of ICT use by social movements worldwide

The first results of my global survey are here. So, what are the numbers? See them on Google Docs.

Those are very early results, and I am hoping to increase the response rate significantly (as in: from ~5% to at least 15-30%). A more international response would be nice, too, although it is inevitable that a Western/English bias will appear (English hegemony of the Internet, etc.).

The results linked above combine results from my local and current global survey, for a net total of 62 responses. For results from the first, local survey (Pittsburgh, PA, USA) only, see here.

Once I get enough responses from the global survey, I will post another update here.

The survey is still ongoing (and likely will be for a few more months). If you would like to take it, and did not receive an @ from me with the invitation to it, you can use this generic link to access the survey.

Preeliminary survey results of ICT use by social movements in Pittsburgh - update

A month ago I released the preliminary results with ~10% response rate and promised that I'll release new results when we cross magical numbers of ~20% and (target) ~30%. Now we are midway at ~20% and hence I'd like to update you the new insights gained from the survey.

Before I go into the numbers, first, an interesting observation that comes from some interviews / phone conversations I recently had with some of the respondents. Many do not consider their organization a part of a "social movement" - yet at the same time they are happy to be listed as a group for "social justice and change" on TMC website. This shows that there is an interesting difference between academic (ivory tower...) definition of what a social movement is, and what an average person (activist...) thinks of it. Plus, from the academic perspective, there is the problem of blurry boundaries - some organizations may be seen as not part of the movement itself, but rather, of the allied "movement community", which can be best understood as the attitude "we are not activists, but we broadly support them". And since in real life it is often difficult to distinguish where the movement stops and the community begins, it is understandable that my survey will reach both spectrums - which I think is fine, as community organizations are no less important (if less showcased) than the movement ones. So if you are not sure if your organization is part of the movement, you can rest assured that as long as you are fine with being listed on TMC list, you are part of the larger community that I am interested in :)

Now, back to business. With the response rate doubling, what has changed?
* a few newer organizations have replied (out of 19 respondents, 3 are in the "our organization is 2 years or younger group", and 16 are in "our organization is 5 years or older group")
* as for areas of focus, environment (9 respondents), health (7) and community and social services (7) are still among the most popular, but have been joined by education (7) and human rights (7).
* so what's unimportant? Culture (4), intellectual property / free culture (6), Internet / network neutrality / digital divide (6) and religion (4) were all selected but ranked only in the third tier ("Least important" - but still important enough to be ranked as third), and
economy / promoting business / labor / trade and commerce (6) is in the middle tier
* ~75% of organizations indicate they have non-members (supporters) who participate in their organization activities, about half have non-members who recruit others for the organization
* at this point, for every new innovative technology I suggest (from blogs through video-sharing sites, wikis to Twitter) there are respondents who indicate their organization finds it useful for something.

For the results to be considered reliable for academic research, a responce ratio of 30% is needed (which translates in ~10 more people taking the survey). Hopefully, in about a month, I'll be able to report that the local survey is done, and move on to my second stage - the international survey.

It is my hope that once the results are fully analyzed, you'll be able to look at what your peers are doing, and thus find some helpful solutions and strategies to benefit your organization.

Thanks to all that took the survey, and to those that will take it - a few minutes of your time greatly contributes to our understanding of how organizations desiring social change are using the tools of the Digital Age.

Youth today... and the future

So I had my final lecture today (teaching university undergrads about "sociology of the family") in the summer class I was teaching, and as usual in my classes, the final lecture looks at the future. We watched a video of Kurzweil, and had a discussion about things like genetic engineering, life expectancy, aging society, the Internet and so on. At one point, however, I was shocked: vast majority of the students seemed very opposed to the idea of immortality (which is increasingly becoming a serious possibility according to some scientists).

Interestingly, theirs were not the arguments I was used to hearing in the past ("it's not natural/it's against the religion/etc."). No, this bunch was rather... very, very pessimistic. They talked about boredom ("why would you want to leave forever? you'll just keep seeing more human misery"), about how the future will be scary (citing sci-fi antiutopias - Huxley, Wells, etc.), about how we have to deal with overpopulation and scarce resources and how immortality is unsustainable, and they even considered (and roughly supported) the idea that the government should make it illegal for people to achieve immortality (!).

I haven't held enough discussions on this subject to know if this group represents an outlier, or is there some current of pessimism about the future that is surfacing about the modern youth?

