A recent news report on North Korean refugees provided plenty of details concerning misery inside their closed nation, including famine, bodies in the street, prison camps, and totally deranged government policy. But one fact was truly a jaw dropper: refugees had never even heard of the Internet until they snuck over the border into China.
Imagine a nation of 24 million people unable to connect on Facebook and read what someone they vaguely know is going to be doing after work; people who can’t learn Lindsey Lohan’s personal thoughts on jail via Twitter; people who can’t watch Mysteryguitarman videos at Youtube; people unable to seek their perfect mate at OKcupid; who can’t even download Lady Gaga’s latest hit.
Not only do North Koreans miss these daily online opportunities, most have apparently never even heard of the Internet.
This amounts to a 2010 version of those stories where hidden tribes have never seen an airplane, the kind of thing found in old National Geographic magazines. But this isn’t a hidden tribe, it’s an entire nation. Wow.
In discussion among the Progress editorial board, we pondered how many people are left in the world who have never heard of the Internet. We were betting zero percent in the developed world, but maybe quite a few in Africa, parts of Asia, and rainforests of South America.
Ironically, we turned to the Internet to get an estimate on how many people don’t know there is an Internet. But here it was no help to us, as, not-ironically, it was hard to get clear information. As is often the case searching the world’s accumulation of knowledge (and nonsense portrayed as knowledge) online, there is plenty of info, even too much info, and nothing to simply answer the one question.
We could find how many people had “personal access” but couldn’t find out what “personal access” meant. Here at the Progress, many of us let the newspaper supply our link to the Net and forego connections at home.
Does personal access include access through your local public library? A recent visit to the Pickens County Library confirmed many people use the former book stronghold mainly for its public computers now.
Some generally consistent statistics on the Internet showed three out of four Americans have some access to the Web, while worldwide, one out of four can update their Facebook pages and bid for junk on ebay. Across the rest of the world, Africa, at 8 percent access, has the lowest contact to the Web.
But no tidbit of info offered even an educated stab at how many people remain in blissful ignorance of trash sites out there like dlisted.com.
In Bhutan, a Himalayan nation of 60,000 that promotes “gross national happiness” over commerce, they have Internet access, but it’s in limited service areas, is mostly dial-up, and is restricted to an hour or two in government offices.
Imagine what U.S. productivity would do if Internet usage here were suddenly restricted during work hours? Maybe a surge of production to bust the recession?
According to the Internet, the people of Bhutan are not bothered by their lack of technology. In fact, the place replaced the only traffic light it once had in its capital city with a police officer directing traffic with graceful hand signals. An official explained that after the traffic light was installed, people didn’t like it––it was so “impersonal,” they said.
Going the North Korean route with a government that intentionally keeps people in the dark and prohibits Internet use is certainly nothing to be praised or emulated. Still, maybe all of us could benefit from more Bhutan-style thinking on technology.
Just because three out of four Americans have access to online news, shopping, blogging, socializing, games, and even education, it doesn’t mean we couldn’t occasionally replace a traffic signal with a real person. |
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