Iain MacAulay
10% of the world's population have access to the Internet, which has been calculated at a staggering 580.78 million people, an increase of 173.68 million people since December 2000.
The report, written by Nua, goes on to show that Europe has the highest number of users with 185.83 million compared to the US 'and' Canada with 182.83 million. And by the time the rear end of 2005 comes into view there will be over a billion people surfing worldwide.
And who wears the trousers in these statistics? Well, it is still the men, for the time being.
In the UK 57.4% of Internet users are male. In Italy it is 63.6% and in Spain it is 66.5%. Norway has the highest percentage of female users with 43.7% closely followed by Denmark and Sweden tying with 43.2%.
Of these European countries Germany leads the way with over 18 million users and the UK coming a close second with 15.7 million and although the Scandinavian countries lead the way for female users they trail the bottom of the table for actual users with an average 2.6 million users each.
One sad point of note to these figures is that the company Nua, of Ireland, who distributed and collated them has recently gone into receivership, which does bring into dispute the reliability of the information regarding technology that is still in a chaotic state of development. And, how all the hype regarding the Internet overlooks the importance of a basic framework to support its existence.
The internet is still growing and in no way has it reached any point of saturation, but like any small child it needs to be reared by responsible parents who can see behind the whole face value and turn it into a strong, self sufficient individual without being eaten by the child in the process.
