COM 3332 Test 6 FSU Quizlet Seibert

New Zealand

2.8 million people accessed a social media site in New Zealand during November 2013. This category reached 94.6 percent of the total Kiwi internet audience. Facebook was the clear leader with 1.95 million unique visitors; more than double that of LinkedIn who came in second place with an audience of 798,000 unique visitors. In the past 12 months, LinkedIn displayed a strong growth (53 percent) with its population growing from 520,000 in December 2012 to 798,000 in November 2013. Blogger ranked in third position with 559,000 unique visitors that month. Analyzing the demographic profile of these social media sites in more detail shows that the professional networking platform, LinkedIn, attracted a large share of the older population with two thirds of their users over the age of 35 (68.6 percent), whilst more than half (55.3 percent) of Tumblr users are under 35. Facebook and Blogger share a similar audience composition, where the number of visitors aged 15-24 accounted for the largest segments of the Kiwi audience whereas people aged 55+ made up the biggest proportion of LinkedIn users in November 2013.

United Kingdom

According to Office for National Statistics , Social networking is an increasingly popular activity in the UK with half the adult population actively using a social platform. This degree of popularity is illustrated by ONS' European survey results which reveal that the UK is one of the leading countries across the EU in terms of the take-up of social networking. The UK has the second highest proportion of social networkers in the EU - this is true for both social networking in general and social networking via a mobile device. Below are the top social media platform in UK: Facebook - Its growth period has clearly come to an end, with Comscore reporting an end of december 2013 user base of just over 31M. Although there are still approximately 2.5 million 13-17 year olds using the site. The largest demographic remains the 25-34 year olds, with just under 26% of all users falling into this age bracket. Twitter - Twitters outgoing CEO announced a figure of 15m users in the UK last September. Growth remains steady with an estimated 15M users by the end of 2013. 80% of Twitter users in UK are active on mobiledevices , the majority of these likely to be Smartphone users.LinkedIn - LinkedIn, the business network had 10M+ active users in the UK by the end of 2013. Pinterest - One of the biggest growers. Pinterest's growth has been steady in the UK from 200,000 users 2011/early 2012 to over two million, at July 2013.Instagram - Instagram also continues to show good growth, with 200 million global users in late 2013 . Instagram have not released any UK specific data.Snapchat and WhasApp are the newest platforms being talked about in 2014 - particularly amongst the youngest demographic (13-20).

Russia

Based on online reports, Russia's online population has steadily grown to 56 million visitors, with 85% of them using social media. The Kremlin is slowly getting a tighter grip on social media platforms as VK.com was used to arrange anti-Putin protests. russian Social-media-usage Here are the top 5 Russian social media platforms: VKontakte (VK) - 49 Million active users and 239 Million accounts. VK is a Facebook like platform and is the second largest in Europe. VK.com is now owned by mail.ru and Putin friendly CEOs happy to give up user data. Odnoklassniki - 37+ Million active users and 148 Million accounts, Similar to classmates.com connecting school friends MoiMir - Brings together mail.ru custoners in one platformLiveJournal - Blogging platform with 3 million active accountsRutube - The top video platform in Russia with and estimated 30 million unique visitors per month.Facebook - 4th most used network. Russian parliament recently passed a bill to try and ban Tech firms from operating if they did not store their data in Russia. Once Putin took control of VK.com a huge amount of users shifted to Facebook, ironically for more privacy.Twitter - 10 million users and growing rapidly in the main cities. Lots of Western brands are doing well in Russia on Twitter as show by Socialbakers stats All the above platforms offer advertising to marketers. Contextual ads can be placed on these neworks via direct.Yandex

Brazil

Brazil was dubbed as "the social media capital of the universe" by the Wall Street Journal . Brazil is undoubtedly an enticing prospect for companies seeking to expand and broaden their audience and an exciting market to watch. 79% of Brazilian Internet users (some 78 million people) are now on social media, according to a newly released report from analysts eMarkeer. Facebook - Brazil already counts 65 million Facebook users , second only to the U.S. Its the worlds second-biggest user of Twitter (with 41.2 million tweeters and counting ) and the largest market outside the U.S. for YouTube . Meanwhile, a range of homegrown and foreign networks - from Google-owned Orkut to Ask.fm - keep social media users logged in for 9.7 hours a month, according to a 2013 comScore report . Plus ll signs indicate Brazil is just hitting its social stride. Average time spent on Facebook among Brazilians increased 208 percent last year , to 535 minutes per month. By comparison, global use declined by 2 percent during the same period. LinkedIn- In October 2012 the professional networking site was reaching more than 10 million people in Brazil. In looking at the comScore numbers, LinkedIn went from 3.6 million total unique visitors in October 2011 to 9.6 million in October 2012, a gain of 166% in the Brazilian marketOrkut - Although suffered a huge drops, Orkut still one of the most visited social media site in Brazil. In October 2011, Okurt hits 39 millions views however in 2012 it only records 14.9m visits"thats 58% drop off while Facebook grew by 30% in Brazil between October 2011 and October 2012. Twitter - Also drops significantly but still in #4 spot in terms of social media rank in Brazil. In October 2012 and had 9.2 million unique visitors from Brazil in that month, its dropped quite a bit compared to October 2011, when it had 13.3 million.Ask.fm, Tumblr, Scribd and Pinterest Are Growing Strongly" Ask.fm has exploded in Brazil, with nearly 8 million unique visitors in October 2012. Its now the #5 social site in the country. Pinterest drew just 16,000 unique visitors from Brazil in October 2011 but has now pulling in 499,000 visitors a month. Overall it ranks at #21 among social sites in Brazil, but the growth is worth noting for social media marketers. Micro blogging site Tumblr went from 4 million total unique visitors in Brazil in October 2011 to 5.6 million the following year. Finally, document-sharing website Scribd went from 740,000 unique Brazilian visitors in October 2011 to more than 2 million in October 2012 according to Latin Link reports.

A Brief History: The Bell System

For much of its history, AT&T and its Bell System functioned as a legally sanctioned, regulated monopoly. The fundamental principle, formulated by AT&T president Theodore Vail in 1907, was that the telephone by the nature of its technology would operate most efficiently as a monopoly providing universal service. Vail wrote in that year's AT&T Annual Report that government regulation, "provided it is independent, intelligent, considerate, thorough and just," was an appropriate and acceptable substitute for the competitive marketplace. The United States government accepted this principle, initially in a 1913 agreement known as the Kingsbury Commitment. As part of this agreement, AT&T agreed to connect non-competing independent telephone companies to its network and divest its controlling interest in Western Union telegraph. At several later points, as political philosophy evolved, federal administrations investigated the telephone monopoly in light of general antitrust law and alleged company abuses. One notable result was an anti-trust suit filed in 1949, which led in 1956 to a consent decree signed by AT&T and Department of Justice, and filed in court, whereby AT&T agreed to restrict its activities to the regulated business of the national telephone system and government work. Over the years AT&T's Bell System provided what was by all accounts the best telephone system in the world. The system made steady progress towards its goal of universal service, which came in the twenties and thirties to mean everyone should have a telephone. The percentage of American households with telephone service reached fifty percent in 1945, seventy percent in 1955, and ninety percent in 1969. Much of the leadership came by application of science and technology developed at AT&T's Bell Telephone Laboratories subsidiary. In the late 1940s, new technologies appeared that provided alternatives to copper wires for long-distancetelephone transmission. AT&T opened its first microwave relay system between the cities of New York and Bostonin 1948, and over the succeeding three decades added considerable microwave capacity to its nationwidelong-distance network. In 1962, AT&T placed the first commercial communications satellite, Telstar I, in orbit,offering an additional alternative especially suited to international communications. Technological changeselsewhere in the system offered parallel alternatives. The transition from electromechanical to electroniccomponents permitted new, more powerful, and eventually less expensive customer premises and networkequipment. Another result of these new technologies was to lower the technological barriers to entry by would-becompetitors to the Bell System. Slowly, over several decades, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the regulatory agency which oversees telecommunications in the United States, allowed some competition using these technologies at the edges of the network. By the mid-1970s, competition had advanced to general long-distance service. The changes in telecommunications during these years eventually led to an antitrust suit by the U.S. government against AT&T. The suit began in 1974 and was settled in January 1982 when AT&T agreed to divest itself of the wholly owned Bell operating companies that provided local exchange service. This would, the government believed, separate those parts of AT&T (the local exchanges) where the natural monopoly argument was still seen as valid from those parts (long distance, manufacturing, research and development), where competition was appropriate. In return, the U.S. Department of Justice agreed to lift the constraints of the 1956 decree. Divestiture took place on January 1, 1984, and the Bell System was dead. In its place was a new AT&T and seven regional Bell operating companies (collectively, the RBOCs.)

