New Digital Divide?

One of the problems in the United States is the fact that not everyone has the same access to technology due to geography and economic status. For example, children in poor, urban school do not have access to computers at home or at school due to the cost. This is often referred to as the "digital divide". One of Barack Obama's campaign promises was to bridge this gap. You would think, logically, that poorer countries would have even larger gaps, where only the very wealthy can get access to the Internet on demand. I heard of a case in Africa where people had to walk for an hour one-way, to use the internet at the post office. You would also assume that people would not have a lot of skills in using computers also. However, this may not be a problem in China.

For a while now, I've been aware of China's attempts to modernize and regain the splendor it once had. At one point China was the most technologically advanced nation in the world. Some folk in America have stated a concern that China was not just catching up with us, but surpassing us. I read an article today that points to this idea. The article sites a statistic that more than 300 million Chinese people are regular internet users. I'd assume that they use the Internet for the same things everyone else uses it for: collecting, reading, and sharing information. This caught my attention because I'm not even sure if the population of the United States is 300 million. When I looked it up I got 305,611,925 people for the population of the United States. So roughly about the number of people in China who are Internet users is about equal to the estimated population of the United States! I call that surpassed because that not all Americans use the internet. I believe the same is true in China. In order to see if we have truly been surpassed in the number of citizen on the Internet, we need to know how many Americans are on the Internet out of the total population. As for China, 300 million isn't even half it's population which is about 1,330,044,544 (July 2008 est.) Three hundred million out of 1.33 Billion is about 22.5% and in the United States, 220,141,969 people on the internet out of 305,611,925 people total works out to about 72%. Although, all the numbers I used are estimates, I think that these calculations show that relatively speaking, more people in the United States are on the Internet than there are in China. The article points out another cool trick you can get out of this information:

Given the nationality of users of the Internet, our crack team of G4 scientists has determined that there's a 37% chance that you are in China right now. You'd better look out the window to make sure.

It's not just Internet that the Chinese are taking to. There are 633.8 million mobile phone users in that country, and last week, China issued a long-awaited license for 3G mobile phones, so Chinese early-adopters will be able to enjoy the Internet from the privacy of their phones.

Let me look...ok, yup, still Californa. Whew! In my Internet crawling I found some interesting graphics. Here are graphics showing population changes for China.