Digital Media and Society

What is the internet?

The internet is the wider network that allows
computer networks around the world run by
companies, governments, universities and other
organisations to talk to one another.
The result is a mass of cables, computers, data
centres, routers, servers, repeaters, satellites and wifi
towers that allows digital information to travel
around the world.
It is that infrastructure that lets you order the weekly
shop, share your life on Facebook, stream Outcast on
Netflix, email your aunt in Wollongong and search the
web for the world’s tiniest cat.
How big is the internet?
One measure is the amount of information that
courses through it: about five exabytes a day.
That’s equivalent to 40,000 two-hour movies per
second.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/499431/global-ip-
data-traffic-forecast/
Hundreds of thousands of miles of cables criss-cross
countries, and more are laid along sea floors to
connect islands and continents.
About 300 submarine cables, the deep-sea variant
only as thick as a garden hose, underpin the modern
internet. Most are bundles of hair-thin fibre optics
that carry data at the speed of light.
The cables range from the 130-km Dublin to Anglesey
connection to the 20,000-km Asia-America Gateway,
which links California to Hong Kong and other places
in Asia. Major cables serve a huge number of people.
In 2008, damage to two marine cables near the
Egyptian port of Alexandria affected tens of millions
of internet users in Africa, India, Pakistan and the
Middle East.
In 2020, the chief of the British defence staff warned
that ‘rogue’ nations could pose a threat to
international commerce and the internet if they chose
to destroy marine cables.
How much energy does the internet use?
The Chinese telecoms firm Huawei estimates that the
information and communications technology (ICT)
industry could use 20% of the world’s electricity and
release more than 5% of the world’s carbon emissions by
2025. The study’s author, Anders Andrae, said the
coming “tsunami of data” was to blame.
In 2016, the US government estimated that American data
centres might need 73bn kWh of energy in 2020. That’s
the output of 10 nuclear power stations.
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/data-
centre-investment-in-ireland-to-near-9bn-by-2021-
1.3456781
What is the world wide web?
The web is a way to view and share information over
the internet. That information, be it text, music,
photos or videos or whatever, is written on web pages
served up by a web browser.
Google handles more than 40,000 searches per second,
and has 60% of the global browser market through
Chrome. There are nearly 2bn websites in existence,
most are hardly visited. The top 0.1% of websites
(roughly 5m) attract more than half of the world’s web
traffic.
Among them are Google, YouTube, Facebook, the
Chinese site Baidu, Instagram, Yahoo, Twitter, the
Russian social network VK.com, Wikipedia, Amazon
and a smattering of other sites.
The rise of apps means that for many people, being on
the internet today is less about browsing the open
web than getting more focused information: news,
messages, weather forecasts, videos and the like.
It depends how you measure it. One metric popular
with the International Telecommunications Union
(ITU), a UN body, counts being online as having used
the internet in the past three months.
It means people are not assumed to use the internet
simply because they live in a town with an internet
cable or near a wifi tower. By this yardstick, some 3.58
billion people, or 48% of the global population, were
online by the end of 2017. The number would reach
3.8 billion, or 49.2%, by the end of 2018, with half of
the world being online by May 2019.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/617136/digital-
population-worldwide/
Fixed-line internet connections are expensive in
developing countries, so most people connect
through their mobile phones. The trend leads to a
two-tier experience of the internet that is hidden by
growth figures.
What can be done on a mobile phone is a fraction of
what can be achieved with a desktop, laptop or tablet,
as anyone who has tried to file their tax return on
their mobile will know.
“The distinction often gets lost in the discussion
around access and affordability,” says Dhanaraj
Thakur, research director at the Web Foundation.
“We can say that 50% of the world is using the
internet, but the majority are using it on their phones.
In terms of productivity, that is completely different
to using a desktop or laptop.”
The popularity of mobile internet leads to other issues
too. In Africa, for example, the telcos incentivise
people to buy 20MB to 1GB data bundles by offering
access to key apps -
apps such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Gmail
and Twitter, even when they run out of data. The
upshot is that people associate the internet with those
platforms rather than the open web. Some even fail to
realise they are using the internet.