Internet Filtering Requirement

From 23 February 2012, Internet Access Service Providers (IASPs) such as SingTel, StarHub, and M1 are required under the Internet Class Licence to offer optional Internet filtering services to their subscribers at the point of subscription or renewal of their fixed residential Internet access subscriptions. This requirement was extended to cover mobile Internet access subscriptions from 30 June 2012. As the filtering services are optional, parents have to opt for or sign up for the filtering services if they want them. This new requirement by IMDA came amid growing concerns among parents that their children might be exposed to undesirable content such as pornography or extreme violence. The Internet filters which are offered by the IASPs can serve as one of the security tools to assist parents in blocking such content online. How to sign up? The IASPs currently offer optional filtering services for home broadband and select mobile Internet services. Parents who have already subscribed to the Internet, and are now interested in getting the Internet filters may enquire directly with their respective IASPs for more information.

Media Censorship in China

Introduction The Chinese government has long kept tight reins on both traditional and new media to avoid potential subversion of its authority. Its tactics often entail strict media controls using monitoring systems and firewalls, shuttering publications or websites, and jailing dissident journalists, bloggers, and activists. Googleâ€TMs battle with the Chinese government over internet censorship and the Norwegian Nobel Committeeâ€TMs awarding of the 2010 Peace Prize to jailed Chinese activist Liu Xiaobo have also increased international attention to censorship issues. At the same time, the countryâ€TMs burgeoning economy relies on the web for growth, and experts say the growing need for internet freedom is testing the regimeâ€TMs control. Official Media Policy Chinaâ€TMs constitution affords its citizens freedom of speech and press, but the opacity of Chinese media regulations allows authorities to crack down on news stories by claiming that they expose state secrets and endanger the country. The definition of state secrets in China remains vague, facilitating censorship of any information that authorities deem harmful [PDF] to their political or economic interests. CFR Senior Fellow Elizabeth C. Economy says the Chinese government is in a state of “schizophrenia†about media policy as it “goes back and forth, testing the line, knowing they need press freedom and the information it provides, but worried about opening the door to the type of freedoms that could lead to the regimeâ€TMs downfall.†The government issued in May 2010 its first white paper on the internet that focused on the concept of “internet sovereignty,†requiring all internet users in China, including foreign organizations and individuals, to abide by Chinese laws and regulations. Chinese internet companies are now required to sign the “Public Pledge on Self-Regulation and Professional Ethics for China Internet Industry,†which entails even stricter rules than those in the white paper, according to Jason Q. Ng, a specialist on Chinese media censorship and author of Blocked on Weibo. Since Chinese President Xi Jinping came to power, censorship of all forms of media has tightened. In February 2016, Xi announced new media policy for party and state news outlines: “All the work by the partyâ€TMs media must reflect the partyâ€TMs will, safeguard the partyâ€TMs authority, and safeguard the partyâ€TMs unity,†emphasizing that state media must align themselves with the “thought, politics, and actions†of the party leadership. A China Daily essay emphasized Xiâ€TMs policy, noting that “the nationâ€TMs media outlets are essential to political stability.†How Free Is Chinese Media? In 2016, Freedom House ranked China last for the second consecutive year out of sixty-five countries that represent 88 percent of the worldâ€TMs internet users. The France-based watchdog group Reporters Without Borders ranked China 176 out of 180 countries in its 2016 worldwide index of press freedom. Experts say Chinese media outlets usually employ their own monitors to ensure political acceptability of their content. Censorship guidelines are circulated weekly from the Communist Partyâ€TMs propaganda department and the governmentâ€TMs Bureau of Internet Affairs to prominent editors and media providers. Certain websites that the government deems potentially dangerousâ€"like Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and some Google servicesâ€"are fully blocked or temporarily “blacked out†during periods of controversy, such as the June 4 anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre or Hong Kongâ€TMs Umbrella Movement protests in the fall of 2014. Specific material considered a threat to political stability is also banned, including controversial photos and video, as well as search terms. The government is particularly keen on blocking reports of issues that could incite social unrest, like official corruption, the economy, health and environmental scandals, certain religious groups, and ethnic strife. The websites of Bloomberg news service, the New York Times, and other major international publications have periodically been blacked out, their journalists harassed and threatened, and visa applications denied. In 2012, Bloomberg and the New York Times both ran reports on the private wealth of then Party Secretary Xi Jinping and Premier Wen Jiabao. Restrictions have been also placed on micro-blogging services, often in response to sensitive subjects like corruption, including 2012 rumors of an attempted coup in Beijing involving the disgraced former Chongqing party chief Bo Xilai. Censors are also swift to block any mention of violent incidents related to Tibet or Chinaâ€TMs Xinjiang Autonomous Region, home to the mostly Muslim Uighur minority group, and the Falun Gong spiritual movement. The Censorship Groups More than a dozen government bodies review and enforce laws related to information flow within, into, and out of China. The most powerful monitoring body is the Communist Partyâ€TMs Central Propaganda Department (CPD), which coordinates with General Administration of Press and Publication and State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television to ensure content promotes party doctrine. Ng says that the various ministries once functioned as smaller fiefdoms of control, but have recently been more consolidated under the State Council Information Office, which has taken the lead on internet monitoring. The Chinese government employs large numbers of people to monitor and censor Chinaâ€TMs media. Experts refer to an October 2013 report in a state-run paper, the Beijing News, which said more than two million workers are responsible for reviewing internet posts using keyword searches and compiling reports for “decision makers.†These so-called “public opinion analysts†are hired both by the state and private companies to constantly monitor Chinaâ€TMs internet. Additionally, the CPD gives media outlets editorial guidelines as well as directives restricting coverage of politically sensitive topics. In one high-profile incident involving the liberal Guangdong magazine Southern Weekly, government censors rewrote the paperâ€TMs New Yearâ€TMs message from a call for reform to a tribute to the Communist Party. The move triggered mass demonstrations by the staff and general public, who demanded the resignation of the local propaganda bureau chief. While staff and censors reached a compromise that theoretically intended to relax some controls, much of the censorship remained in place. Exerting Control The Chinese government deploys myriad ways of censoring the internet. The Golden Shield Project, colloquially known as the Great Firewall, is the center of the governmentâ€TMs online censorship and surveillance effort. Its methods include bandwidth throttling, keyword filtering, and blockingaccess to certain websites. According to Reporters Without Borders, the firewall makes large-scale use of Deep Packet Inspection technology to block access based on keyword detection. As Ng points out, the government also employs a diverse range of methods to induce journalists to censor themselves, including dismissals and demotions, libel lawsuits, fines, arrests, and forced televised confessions. As of February 2017, thirty-eight journalists were imprisoned in China, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, a U.S.