Being a singularitarian optimist myself I found their pessimism unsettling. Not to want to see the wonders of the future, not to want to live one life's fully... that's what *I* find scary.

Comparing Wikipedia to Second Life (popularity contest)

I recently found that a Wikipedia-related presentation of mine in a sociological conference (ASA in SF - let me know if anybody else is going there) got shifted to a Second Life track (it was supposed to be about online communities in general, but mysterious are the ways of conference and panel organizers).

So I thought I should at least pay a token attention to SL, and I thought about a brief numerical comparison. It is possible to consider the number of total registered accounts (en-Wiki 2009: ~10 mil, other Wikimedia Foundation projects 2009: ~10 mil, Second Life 2008: ~15 mil) but I run into a problem trying to get a wiki-equivalent of "average/highest number of active editors" (SL in early 2008: ~40,000 - but that's just for people logged in, doesn't say anything about their activity - one can leave a SL client running in the background... just like one can be logged in to Wikipedia for weeks).
What about Wiki? After some thought and discussion and a useful tool that was designed I begun compiling some stats based on a number of unique editors listed at RC page. There is still not enough data to see a clear trend, but numbers seem roughly consistent at about 800 registered users / 400 ips editing en-Wikipedia per hour and 90/30 per 5 minute periods.

As for Alexa traffic rank, SL is at megere ~4000, compared to our Top 10, but that of course simply reflects the fact that Wikipedia is useful for non-logged in users as well.

I wonder if we can indeed answer whether Wikipedia or SL is more popular? Wikipedia is more popular in general, but for logged in (registered) users, which one would be?

Preeliminary survey results of ICT use by social movements in Pittsburgh

I am a strong believer that science is for the people, not to be locked in ivory towers. Hence, over the coming months I will be publishing a series of blogs documenting research progress in my PhD dissertation, which, roughly, aims to survey and analyze how social movements are using new information and communication tools (think new media - blogs, twitter, wikis, etc.). This analysis should also show the wider public why such research is actually useful :)

To this date, while individual use of some of those tools in organizations was studied, nobody has tried to do a comprehensive analysis of how Internet-era ICT are affecting the social movements. This seems to be to be a major omission on the part of social movement researchers, and I believe that deeper understanding of this issue will be of much use both to the scholars, and to the movement activists themselves.

The first stage of my research involves surveying movements local to my region, which is Pittsburgh. Later stages should provide data on national and international levels.

The Pittsburgh survey takes advantage of the existence of a local social movement coordination organization, the Thomas Merton Center. A downside to this is that TMC has a left wing bias, and thus this survey is likely missing some right wing movements. This should not be an issue with the latter surveys, which will be based on more neutral sampling schemes. TMC list of "justice groups" has approximately 200 entries (193 to be exact), out of which, 125 seem to have or had online presence (i.e. I was able to find their contact info in form of an email (112) or web-based contact form (13)). I should note here that the TMC list has online contact info only for ~15% of the movements, the other 50% I googled myself.

This yields the first interesting statistic: in Pittsburgh region, we can say ~65% of movements have online presence. In other words, a decade into the 21st century, ~35% of local movements have never entered the Internet - an interesting comment on a digital divide, and a contradiction to an existing statistic by Surman (2001) who estimated, nearly a decade ago, that in the developed world, ~90% of voluntary organizations have internet presence. I am already wondering what will be the findings of my larger scale surveys.

Out of 125 online contact addresses, 2 have opted out before from being ever contact for future surveys (according to surveymonkey - the tool I use - database), and 21 have bounced, which indicates to me that that movement is no longer active. Thus the real sample size is 102. Out of those, I have gotten, two weeks and two mailings into the survey, 11 replies (10.7% response rate).