The issue came to light when surveys in Africa and
southeast Asia found that more people said they used
Facebook than went online. “For them Facebook is
the internet. They are not exploring beyond it,” said
Nanjira Sambuli, who leads the Web Foundation’s
efforts to promote equality in access to the web.
Who are they?
In some countries nearly everyone is online. More than
98% of Icelanders are on the internet, with similar
percentages in Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg and
Bahrain, the ITU says. In Britain about 95% are online,
compared with 95% in Germany, 92% in Ireland.
The Digital Divide is causing much concern:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQD5soc2r7Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4N-aprAI86w
Meanwhile, a 2018 report from the Pew Research
Center found that 89% of Americans are online. The
unconnected tend to be poorer, older, less educated
and rural. The west does not dominate the online
world, though.
While the US has around 300 million internet users,
China notched up more than 800 million in 2018, with
40% of its population still unconnected.
India reached an estimated 500 million internet users
this year, with 60% of the nation still offline.
What are they doing? What’s going on?
A minute on the internet looks like this: 156m emails,
29m messages, 1.5m Spotify songs, 4m Google
searches, 2m minutes of Skype calls, 350,000 tweets,
243,000 photos posted on Facebook, 87,000 hours of
Netflix, 65,000 pictures put on Instagram, 25,000
posts on Tumblr, 18,000 matches on Tinder, and 400
hours of video uploaded to YouTube.
Most consumer internet traffic is video: add up all the
online video watched on websites, YouTube, Netflix
and webcams and you have ………?
77% of the world’s internet traffic, according to US
tech firm Cisco.
What places are offline?
There is a stark divide between the haves and have-
nots and poverty is an overwhelming factor. In the
urban centres of some African nations, internet access
is routine.
More than half of South Africans and Moroccans are
online, and parts of other countries, such as
Botswana, Cameroon and Gabon, are connecting fast.
But it is mobile phones that are driving growth thanks
to mobile broadband costs falling 50% in the past
three years.
But plenty of places are not keeping pace. In
Tanzania, Uganda and Sudan, around 30 to 40% can
get online. In Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone only 7
to 11% are online.
In Eritrea and Somalia, less than 2% have access. To
build a mobile hotspot in a remote, off-grid village
can cost three times the urban equivalent,
which reaches far more people and so brings a much
greater return on investment. In rural communities,
there is often little demand for the internet because
people do not see the point: the web does not serve
their interests.
Are certain groups offline?
There is a clear age divide: far fewer older people use
the internet than young. In Britain, 99% of 16- to 34-
year-olds are online, the 75-and-overs make up more
than half of the 4.5 million who have never used the
internet, according to the Office of National Statistics.
In Ireland, of the 16-29 years age category, 92%
accessed the internet every day, compared with 31% of
the 60-74 years age group.
Over half (52%) of internet users in the latter age
category did not use the internet within the 3 months
prior to interview.
 By comparison, 84% of individuals in the 30-44 years
age group accessed the internet every day, as in 2016
also, but an increase of five percentage points when
compared with the same age cohort in 2015.
Central Statistics Office – July 2017.
There is a serious gender gap too. In two-thirds of the
world’s nations, men dominate internet usage. Globally,
there are 12% fewer women online than men.
While the digital gender gap has narrowed in most
regions since 2013, it has widened in Africa. There, 25%
fewer women than men use the internet, the ITU says.
In Pakistan, men outnumber women online by
nearly two-to-one, while in India, 70% of internet users
are men. The divide largely reflects patriarchal traditions
and the inequalities they instil.
Some countries buck the trend, notably Jamaica,
where more women than men are online. This may be
because more women than men enrol at the
University of the West Indies in Kingston. The
country has the highest proportion of female
managers in the world.
How will the whole world get online?
A major challenge is to get affordable internet to
poor, rural regions. With an eye on expanding
markets, tech firms hope to make inroads.
Google’s parent company, Alphabet, scrapped plans
for solar powered drones and is now focusing on high-
altitude balloons to provide the internet from the
edge of space.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX and a company called OneWeb
have their own plans to bring internet access to
everyone in the world via constellations of
microsatellites.