-based watchdog on press freedom issues. In 2009, Chinese rights activist Liu Xiaobo was sentenced to eleven years in prison for advocating democratic reforms and freedom of speech in Charter 08, a 2008 statement signed by more than two thousand prominent Chinese citizens that called for political and human rights reforms and an end to one-party rule.  When Liu won the Nobel Peace Prize, censors blocked the news in China. A year later, journalist Tan Zuoren was sentenced to five years in prison for drawing attention to government corruption and poor construction of school buildings that collapsed and killed thousands of children during the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan province. Early 2014 saw the government detain Gao Yu, a columnist who was jailed on accusations of leaking a Party communiqué titled Document 9. The State Internet Information Office tightened content restrictions in 2013 and appointed a new director of a powerful internet committee led by President Xi Jinping, who assumed power in late 2012. A July 2014 directive on journalist press passes bars reporters from releasing information from interviews or press conferences on social media without permission of their employer media organizations. And in early 2015, the government cracked down on virtual private networks (VPNs), making it more difficult to access U.S. sites like Google and Facebook. “By blocking these tools, the authorities are leaving people with fewer options and are forcing most to give up on circumvention and switch to domestic services,â€Â writes Charlie Smith [pseudonym], a cofounder of FreeWeibo.com and activist website GreatFire.org. “If they can convince more internet users to use Chinese servicesâ€"which they can readily censor and easily snoop onâ€"then they have taken one further step towards cyber sovereignty.†The restrictions mount on a regular basis, adds the NewYorkerâ€TMs Evan Osnos. “To the degree that Chinaâ€TMs connection to the outside world matters, the digital links are deteriorating,†he wrote in an April 2015 article. “How many countries in 2015 have an internet connection to the world that is worse than it was a year ago?†Foreign Media China requires foreign correspondents to obtain permission before reporting in the country and has used this as an administrative roadblock to prevent journalists from reporting on potentially sensitive topics like corruption and, increasingly, economic and financial developments. Under Xi, the ability of foreign journalists and international news outlets to travel and access to sources have shrunk. “The hostile environment against foreign journalists is being fueled by efforts to publicly mark Western media outlets as not only biased, but part of a coordinated international effort to damage Chinaâ€TMs reputation†[PDF], according to PEN Americaâ€TMs 2016 report on the constraints of foreign journalists reporting from China. Eighty percent of respondents in a 2014 survey conducted by the Foreign Correspondentsâ€TM Club of China said their work conditions had worsened or stayed the same compared to 2013. International journalists regularly face government intimidation, surveillance, and restrictions on their reporting, writes freelance China correspondent Paul Mooney, who was denied a visa in 2013. Austin Ramzy, a China reporter for the New York Times, relocated to Taiwan in early 2014after failing to receive his accreditation and visa. New York Times reporter Chris Buckley was reported to have been expelled in early January 2013â€"an incident Chinaâ€TMs foreign ministry said was a visa application suspension due to improper credentials. China observers were also notably shaken by the 2013 suspension of Bloombergâ€TMs former China correspondent, Michael Forsythe, after Bloomberg journalists accused the news agency of withholding investigative articles for fear of reprisal from Chinese authorities. The treatment of foreign reporters has become a diplomatic issue. In response to the ArabSpring protests in early 2011, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pledged to continue U.S. efforts to weaken censorship [PDF] in countries with repressive governments like China and Iran. In response, Beijing warned Washington to not meddle in the internal affairs of other countries. On a December 2013 trip to Beijing, then Vice President Joe Biden pressed China publicly and privately about press freedom, directly raising the issue in talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping and meetings with U.S. journalists working in China. U.S. Technology in China In more recent years, China has made it exceedingly difficult for foreign technology firms to compete within the country. The websites of U.S. social media outlets like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are blocked. Google, after a protracted battle with Chinese authorities over the banning of search terms, quietly gave up its fight in early 2013 by turning off a notification that alerted Chinese users of potential censorship. In late 2014, China banned Googleâ€TMs email service Gmail, a move that triggered a concerned response from the U.S. State Department. In January 2015, China issued new cybersecurity regulations that would force technology firms to submit source code, undergo rigorous inspections, and adopt Chinese encryption algorithms. The move triggered an outcry from European and U.S. companies, who lobbied governmental authorities for urgent aid in reversing the implementation of new regulations. CFR Senior Fellow Adam Segal writes that “the fact that the regulations come from the central leading group, and that they seem to reflect an ideologically driven effort to control cyberspace at all levels, make it less likely that Beijing will back down.†Circumventing the Censors Despite the systematic control of news, the Chinese public has found numerous ways to circumvent censors. Ultrasurf, Psiphon, and Freegate are popular software programs that allow Chinese users to set up proxy servers to avoid controls. While VPNs are also popular, the government crackdown on the systems have led users to devise other methods, including the insertion of new IP addresses into host files, Torâ€"a free software program for anonymityâ€"or SSH tunnels, which route all internet traffic through a remote server. According to Congress, between 1 and 8 percent [PDF] of Chinese internet users use proxy servers and VPNs to get around firewalls. Microblogging sites like Weibo have also become primary spaces for Chinese netizens to voice opinion or discuss taboo subjects. “Over the years, in a series of cat-and-mouse games, Chinese internet users have developed an extensive series of punsâ€"both visual and homophonousâ€"slang, acronyms, memes, and images to skirt restrictions and censors,†writes Ng. Googleâ€TMs chairman, Eric Schmidt, said in early 2014 that encryption could help the company penetrate China. But such steps experienced a setback in March 2014 when authorities cracked down on social networking app WeChat (known as Weixin in China), deleting prominent, politically liberal accounts. Soon thereafter, the government announced new regulations on “instant messaging tools†aimed at mobile chat applications such as WeChat, which has more than 750 million users and was increasingly seen as replacing Weibo as a platform for popular dissent that could skirt censors. CFRâ€TMs Economy says that the internet has increasingly become a means for Chinese citizens to ensure official accountability and rule of law, noting the growing importance of social network sites as a political force inside China despite government restrictions. China had roughly 731 million internet users in 2017. Although there have been vocal calls for total press freedom in China, some experts point to a more nuanced discussion of the ways in which the internet is revolutionizing the Chinese media landscape and a society that is demanding more information. “Some people in China donâ€TMt look at freedom of speech as an abstract ideal, but more as a means to an end,†writes author Emily Parker. Rather, the fight for free expression fits into a larger context of burgeoning citizen attention to other, more pertinent social campaigns like environmental degradation, social inequality, and corruptionâ€"issues for which they use the internet and media as a means of disseminating information, says Ng.