Here I want to heartily thank all the people who have taken time to complete the survey so far, and I should note that the survey is still open (and will be for several weeks), so if you would like to improve our understanding of the ICTs in movements in Pittsburgh, please consider taking the survey :) (please use a personalized email invitation link instead of this one if I have got a survey invitation from me before)

Now, onto the preliminary results. 11 is a relatively low respononse rate, and this does impact the validity of the results somewhat (just a few more responses would do wonders here). If and when I get more responses, I will post an updated analysis. Still, with 11 responses there is enough data to see some interesting patterns. I am bolding those that I found most surprising/interesting:

* all surveyed movements concentrate on local or regional issues
* 80% of surveyed movements are 20 or more years old, all are 5 or more years old
* more responses are need to reliably judge areas of interest, currently, environment, health and social services are the leading areas, but I think this may change if and when more movements reply to my survey
* most movement who replied have few hundreds members
* on average, organizations which replied have ~16 computes connected to the Internet
** Those two may indicate that primarily representatives of larger movements have responded to my survey so far... although it's hard to be sure, as there is no data on size of local movements (maybe most or nearly all movements are that large? Yet somehow I have my doubts here)
* all movements indicate that they have non-members (supporters) who participate in their organization activities, about half have non-members who recruit others for the organization
* member's age distribution seems to be concentrated in the 31-50 range
* majority of respondents think that Internet is very important to the organization (~60% declared it is very important, ~30% as important, only ~10% (=1...) as very unimportant

The second part of the survey, due to its matrix build, needs more replies to be valid; still, here are current highlights:
* face to face communication seems to be the single most important when it comes to management, recruitment, and fund raising, but ICTs become more important when it comes to interacting with other organizations. Usage of traditional mail, websites and emails is popular as well, but there a minority (10-20% = 1-2) of respondents indicate that their movements use new innovative technologies (blogs, internet foras, social tagging, social networking, Twitter, etc.).
* about half of the respondents agree that younger members are much more likely to use the Internet; only 15% disagree
* Internet seems to be used equally by all members, no matter what their rank in the organization
* Usage of tools is dependent on their recentness, more or less as we would expect, although interestingly, texting is used by three organizations - but only in since about a year
* There is strong correlation between ICTs - whether pre-Internet or post-Internet - and a feeling that they give both the individual and the organization more of a say. I would like to say that the the new ICTs are slightly more correlated with that then the old ones, but validity is really an issue here (more replies are needed for me to be able to discuss that)
* there seems to be a general interest in the ICTs, and several respondents indicated that their organization may use the newer, more innovative ones in the future
* at least two of the surveyed organizations are familiar with and are using wikis

That's it for the preeliminary analysis. Once again, I'd like to thank all who have taken (and will take...) their time to fill the survey. If you have not done so, I hope that the analysis above does show how valuable even one answer can be.

I will make a new update when the survey closes with more than 20 respondents, or as soon as that number is reached (and I will make further updates for each 10 more respondents). In theory, past studies suggest I should eventually get about 30 responses, since online survey response rate is about 30%. I will let you know if this holds true in my case :)

PS. The full dataset, minus any potentially confidential information (like emails and such) will be make available online once the survey is completed. Science is for the people...

Wikipedia statistics updated

Wikipedia en statistics have been updated updated, first time since 2006.

Find out more about it at Erik's blog (post1, post2).

Demise of blogging

So I don't blog as much as I used to - I was surprised to realize recently I went half a year without blogging. I wonder why... for now, while I mull over it, dearly hoping it's not because I have nothing more interesting to say, a link from The Economist - their idea why why blogging is on decline: we're mainstream now, folks.

For whom the bells toll

Two major print encyclopedias cease production

No suprise there. Back in 2004 in related news I blogged that ex-CEO of Britannica compared dictionaries to dinosaurs. In 2006 Nature dealt a death blow to Britannica. Recently I found out that Alexa graph comparing popularity of Britannica to Wikipedia has lost its usefulness - because Britannica line is now FLAT, so I have to use two graphs. Let them finish the story:

Popularity of Wikipedia vs...

...popularity of Britannica.

How long will we live?

Recently The Economist has published a very interesting article: Abolishing ageing: How to live forever. Considering that it is not a fringe publication, but a reliable mainstream one, it is certainly worth checking out. If The Economist thinks technologies increasing our life expectancy are worth writing about, they are no longer just a dream of a science-fiction authors.

For a follow up, read the very interesting article by Ray Kurzweil: The Law of Accelerating Returns.


Of course this may not happen. But it looks more and more likely that it will.

I don't know about you, but I wouldn't mind leaving forever. Or at least for a few thousands years :)

And if this seems weird or intimidating, do read Yudkowsky and Anissimov on the concept of shock levels:
* Future Shock Levels
* Future Shock Level Analysis

Lessons for the day:

Don't fear the future just because it's likely to be different.

Don't underestimate the probability of change because change intimidates you personally.