An Internet user includes not only the young woman with a smartphone, a tablet computer, and a laptop who is online for all of her waking hours, but also the older man who went to an Internet cafe once four years ago and never went back or the person who Skypes with a distant relative every few months. "Ever used" is a fairly meaningless category.Īnother issue with penetration rates is that they are all-inclusive. Additionally, sites that produce social-media penetration rates (like ) are interesting to get a sense of over-time growth, but because these sites are for profit entities selling analytics to marketers without transparent (in the name of good science) methodologies for determining penetration rates, these too are unreliable.ģ. Further, these penetration rates include all of those social-media accounts that were opened and never used again. With choices about listing location and proxy servers that can allow a user to appear to be located in a different country than s/he is actually in, accuracy is questionable. With social-media platforms it is very difficult to determine the true location of a user. The number of people with an active phone in their hand is much less. Therefore when one hears that 75 percent of the world has a mobile phone, it is more accurate to say that there are 75 SIM cards (some active, some inactive) per 100 people in the world. Most count SIM card subscriptions, without acknowledging that it is incredibly common in many countries for individuals to possess multiple SIM cards - for business purposes or to economize on voice versus data rates. Mobile-phone subscriptions, for example, are notoriously inaccurate. In an interview with RFE/RL's Azerbaijani Service, a representative of the Azerbaijani Telecommunications Ministry cited the ITU data as an authoritative source of Internet penetration in the country, without acknowledging that it was his own ministry that supplied that data.Īnother issue with measuring penetration rates is the nature of the technologies. Where does the ITU get this data? From "administrative data sources" - which are "mainly telecommunication operators, and are collected by governments at the national level (ministries or regulatory authorities)." Without a doubt, some governments have reason to inflate penetration rates and there are few checks on this by the ITU. In lieu of a properly sampled nationally representative survey (which is not perfect either - social desirability and response biases abound), penetration rates generally come from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a United Nations agency that is responsible for information and communication technologies. Thus when comparing countries or other entities based on percentage of individuals that have adopted a technology, analyses that do not control for these differences are misrepresenting the actual technology landscape.Ĭounting technology users is difficult. Similarly, societies with higher proportions of younger people will have higher technology-penetration rates.Īt a macro level, telecommunications systems, competition, price, and national wealth can also influence penetration rates. Thus, it is unsurprising that in societies with more wealthy people or better distributed education systems, there are higher technology-penetration rates. In nearly all societies, the wealthier, the better educated, the more urban, and the younger adopt new technology earlier than the poorer, the less educated, the more rural, and the older do. Technologies tend to diffuse in similar patterns, with similar factors determining early versus later adopters. The contributing factors to technology adoption are well-known, but become embedded within discussions of penetration rates. Why is technology penetration so difficult to measure?ġ. Given the challenges in measuring technology penetration, it is astonishing that speakers continue to make such statements. When pundits or government officials mention penetration rates, it is often in support of a bigger social or political goal: "84 percent of women in Country X have a mobile phone"." women's empowerment through technology is possible." Or: "With 80 percent of the country using the Internet, we can say that we've achieved our economic and technological goals" or “most African-American households have Internet access, so the digital divide is over” or 1 million Facebook users means that there is freedom of expression. Why should anyone care? Because inferences into what social-media- or mobile-phone- or Internet-penetration rates represent are dangerous. Despite this, in fact, penetrations rates are futile. Governments and policy pundits frequently cite technology-penetration rates - Internet, mobile phone, or social media - as meaningful proxies for deeper concepts. This is a guest post by Katy Pearce, an assistant professor in the University of Washington's Department of Communication.
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