A Conversation about the Mobile Internet with Jonathan Donner

I recently spoke to Jonathan Donner, author of After Access: Inclusion, Development, and a More Mobile Internet for the New Books in Media & Communications podcast. You can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes or you can listen to our conversation and others on the New Books Network site. Thanks to mobile phones, getting online is easier and cheaper than ever. In After Access: Inclusion, Development, and a More Mobile Internet (MIT Press, 2015), Jonathan Donner challenges the optimistic narrative that mobile phone will finally close the digital divide. How we log on, how long we stay, what we choose to do, what we can do — all are shaped by our environments, resources and digital literacies. After Access examines the implications of the shift to a more mobile, more available Internet throughout the developing world. Donner addresses these implications specifically for socioeconomic development and broad-based inclusion in a global society. He offers a note of caution about the Panglossian views of mobile phones arguing that access and effective use are not the same thing, and the digital world does not run on mobile handsets alone. Donner, a Senior Director of Research at Caribou Digital, a UK-based consultancy focused on building inclusive digital economies in the developing world. After Access draws on ethnographic and survey research in South Africa and India, as well as the burgeoning literature from the ICT4D (Internet and Communication Technologies for Development) and mobile communication communities. It introduces a conceptual framework for understanding effective use of the Internet by those whose "digital repertoires" contain exclusively mobile devices. In showing that there is no singular internet experience, Donner argues that both the potentialities and constraints of the shift to a more mobile Internet are important considerations for scholars and practitioners interested in internet use in the developing world. _____________________________________________________________ ______ John: The title of your book is After Access. I want to start with the first word of that title, after. Why is it there? Why are you looking forward past access? Is access some kind of foregone conclusion? Jonathan: I think it's almost foregone. We're getting close to a situation where the significant majority of the world, in theory, has access to the internet and this was not always the case. For a long time the conversations about closing the digital divide or addressing the digital divide were conversations about infrastructure and about literally laying the cables making the connections or building the telecenters such people in resource-constrained settings would have the opportunity to be online. It was a physical access problem. With the shift toward a mobile internet, basically the mobile boom that's been happening for 10 or 20 years now becoming a mobile internet boom, that physical barrier has been removed for most of the world. So the figures vary a little bit depending on who's supplying them whether it's the International Telecommunications Union or the GSMA of some others that also try to make these estimates, but we think that by now about 85% of the world's population lives under a cell tower signal. And about 50% of the world lives under a cell tower that has broadband 3G internet signals and those numbers are going to rise as well. They're not going to get to 100%, but let's say that within 5 years it's that same 85% or 90% and 82% of those are living under a broadband signal. Well, in that case it's not an access question. There are a whole bunch of other reasons why people who live under those signals may not be online or be online in the ways we think they should be so we can talk about that. I think we will. But that 80% or 90% is a remarkable accomplishment. For years, conversations about closing the digital divide were about "literally laying the cables...It was a physical access problem." Now it's an effective use problem. I should preface this with the fact that we haven't solved for the other 10 or 15% of the world's population that for various reasons still lives outside the mobile signal and therefore mostly lives without the chance to get online. This is people in extremely sparsely population areas, deserts and jungles and mountain valleys and that sort of thing. It tends to be populations without a lot of resources. The way we've, as a world, decided to wire the world is letting private companies invest in the infrastructure and then charge for access. For this last 10 or 15% currently the technologies and the business models don't line up to make it economically sustainable to put in towers there. We can also talk about that and whether that's something that will continue and what kind of policy things may be going on to address that last 15%. John: Do you think that last 10 to 15% will remain a persistent gap even as the rest of the 85, 90% mobile experience matures? Jonathan: I think so. I don't know exactly how to project whether it stabilizes at 7 or 10 or 12 or 15 or 2, but I do think there are just...we're talking about the physical, spatial access to an internet signal or some means of connecting to the internet servers. I think there will be geographies, maybe political regimes, local places, a whole bunch of reasons why certain populations may not have access. But it's a pretty small fraction of the world compared to where I think we thought we would be by 2016. I think if you went back 20 years and imagined how much of the world was going to have access by now, I don't even think the wildly optimistic projections would've put us that high. This is again physical access. We're not talking about use yet. We'll do that in a little while. Let me say two other things about this. There are satellites up there that cover the whole world more or less, and you could buy yourself a base station, your village could buy a base station and get a type of internet access right now, satellite laggy meaning a long time that the signal takes to get up and back so it's not great for real-time conversations like the one we're having or some more intensive things that demand low latency. But you can get online. The problem is that type of access right now costs a prohibitively large amount of money for the villages that don't currently have access. If you're a supertanker floating around in the middle of the Atlantic, you can have your satellite internet. You could use that same technology to wire a Himalayan village but we can't afford that right now and the village can't afford that. So in one sense we're already at 100% coverage and it's clearly not simply an access problem. It's either an affordable access problem or an effective use problem. John: For listeners who have not traveled as extensively or spent as much time as you have in these areas around the world, help us understand what the mobile internet looks like from the perspective of someone living in an emerging market. You refer to it in the book as the Global South. Let's say I'm in the bottom 1% as judged by per capita income around the world, but I'm closer to the top of that so I'm actually earning money. I'm scraping out a living day-to-day, week-to-week, something like that. Say I live in South Africa, where you've been and I have a mobile phone with internet access. First off, what does that phone look like? Who's the maker? What can it do? How much is it costing me? What am I doing? What do I have? Jonathan: Well there's a lot to unpack and explore there and I think one of the challenges I found in the book and I think people who work in these spaces wrestle with a lot is there's no single archetypal user that represents the majority of people in the world. Most people live in the developing world, not in what we call the developed world. And there's a whole different variety of profiles, ways of living there. There are places in South Africa...funny, South Africa is kind of a microcosm; there are incredibly rich people living in beautiful cities in South Africa; there are incredibly rich people living in beautiful ranches in South Africa; there are also a whole lot of poor people and everything in between. So there's no single experience which I could point to that would kind of say, well this is how the rest of the world uses it and it's different from how we use it. But there's a lot of heterogeneity and what you do find are a lot of new use cases where the cost of technologies has come down, the cost of a handset has come down in particular as those towers have gotten out there to more and more of the population and the landscape. That means there are cases now where people who had lived outside a signal before now have access. Why don't we do two? Let's talk about an urban case and a rural case. The urban case would be somebody, maybe the urban working poor in any one of hundreds of cities around the world where access has been around for a while, but they've been able to switch from maybe only getting access to an internet through a telecenter or like a cybercafe or maybe a shared connection somewhere to getting a phone. And maybe the first phone that they bought didn't ever have internet on it. It was just a basic like a candy bar Nokia phone that was so popular for so many people around the world because the battery lasted for two weeks and dust wouldn't kill it. Didn't have internet or what we think of as internet. But then phone number 2 (was) what we maybe call a feature phone and it started to have little bells and whistles and maybe some early internet capability through something called WAP (Wireless Access Protocol). Maybe it had things that felt like a data connection even if it wasn't a particularly good one. And then this thing called 2.5 or Edge networks, which maybe some of us remember from having it here in the States or Europe a few years ago. But basically every generation of phones has gotten better and better and the phones that did have an internet connection have gotten cheaper and cheaper. "If they don't have access to wi-fi...they probably pay by the bit...Then it's like the experience of roaming. Even though you are in your own house, it's that feeling of 'I don't know how much it's going to cost. I better not click on that'...That becomes the pervasive, what I call the metered mindset, which is a kind of a check on whatever people want to do online." Now we're in a scenario where almost anybody who buys a phone, whether or not they want to buy an internet-enabled phone, gets an internet-enabled phone. There are people keep walking around with theoretical internet access who haven't elected to turn it on. If they turn it on, and this is going to count for rural or urban...means, ok so you've got a phone, maybe it's still a feature phone, it's not a smartphone, it's not an Android or an Apple device that are so popular here. It's just a phone with a data connection so that if someone sent you a text message that had a URL and you clicked on it using your little selector or cursor you would initiate a data connection. On those feature phones, the internet experience is better than nothing and not quite what we might hope for right? The browser would be small, limited by screen real estate. It's kind of hard to navigate the internet in a world wide web kind of way. The little programs like we know calls apps become a much more effective way to navigate. It doesn't even matter if you are just using a feature phone, you still may have a downloadable program like chat or something like that that you use to be your interface with the internet. Certainly if you are using a smartphone where the app experience becomes something where people want to spend more time in. The phones that people buy aren't traditionally bought on these 2-year installment contracts like we get access to but people save up and they buy a phone for the equivalent of $75 or so. And then here's the important part: If they don't have access to wi-fi and they don't have access to an internet connection at home they probably pay by the bit, which means they buy little bundles of airtime, which are minutes to use on their phone and then some of those minutes can get converted into megabytes or if they are lucky a GB of data. But probably they are buying 100 MB at a time. Then it's like the experience of roaming. Even though you are in your own house, it's that feeling of "I don't know how much it's going to cost. I better not click on that. Maybe I think twice about whether I want to click on that. Maybe if I click on it I'm worried I'm going to run out of my minutes." That becomes the pervasive, what I call the metered mindset, which is a kind of a check on whatever people want to do online. I think that that is...one of the two most important things to think about when we think about people using the internet through mobile devices. The first is the size of the device itself and the limitations on the keyboard and that kind of thing. The second is this metered mindset