Pun intended, hehehe. I went through the Smart Mobs RSS feed for the first time in a while today, and a number of links I’ve found today get me thinking:
- The next five billion Internet users will be in India and China. There’s a link to an interesting podcast about the cultural issues involved. Also, the number of Chinese internet users will soon be greater than the number of people online in the US, with Chinese also becoming the largest online language.
- Meanwhile, the Central Asian state of Turkmenistan is about to give its public internet access for the first time.
- And, on the other side of China, South Korea is home to the world’s largest online community: Cyworld, with 19,996,000 members. 10,000 sign up every day; 950,000 are over 50 years old.
Of course, computers and internet access aren’t the only ways of connecting with people around the world. I find that I often contact people in other countries via SMS; it’s cheap, immediate, and personal. For many people around the world, mobile phones are much cheaper and more appropriate than computers:
- Just under a billion SMS messages were sent on the eve of Chinese New Year by residents of Beijing and Shanghai alone.
- China has the largest number of mobile phone subscribers in the world, expected to reach 520 million by the end of 2007.
- Switching continents, in 10 African countries, mobile phones are being used to assist health workers in the field in their fight against AIDS;
- while in Zimbabwe, SMS text messages are being used by journalists to circumvent government censorship, and get the news to the people in < 160 characters.
Both of these last two topics have potential Chinese applications as well. I was having a conversation with friends about this recently. One of China’s biggest, and eternal, problems – going far back into Imperial times – is the corruption of, and abuse of power by, local officials. The Chinese people themselves have just had to suffer, because it has rarely been possible to complain or obtain justice: “The mountains are high, and the Emperor is far away“.
Now, with the central government seemingly serious about attacking entrenched corruption, will the spread of mobile phones and internet connectivity mean that the mountains will be ‘levelled’, and the ‘Emperor’ just an SMS away?