that people pay by the bit. Do you want to do a rural one real quick? John: Yeah, do a rural one real quick. I want to come back to this with a thought, but do the rural one. Jonathan: So the rural one is kind of all of the above with even...and by rural in this case I'm sort of imaging the idealized rural village down a dusty road somewhere, certainly not with a lot of electricity, and electricity becomes a big limiting factor on using one's phone. Some people are in situations where there's a cell tower that touches their home or their village but there's no electricity in the village. They actually have to pay more to recharge their phone and keep their phone charged than they do on the bits or the minutes they consume via the phone. That's one of the things that's going to keep us from having that 100% coverage you were talking about earlier. The electrical grid isn't there either. The connectivity challenge goes hand-in-hand with the electricity challenge. So you've got a rural area. Maybe you've got electricity. Maybe they charge by even a car battery and some guy sells electric top-ups charges for a few pennies depending on how cheap it was to get the electricity. People can use the phone. And then if they are lucky there's content that's in the language they speak. If they are lucky they've got the digital skills and literacies required to navigate the internet, they're able to get online through their phone. In many ways, the remarkable power of this, the promise of this is already being seen. Someone down that dusty road in that village doesn't have to spend two hours waiting for the bus, two hours taking a bus down to the medical clinic, wait an hour for a nurse to see them to talk about what they should be doing for whatever thing is making them feel bad and then do the same thing in reverse. What After Access tries to raise "is whether we should just be declaring victory just because that 85% number has been reached and most people live near a tower." There's promises about using the internet for rural medicine or for job search or for education, reading little things on the side — I don't think it replaces a teacher or a school — but there's ways to use even a tiny connection through a phone in ways that really allow more people to overcome distance, be much more productive with their time because they are not sitting there waiting for that bus, to search for information over a broader area, to express themselves through chat or Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram...all three of those companies are owned by Facebook, which is remarkably prevalent throughout the developing world. I'm not knocking it and I don't want to sound like I'm not acknowledging...that this isn't already a transformative thing in development in terms of the shape of communication and the potential that's there. What I think the book tries to raise through these urban cases and rural cases and things we'll get into is whether we should just be declaring victory just because that 85% number has been reached and most people live near a tower. I do raise some ways in which I don't think the internet that we've gotten through a mobile channel is the one I think we all were expecting to get. John: You draw the distinction between access and effective use in the book. I want to get to that, but first I want to go back and put a point on this What is my phone? What is my experience?...Say there is heterogeneity and there's a range, but I'm buying this phone, $75, feature phone, a couple things on it: Does it have features that are not internet related like a camera? A recorder? And would these be useful? And put that $75 with a data plan that I'm paying for separately in the context of overall monthly budgets. Jonathan: That's the trick. There are a couple things going on. First off, the news is generally good on devices. The devices are getting less expensive every year. They do more. And this is the same thing that we're accustomed to. The camera was 2 megapixels and now it's 6.For $75 maybe it used to be half a megapixel and now it's 2 megapixels. You don't get the same performance. You get slower processors, smaller screens, things that are laggy meaning there's a long response time when you click something before it actually executes. The storage may not be as high as you want. The battery life may not be as good as you want. The interface may nit be as clean and breezy as the ones we enjoy. But still, increasingly now it's a smartphone and the idea that you can now get a smartphone for under $100 isn't fanciful anymore. You can get it. And it's probably pretty good as the smartphone you would have spent $300 or $400 on three or four years ago. "Whereas for us that mobile device is one of several different types of internet...methods that we use to get (online), folks who only have that mobile phone and only have that cell tower have a...digital repertoire that is mobile-only." The progress on devices is pretty good already. They're not that faroff. There are plenty of basic phones around, candy bar phones...dumb phones...and then there's this middle category of phones, feature phones which have some things like media player or a camera or something on them, but aren't an Android phone or an Apple phone. That's the category that's really been under pressure lately. I think the proportion of new phones being sold every year that fit that feature phone category is declining and smartphones are rising. In a few more years it will be hard to buy anything but a smartphone new. And that's a remarkable transformation and a good tech story. In that sense, the internet that one consumes or interacts with through a mobile device in Rwanda or India or South Africa or Nicaragua or wherever isn't that different from the internet that you and I might consume through our mobile devices. The distinctions I make in the book is that whereas for us that mobile device is one of several different types of internet modalities or methods that we use to get there, folks who only have that mobile phone and only have that cell tower have a...digital repertoire that is mobile-only. This means they are making more compromises, essentially in spending less time on a device that's perfect for all their tasks. John: I just want to go back and on the budget piece, relative to electricity or water or food, is it equal to those? Jonathan: Right. It's probably often higher than those. Sometimes it's hard to get good data on this because it depends on the country. There's actually a lot of variability in how much a minute costs of voice talk time or how much a megabyte costs of data. It depends on how regulators have sold the spectrum and how competitive the market is and how many strange taxes there are, a whole bunch of reasons why it's not the same from place to place. But there are plenty of places where civil society movements are making the case that it's still too much. That it's still 10 and 20 and 30 percent of the total monthly household income (that) goes to telecommunications. That's too high. The Broadband Commission, which is a group sponsored by the United Nations, it's a standing group and every few years they put out a report on the state of broadband. They've got agreed on targets that they would like to see broadband cost no more than 5 percent of monthly household income around the world. Over the last several years, most of the developed world, most of the more prosperous economies have had no problem hitting that 5 percent threshold. But there are countries left in the world, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa where that threshold is not nearly there and that's for a reasonably big bundle, a decent chunk of megabytes that you could feel like you've got a good internet experience for the month. That's costing more than 5 percent and that's higher than the Broadband Commission wants. John: Now for part of your research, staying in South Africa, you were in Cape Town and you asked teenagers you found in libraries around some of these low-income neighborhoods an interesting question, that being "Your phone has internet, why are you at a library PC?" What prompted you to use that as a starting question? Where did it come from? What does that (question) represent about this issue of use versus access? Jonathan: This was a study I did with research partners at the University of Cape Town, Marion Walton in particular is a professor media studies there who was this co-investigator with me and I'm really grateful getting to know Marion and working with her on this. She's spent several more years than me living in Cape Town and working with me on these questions of what affordable use looks like. We were funded by the International Development Research Center, which is a Canadian organization, part of the Canadian government that's always been interested in these questions of technology and development, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as part of a larger project that was looking at the state of public access to the internet, telecenters and libraries and cyber cafes, those sorts of things, around the world. We, Marion and I, got to be the ones thinking about how mobile was complicating that whole idea of public access and so our question really had to be about mobile as part of this project, but it was funny that the best way to look at it actually was to still go back to the public access places and use that kind of question, which is a bit of a cute question and obviously we didn't spend the whole time just on that one question. But the question helps us unpack some of the things that you already heard me talk about, this difference between only having one device or one network and having a repertoire of things to choose from. What we were seeing with the teenagers we were talking to at these public access venues was actually a strong case for the continued importance of public access venues because each of these kids already had the internet in their pocket. But they had one internet that wasn't the same internet when they walked half and hour and waited in line for half and hour to get half an hour of free PC-based internet a day to do their homework on. That to me was a real penny drop that we can't declare victory just because 85% of the world lives under a cell signal. These teenagers were voting with their feet essentially, voting with the pocketbooks, and going back to the cyber cafes and the telecenters to get their work done. The Cape Town teenagers "had one internet that wasn't the same internet when they walked half and hour and waited in line for half and hour (at a library) to get half an hour of free PC-based internet a day to do their homework on." The questions that Marion and I got to work through a little bit helped me think through...a study that helped me want to frame the whole book was how do these repertories look like? And how can it be that (if) the cell phone as a means to access the internet is so powerful for these students and other people in so many ways, then why is it that they are still back there in the venue? There are two generalizable answers and one not-quite- so-generalizable answer. The not-quite-so-generalizable answer is specific to Cape Town, or specific to South Africa, is little bit around safety in some cases. These guys and girls lived in small homes and maybe had trouble finding a place to do the homework and all that. That's a pretty universal thing. Add to that some of them live in really tough places and it's a good place to go. Letting aside the fact that there is technology there, the idea of going back to a library or going back to an institution where they could do their homework kind of in peace and focus again gave me great respect for the ideas of libraries and safe places again. But the two more generalizable ones that came out of the work are what we call the affordances, which are what the technology lets you do or suggests you should do. The particular affordances of personal computers of unmetered access. And the second was this price issue. The number one reason people were there was it was cheaper to do their homework with somebody else paying for the bits than for them trying to do it on their phones. I can talk more about each of those if you want. John: Let's get into that with a conversation about what are the most popular uses for internet activities on a phone. You point out there is remarkable universality (in developing and developed markets) in the most popular kinds of online activities. They are chat, social networking, games, and media. So you have the top 10 app downloads being YouTube and Snapchat and Instagram and Skype and Facebook, all these things basically from Silicon Valley companies. But all of them are largely around consumption versus what you touched on a little bit, which is productivity. That would be the library example there of doing your homework. Why is productivity lagging so much in the mobile experience? Are there ways to improve that? What's your outlook on the distinctions between the two and where they're headed? Jonathan: There are a couple threads to pull on there. The first is what do we mean by most important? By time? By popularity? The second is who cares about productivity? We should care about productivity. One group that cares about the broader policy conversation, that cares about productivity, or production, not just economic productivity but this idea of contributing and making and earning a living or having a voice, which are the two categories I use to describe expressing oneself. But why do those sorts of production things matter? Part of the reason they matter is in these broader policy discussions is that's the stuff of economic development and creating prosperity and creating well-being and getting out of poverty and all that, there is a production component to that. And whether people are never touching a computer and they are going off and building homes or working in manufacturing or whatever, there's all sorts of things about productivity in the economy. There are questions then how digital changes productivity. We want to privilege the productivity conversations when we are linking processes to economic development. And there's nothing wrong with linking it there. I think the problem is that somewhere between the formal research literature and the more informal, broader discourse around the role of communication technologies in development has been so focused on productivity or information seeking as related to that they have turned a blind eye to the totality of people's online practices and digital practices. So that you end up with agricultural economists studying how farmers check farm prices on the cell phones...You play that out and they forget that that farmer probably makes one phone call about prices a day and makes five calls to his cousin. Or that we're trying to figure out how to use the internet to distribute information about pre-natal care or something like that and that that app, which may be distributing information about pre-natal care has to sit on a home screen with nine other apps, most of which are Facebook and Google and YouTube as we were just talking about. I think it's very important for even the practitioners and researchers who want to study the potential of these technologies to do good to enable productivity or enable expression to see where those practices and enabling processes sit as part of the whole. Agricultural economists may study how farmers check farm prices on the cell phones. "They forget that that farmer probably makes one phone call about prices a day and makes five calls to his cousin." And in fact to complicate the idea that there's some stuff that's not social and some stuff that is; some stuff that's instrumental and useful and some stuff that's not. Actually the lines are quite blurred and getting more blurred all the time. That's why the farmer who are figuring out how to do price check mechanisms, either make phone calls, which is what they used to do. Maybe the government sets up some system of text messages with the price of mangos every week. And maybe they set up a Facebook group...where they can exchange information with each other about mango prices. It's not even really fair to say Facebook is always social or always frivolous, right? People are using these platforms for both the frivolous and the very serious and the productive and the non-productive. Towards the end of the book and a little bit in the work I'm doing now I'm interested in pursing these things in more detail. John: I think of that chat example as such a powerful one for blurring those lines exactly as you say here. You are expressing yourself one minute, chatting with a friend another, and the next you are lining up business all within the same feature, the same app, but very different use cases. It's a question of what is that thing, really? How useful at this point do you even find distinctions around voice versus consumption versus this productivity? Jonathan: The same argument can be made for voice. Some of the earliest work I did, research I did in the space was in Rwanda with microentreprenuers to small business owners who had been getting their first phone. This was back in 2004, 2005. It was all voice. We started out with questions, we did a survey, it was like an intercept thing where we walked up with people and said can we interview you? Can we look at your last 10 calls? And you pull up the phone book on the phone and you go down the last 10 calls and say who was that and what did you talk about. We started with only allowing people to check one thing. Was it a business call? Was it calling to say hello? Was it a joke? Was it friends and family kind of thing? We found we couldn't do that. We had to make the categories check all that apply. The blurring between the social and the instrumental. The productive kind of uses of the medium, the phone, the voice call, needed to pay close attention to the way the non-productive and productive activities are embedded in social relations. This is old sociology stuff playing out in tech. I think that the same stuff is happening now, in fact, arguably even more so, in Facebook and Twitter and YouTube with all its hosted course content for studying and for Khan Academy and all these sorts of things, you could make the argument that there's lots of productive stuff happening there alongside stuff that's maybe not so central to the development of priorities for states or NGOs or whatever. What's broken isn't that. That's just the way humans behave. Embedded and complex and blurring and dynamic. It's the narratives that are stale and siloed and it's the pitch mechanisms people can do to make an app to help farmer's check corn prices when we don't actually need another app taking up space on the home screen. What we need is the people teaching social media skills to farmers for facilitating groups such that they can build a Facebook group, a Twitter list or whatever, that allows them to exchange the information they need on these platforms more effectively. John: The structural challenges with either providing the end-service or app or some kind of productivity piece or teaching the skills within existing apps, I was thinking when I was reading these sections of the book just about baseball and these big-market, small-market teams where essentially you have the Yankees who have these huge payrolls and they are able to support them year after year and then you have these other teams like the Pirates. They can win sometimes, but essentially you'd rather bet on the teams that have the resources and the range of skills and literacies that they have. There will always be examples of people, someone the other day in America who had been homeless and developing mobile games who overcome and create amazing things and be incredible citizens and economic engines with the mobile experience, but what is necessary are really basic blocks. Teaching people how to use Facebook groups to do whatever they want to do. What else can be done to teach those digital literacy skills? Jonathan: There's a couple things involved there. The idea of helping people get the most out of the tools through improving digital literacies is something we haven't cracked at scale yet. I don't think middle school curriculums or high school curriculums do enough quickly enough — and this is not just in the U.S. but around the world — to train up digital literacy. It would be very hard to justify, Hey we're going to teach kids Facebook and Twitter or WeChat or Weibo depending on where you are — these are ones that are popular elsewhere — it seems crazy to do, but I think there's enormous value in that and that isn't turning everybody into an app entrepreneur or saying that the only way to make money is to do something directly in tech. It's using tech to pursue your own livelihood or your own expression or whatever more effectively. Digital literacy, as much as the devices and networks unlock that, they only work to the extent that people have the skills to use these pieces effectively "What we need is the people teaching social media skills to farmers for facilitating groups such that they can build a Facebook group, a Twitter list or whatever, that allows them to exchange the information they need on these platforms more effectively." It's the hardest one to do well because it doesn't scale very well. It's hard to train thousands of people at a time unless we can somehow make these things more bootstrappy than they are. So I think the (digital) literacy question remains somewhat unsolved although there's a lot of great work happening there, I don't want to diminish it, I'm not the only person saying this, trying to work on these pedagogies. And certainly under-resourced and kind of under- embraced as part of the puzzle. Other researchers have spoken, Hargittai talks about second-order divides and skill divides, and Michael Gernstein talks about effective use, and Mark Warschauer talks about the social capital that surrounds this, a whole bunch of scholars and a community of people working on this, they all see the ways in which literacies remain, the human side of technology use remain as much a limiting factor and an enabling factor as the technology conversation tends to get framed around digital divides. Let me say one more thing on literacies, which is the last people that come into mind right now in the World Development Report this year published by the World Bank takes a big development topic every year, they do a massive, hundreds of pages of analysis across various sectors on some element of the development puzzle and this year is was on technology and development. The World Development Report 2016 identifies a lot of things that are analog partners to the development that are happening digitally and basically saying if we want to get the most out of digital, we actually have to invest in things like literacies and regulatory regimes that promote competition as opposed to monopolies in the digital space in things that promote the broad-based adoption of technologies in sectors other than technology, for example. The World Bank itself has come to a place (that isn't) just applying this pro-technology banner and rather seeing technology as something linked to broader and more ongoing recognizable development challenges, of which literacy is one of them. So the literacy thing is something worth keeping an eye on. John: Literacy doesn't just apply to productivity or economic development. I was thinking about, again, where you are discussing voice and engagement where if I have mobile phone access and say it has a chat service of what not, it's harder for me to engage in lengthy, rich dialogue. It's harder for me to create and post some kind of thoughtful view the way I would on a blog post even. This digital literacy question seems to me applies well beyond economic development. Jonathan: Yeah. Because there's types of production that aren't directly tied to economic development and they're just part of being human and expressing and creating art and finding a voice and all that. And this is not to say there isn't plenty of production happening on mobile devices. At the top end you drive by these billboards and Apple is happy to show you some fantastic photograph that was taken on an iPhone. Great. The services, these platforms like Facebook, Instagram, whatever, that allow people to seamlessly share images and videos and Vines, little 10-second videos, back and forth means...there's more production happening by more people thanks to mobile devices than ever before. The kind of annoying critique I raise in the book is that I don't see those kind of production activities are getting the traction, either the monetary return in a development sense, or the opinion- leadership...culture influencing things that we may want to see when we talk about technologies being as empowering as they can. Some of the most high-value activities, those tasks, whether it's running a climate model — not everybody is going to run a climate model, I know — but you can make some money if you run a climate model, an economic model. Or writing a long piece of prose. Or creating a movie with careful cuts...some of these things are still easier on devices other than mobile phones and on networks other than mobile networks. We all still have them in our life. And not everybody does. We need to be careful about not letting our rhetoric get out ahead of the affordances of the devices and the networks that people who have mobile-only internet experiences have. I would link that to a few years ago, Steve Jobs was interviewed — this was 2010, I think — he was asked about whether PCs were dying. This was at a conference on the future of the net with the enthusiasm for the iPhone, of course. The question was: Are PCs dying?...Steve Jobs said, Well, they're not dying because, well, he used the reference of a farm, and he said, in the old days all we had were trucks because we all lived on farms and we needed trucks to do all our farming stuff. Now we're not all farmers and not everybody needs a truck. And he said PCs are like trucks. Not everybody needs a truck. Certain tasks like running climate models and editing video, "are still easier on devices other than mobile phones and on networks other than mobile networks. We (in developed markets) all still have them in our life. And not everybody does." We need to ask who has access to the tools and networks they need to pursue those tasks if they want them. I don't think we're done, to back to your original first question about being 85% and after access, I don't think we're done, I don't think we can declare victory just because 85% of the world lives under a signal that they can barely afford to use on a device that's not going to allow them to do everything they want to do. There's room to keep doing things like community access telecenters or free wi-fi in the train stations like Google is doing in India right now will...do an enormous amount to give people more affordances that will allow them to be more effective users of the internet than they are now. Those are not just mobile affordances. "There's plenty of content being created on Facebook every single day and nobody other than Facebook is getting paid for that content." John: You say in the book the problem is not that it's difficult to produce content or earn money for this kind of micro-work performed on a mobile phone but the persistent issue is quote "the shift to a more mobile internet that remains relatively difficult to produce content for which one will be paid relatively well," which I think gets to that point that sometimes trucks are necessary for doing that kind of work. Jonathan: Yeah, I think there's plenty of content being created on Facebook every single day and nobody other than Facebook is getting paid for that content. John: In the last part of our conversation I'd like to shift away from development and go back to human usage for a second here. How do people try to figure out how much data they are using or how much they are using the internet with their phones given that it's still a costly device for them including the data and given your comments about (them) operating under this metered-mindset? Jonathan: So the metered-mindset has two components. There's this cost by the bit...Let me do two problems and one clear impact of why this stuff is important. The two problems are the real, the undeniable problem that it costs a lot per bit to consume data on a mobile phone over a mobile network if you are a prepay user and you don't have a contract. So the cost of watching a bunch of YouTube videos, whether they are Shakira videos, which is an example I use in a study I did and picked that at random, or an incredibly important video issued by the World Health Organization about how to prevent the spread of a disease. If you are paying by the bit, the chances of you watching as many of (those) or consuming as much as you want are lower than if you have access to a plan you can afford or an all-you-can-eat situation. There are research studies that suggest if you flip people from pay-by-the-bit to all-you-can-eat their consumption goes way up. So there's the real problem of on a per bit basis it's too expensive to get that cost down. There's a second problem which is because there's sort of a detachment between bits, bytes are very abstract, money is not, you're not actually consuming money you are consuming bits, it's hard to map those things effectively. So you get all these sorts of cognitive errors where you're...kind of over-accounting for...you're being overly cautious. You leave bits on the table. You don't click on links you want. You don't spend as much time on Facebook as you might want or you don't spend as much time on YouTube. You certainly don't leave stuff running in the background. This isn't just a rational thing, (which are) the cognitive kind of challenges. I think the best way to empathize with that metered mindset is to think back to any time you got stung by a roaming bill on your own cell phone and how careful you were about using the net or making phone calls when you were roaming next time. We're back in a situation where the victory that we claim to have had, that most of the world has internet access, at least hypothetically, involves them doing so with this kind of pervasive, persistent feeling of dread or caution that they are going to over-click. There are ways in which this is getting better. The Android operating system and the Apple operating system are getting better with each passing iteration at representing how much data is getting consumed and which apps are doing it. Google's done some interesting experiments, still research, where they've actually put the amount of bits that it will cost if you click on a link off their home page. They're just sort of exploring, it's not rolled out yet, it's just research. But the trial is really interesting. I'm kind of curious to see how they're trying to empathize with the metered mindset. Microsoft is certainly doing that in their operating systems about when you pull down updates whether you are on a cell connection or a wi-fi connection; it'll change the behavior now, which is good. Certainly, and this is big impact I was going to talk about, Facebook's been very good about empathizing with the metered mindset. So good that they've run up against the vision of the internet itself. Here I'm talking about their proposals to subsidize the mobile internet, the Facebook experience of many users in many developing countries. John: You've noted that the result of these cognitive errors, these biases, is underconsumption. Has anybody to your knowledge tried to figure out how serious a problem is that considered? Is under consumption really bad? What are they giving up? Jonathan: I think it's really bad. I don't think there's enough research on this. I did a bit of a review in the book on this, but that's already a couple years old and I think you would find more studies coming out that are trying to quantify the extent to which this kind of feeling of being on pre-pay changes your internet, changes the amount you consume. But it's just an empathy thing to some extent, which is if you're spending 20% of your household income you haven't hit those ITU Broadband Commission 5% targets cause you live in a place where data is expensive and incomes are low and you pay by the bit. You know every two weeks when you go down to the corner store and buy more air time — I think it's converted into minutes — that it costs you more than you want to pay, your chances of swimming in the internet and using it effectively in the way that some of us almost take for granted with background process and huge HD videos on Netflix or whatever is living in a bandwidth cornucopia that the rest of the world doesn't have right now. We risk a kind of stratification of the internet into those who can use it without that feeling of constraint and those who feel constrained all the time. The rhetoric doesn't often line up with that. We tend to say that everybody is on the same side of the divide and everybody has the same internet just cause they've got hypothetical access and that's what I'm challenging. "We risk a kind of stratification of the internet into those who can use it without that feeling of constraint and those who feel constrained allthe time." The way that this amplifies up from just being something that happens at the individual level is Facebook and a few others, not just Facebook but Wikipedia found this, Facebook tried it, Airtel in India tried it, Twitter does it in the U.S., T-Mobile will let you in the U.S. download songs that don't count against your data cap because they want you using more. A lot of the companies are exploring ways to enter relationships with mobile internet operators to subsidize the bits of internet users for the services that they want those users to spend time on. As a practice this is called zero rating and I do need to say, since the book came out, I talk a little bit about zero rating in the book, things have really come to a head in India in particular and particularly around Facebook. Facebook in 2014 and 2015 was pushing something called internet.org that was dressing up a lot of the benefits of the internet for maternal health and farm prices and education, all that stuff we were just talking about, along with Facebook. So you had a suite of nine or ten things you could choose. putting it on an app and working with a mobile network operator to say everything inside that app is free and doesn't count against your cap. That only works as something that's compelling to people because of the metered mindset and the fact that there's such a palpable sense of "I don't want to click on anything that I think I'm going to have to pay for. But if I stay in my Facebook+ zone, this thing called internet.org rebranded as free basics." Facebook did really well with this. It rolled out in a dozen, maybe two dozen countries, kind of without major incident until late last year and it then bumped into India where there was a blowback that this practice violated net neutrality and the principle that all bits should be treated the same and not discriminated against, that some services can't get discriminated against in prices. The Indian regulator had about a million comments come from the civil society, the internet civil society in India, most of which were protesting against zero rating. The regulator took it all under advisement and after several months just recently issued a ruling banning zero rating apps as a practice. There's some detail to which ones are special cases, but for the most part saying Facebook and others, you want to use this to subsidize other services, you can't do that. This is a major turning of the tide in how we approach the shift to a more mobile internet. The zero rating brouhaha, tension, crisis, however you want to call it, is only because of the metered mindset and that's only because that the only way you can allocate spectrum is to have people and have mobile network operators and charge by the bit for it. If we had a different internet with more wi-fi and more stuff in train stations and more people with home connections and maybe someday with satellites and drones taking the pressure off the mobile channel then this zero rating conflict will go away. John: Final question for you here. What is your current level of optimism, say 25 years from now about an internet that's more inclusive and more effective use for people everywhere, in every country, but particularly in the emerging markets? Jonathan: Twenty five years is a long time, but even in five or ten years you will see some of there first-level access problems recede...But I think that an internet with 5 billion people on it is going to look different than the internet we have right now, which is 2 or 3 billion people depending on how you count. As the internet population starts to look more like the world population two types of things could happen. It could be that the internet itself, the fact that everybody has access is going to change the structures of society and change the nature of economic stratification and all that kind of stuff. I think you'll see some of that , but I don't think it's all necessarily good news. Nairobi is having protests right now about Uber disrupting, to use that word, the taxi markets in Nairobi. Say what you will about whether the taxi market in Nairobi should or shouldn't be disrupted and whether Uber is the right organization to do it. But it is changing, right, that even these local services have a digital component to them and it's not just happening in Seattle and Boston and Helsinki. It's happening in Nairobi and in smaller towns all around Kenya as well. That's the thing where I think the right answer, the more accurate answer isn't that it's going to get better for everybody, but that the ways in which a more mobile internet will bring more people online in certain kinds of ways that are good in some senses and constraining in others will actually reinforce existing stratifications and ones that we'll recognize. It'll look as stratified as it does now and set up these new disruptions. I think there's a lot to keep our eye one. I would say this is my final point is just, again, I come back to this idea we don't want to declare victory that the access problem is the right one to have solved or that it's a sufficient problem to have solved. These questions of effective use don't scale very well, and I think as we explore what it means to be effective online, those old paradigms of developing world versus developed will probably fall away and in ten years the discussions we'll be having will be more reflective of the same types of discussions we're having here in the U.S. about the shape of the income distribution in the U.S. and whether the new digital world is good for people of modest means or not. I think you're going to see those same kinds of conversations happening on a global level as more of daily life has to go through these servers sitting in air-conditioned rooms sometimes 7,000 miles away.

Germany

In December 2012, 46.4 million German internet users accessed a social networking site from a computer at least once during the month. The German Press Agency (DPA ) recently published a snapshot of the social networking landscape in Germany using comScore MMX data and unsurprisingly, Facebook captures the majority of users with an audience of 38.6 million unique visitors. Google Plus is in second position with 5.6 million unique visitors, Xing is a close third with 4.2 million users and Stayfriends is fourth with 3.5 million unique users. Twitter is 5th in the rankings with 3.1 million German users and LinkedIn comes in 8th place with an audience of 2.7 million.

China

In the recent social media infographics made by Go Globe , China has an estimated 597 million people active on social networks . The data also shows that the largest section of China's social media users are aged 26 to 30 (30%). As a whole, 91 percent of Chinese netizens have social accounts, which is way above the 67% in the US. China's social media platforms are all monitored by The Great Firewall, known as the 'The Golden Shield Project '. Each social media platform in China has to manually monitor every piece of content being uploaded to ensure it complies with Chinese internet regulations. "the self-censorship by content providers, who must make judgment calls on what needs to be censored in order to stay in the governments good graces, and self-censorship by users, who face the threat of being detained and punished for anti-government posts" (Jason Q NG, Social Media Analyst) Here's are the most popular social networks in China: Tecent & Sina Weibo - In second and third place are the Twitter clones, Tencent Weibo and Sina Weibo . The latter gets most of the media attention, both in China and around the world.Facebook clones - Four of the sites are a lot like Facebook. Tencents QZone, Tencents Pengyou, Renren, and Kaixin are all focused around a mix of social profiles, albums, buddies, and social gaming. These platforms have seen a decline over the past year as mobile test apps become popular. Qzone is now thought to be the 3rd largest social network in the world after Facebook and Youtube. Wechat - The much talked about WeChat is like Whatsapp, and is one of a number of Asia-made messaging apps " like Line and KakaoTalk " that are battling to get onto the smartphones of young Chinese and Southeast Asian web users. Youku Tudou - Video platform which now gets 500 millions uniques per month. The platform is similar to Youtube, but the content tends to be professionally produced. All the above platforms offer paid promotion opportunities once official accounts have been created.

IMDA's approach to regulating content on the Internet

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Internet Content Providers (ICPs) in Singapore are regulated through the Broadcasting (Class Licence) Notification and are required to abide by the conditions of the licence and to exercise judgement in ensuring that their content complies with the Internet Class Licence and the Internet Code of Practice. Our key focus is on content issues of concern to Singapore such as those relating to public interest, race, religion, pornography and content harmful to children. As a symbolic statement of our societal values, local ISPs are required to restrict public access to a limited number of mass impact websites which contain content that the community regards as offensive or harmful to Singapore's racial and religious harmony, or against national interest. The majority of the websites on the list are pornographic in nature. Beyond this, IMDA does not restrict or monitor individuals' access to online content. IMDA's guidelines do not cover webpages operated by individuals and personal communications such as email and instant messaging. From 2 February 2015, unauthorised websites which promote, facilitate or advertise remote gambling will be blocked under Section 20(1) of the Ministry of Home Affairs' Remote Gambling Act. The regulation of remote gambling activities under the Act serves to maintain law and order and protect young persons and other vulnerable persons from being harmed or exploited by remote gambling. More details can be found at MHA's website. In addition to regulations, we also recognise the need for public education and to empower the public to manage their media/Internet consumption. Parents can subscribe to optional Internet filtering services offered by local ISPs for their home and mobile Internet access to help their children access the Internet safely. In addition, stand-alone filtering software from Internet filtering solutions companies are also available on the market for parents to consider.

Japan

Japan is one of the few countries that had managed to keep local social networks more popular than Facebook, but now this is changing. Unlike Linkedin who started their Japanese services in October last year, Facebook had their Japanese version online back in 2008. The local Market leader Mixi partnered Twitter in 2011 to compete against Facebook. The following list looks at the top 6 social networks in Japan: Mixi (25million). Launched in February 2004 is the biggest social networking site in Japan.Facebook (16 million).Facebook has shown strong growth in Japan, with active users increasing to 16.7 million, 300 percent up from last year. Facebook has made progress recently as a business network among Japanese - rather than LinkedIn, which is popular overseas. Gree (29 million). Gree has 190M user accounts globally, with overseas operations in nine countries. The social-network operator will offer user-support services in 14 languages starting next year.Mobage 40 million. Mobage is a social mobile gaming platform with highly engaged users. It currently has three networks: Japan, China and West. Twitter (30 million). Twitter's new "Lifeline" feature was launched in September in Japan - the first region in the world to receive the service that suggests which official government Twitter accounts should be followed if a disaster hits. LINE (36 million). Launched in June 27, 2011, LINE is a cross-platform communication service and app, offered for free by Naver, from NHN Japan. The basic functionality allows users to send text messages and to make free calls with other users who have the app installed on their smartphones. Along with the above countries, here are a few more with strong social media penetration among online users.

Guide To Social Media Platforms For International Campaigns

Lots of businesses are now seeing the power of international geo-targeting for their offerings, creating sub folders and designing landing pages for each market. Apple.com do a great job of this with a huge list of targeted subfolders, all created to market to that specific country. Though companies are getting to grips with international SEO, very few tend to set up international social accounts and are missing out on strong marketingchannels. China andRussia are the obviousregions worth exploring,both having rapidly expanding internet user growth and social media penetration. While Brazil has been dubbed "the new social media capital of the universe" with an estimated 79 Million people actively using social media. Though Facebook is the largest network in the world (as seen below), many countries have their own social networks with millions of users and open to Western brands and social media advertising. bii-top-global-social-properties-4 Below is our guide to social media platforms in countries outside of the US with strong social media penetration.

Three-Pronged Approach to Regulation

Recognising that there is a limit to what domestic legislation can achieve in the face of a global and borderless medium like the Internet, IMDA adopts a three-pronged approach to encourage a balanced and judicious approach to Internet regulation. This strategy involves Government and industry initiatives as well as public involvement. The approach emphasises the following: Instituting a light-touch framework IMDA's regulatory framework for the Internet is embodied in the Broadcasting (Class Licence) Notification. Under the Internet Class Licence, Internet Content Providers and Internet Service Providers are deemed automatically licensed and have to observe and comply with the Internet Class Licence Conditions and the Internet Code of Practice, which outlines what the community regards as offensive or harmful to Singapore. Encouraging industry self-regulation The industry is encouraged to self-regulate and be socially responsible for their content. IMDA encourages content providers in Singapore to develop industry codes of practice, which can be used to promote greater industry self-regulation and complement existing Internet content regulations. Promoting media literacy and cyber wellness through public education IMDA recognises the need to educate the public on the positive as well as the less positive aspects of the information superhighway. In view of this, IMDA initiates programmes to promote media literacy and discerning use of the media including the promotion of cyber wellness. For more information on our public education efforts, please click here. To take such efforts further, the Media Literacy Council (MLC) was formed in August 2012 to spearhead public education programmes and initiatives on media literacy and cyber wellness. As its secretariat, IMDA supports the council's programmes to build awareness and inculcate astute consumption of media offerings and responsible online participation.

Internet

Singapore is one of the most-connected countries in the world, with high broadband and mobile phone penetration. IMDA is mindful of the dynamic and borderless nature of the Internet and the need for the responsible use of this medium. In light of this, IMDA adopts a practical and light-touch approach in regulating the Internet.

Spain

Social Media networks are popular in Spain with 41% penetration as seen in wearesocial's infographic. Of the 30 million people on the online in Spain, 69% of them use Facebook, followed by Youtube at 10% and Tuenti at 10% as well. As of June 2012 the Facebook users of Spain totalled over 16 million. Tuenti is also very popular in Spain, with their headquarters based in Madrid. Though a global network, Tuenti's main users are based in Spain with an estimated 10M+ active user base.