[NEC] 1.3 - Half the World

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NEC @ Shirky.com, a mailing list about Networks, Economics, and Culture 

           Published periodically / # 1.3 / June 30, 2002 
              Subscribe at http://shirky.com/nec.html

In this issue:

 - Introduction
 - Essay: Half the World
   (Also at http://www.shirky.com/writings/half_the_world.html)
 - Notes from the Web
     - Ted Nelson misunderstands the web again
     - Weblogs and Power Laws
 - Questions I'm asking myself
     - MUDs and MOOs

* Introduction ======================================================

After last month's essay on the inherently political nature of
creating an managing memorable naming, I was reminded of Bryce 'Zooko'
Wilcox-O'Hearn's essay on the related problem of balancing
memorability, security, and decentralization in namespaces: "Names:
Decentralized, Secure, Human-Memorizable: Choose Two."
(http://zooko.com/distnames.html)

Though my focus is still principally on social software, the essay in
this issue concerns the phrase "Half the world has never made a phone
call."

-clay
clay@shirky.com

* Essay =============================================================

Half the World
[http://www.shirky.com/writings/half_the_world.html]

A good deal has been written about the digital divide, the technological 
gap that exists between the developed and developing world. If you
wanted a striking illustration of the problem, you could turn to Thabo
Mbeki's speech at the Information Society and Development Conference
in 1996, where he told the delegates "Half of humanity has not yet
made a phone call."

Or, if you prefer, Kofi Annan's speech to the ITU in 1998, where he
said "Half the world's population has never made or received a phone
call." Or Thomas Homer-Dixon's version, from a speech in 2001:
"...half the people on the planet have never made a phone call." Greg
LeVert of MCI said it at a telecom conference in 1994; Richard Klugman
of PaineWebber said it in The Economist in 1995; Jeffery Sachs and Al
Gore both said it in 1998; Carly Fiorina said it in 1999; Reed Hundt
said it 2000; Michael Moore and Newt Gingrich both said it in 2001;
and not content with merely half, Tatang Razak of Indonesia told the
UN's Committee on Information "After all, most of the people in the
world have never made a phone call...", in speech from April of this
year.

The phrase "Half the world has never made a phone call" or some
variation thereof has become an urban legend, a widely believed but
unsubstantiated story about the nature of the world. It has appeared
countless times over the last decade, in essentially the same form and
always without attribution.  Where did that phrase come from?  How did
it take on such a life of its own?  And, most importantly, why has it
gotten so much airtime in the debate over the digital divide when it
is so obviously wrong?

* You Can't Keep A Good Factoid Down 

The Phrase is such a serious and important statistic that only the
boorish would question its accuracy. There is a kind of magical
resonance in advancing arguments on behalf of half the world's people,
and it allows the speaker to chide the listener for harboring any
lingering techno-optimism ("You think there's a revolution going on?
Half the world has never made a phone call!") The Phrase establishes
telecommunications access as a Big Problem and, by extension,
validates the speaker as a Thinker-About-Big-Problems.

But saying "Half the world has never made a phone call" makes no more
sense than saying "My car goes from 0 to 60" or "It rained 15 inches."
Without including the element of time, you cannot talk about rate, and
it is rate that matters in dynamic systems. Half the world had never
made a phone call _on what date_? And what has the rate of telecom
growth been _since that date_? Because it is that calculation and only
that calculation which could tell us anything important about the
digital divide.

* Static Statements About Dynamic Systems 

Virginia Postrel, in her book "The Future and Its Enemies" (ISBN:
0684862697), suggests that the old distinctions of right and left are
now less important than a distinction between statists and
dynamists. Statists are people who believe that the world either is or
should be a controlled, predictable place. Dynamists, by contrast, see
the world as a set of dynamic processes. This distinction is the key
to The Phrase. Anyone who uses it is affirming the statist point of
view, even if unconsciously, because they are treating
telecommunications infrastructure as if it were frozen in time.

To think about rate, we need three things: original time, elapsed
time, and speed of change. The figure first appeared in print in late
1994, when the Toronto Sun quoted it as part of Greg LeVert's speech
at TeleCon '94. (Mr. LeVert was no statist -- though he seems to have
accidentally bequeathed us The Phrase, no one now remembers that he
introduced it as a way of dramatizing the magnitude of the coming
change, and went on to predict a billion new phones by 2000.)
Therefore we can restore the question of rate by asking what has
happened to the number of telephones in the world between the
beginning of 1995 and now.

* Restoring Rate

The ITU estimates that there were approximately 689 million land lines
in 1995, and a little over 1 billion in 2001. This is an average
annual growth rate of just over 7%, and a cumulative improvement in
that period of over 50%, meaning that the first two-thirds of the
world's phone lines were run between 1876 and 1994, and the remaining
third were run between 1995 and today. Put another way, half again as
many land lines have been run in the last 7 years as were run in the
whole previous history of telephony. So much for stasis.

Of course not all of this growth touches the problem at hand -- a new
phone line in a teenager's room may increase several sorts of telecom
statistics, but the number of people making their first phone call
isn't one of them. Since The Phrase concerns the digital divide, we
should concentrate on telecom growth in the less developed world.

>From 1995 to 2001, 8 countries achieved compound average growth rates
of 20% or more for land lines per 100 people (against a world average
of 7%), meaning they at least tripled the number of land lines over
the whole period. They were, in order of rate, Sudan (which improved
six-fold), Albania, China, Sri Lanka, Viet Nam, Ghana, Nepal, and
Cambodia -- not exactly the G8. China alone went from 41 million land
lines to 179 million in those 7 years. And there were 35 additional
countries, including India, Indonesia, and Brazil, with annual growth
of between 10 and 20% from 1995 to 2001, meaning they at least doubled
the number of land lines in that period.

And mobile telephony makes the change in land lines look tectonic. In
1995, there were roughly 91 million cellular subscribers. By 2001, the
number had risen to 946 million, a ten-fold increase. Thirty countries
had growth rates of over 100% annually, meaning that, at a minimum,
they doubled and doubled again, 7 times, achieving better than
hundred-fold cumulative growth. Senegal went from around 100
subscribers (not 100 thousand subscribers, 100 subscribers) to 390
thousand. Egypt went from 7 thousand to almost 3 million. Romania went
from 9 thousand to almost 4 million.

Because wireless infrastructure does not require painstaking
building-by-building connectivity, nor is it as hampered by
state-owned monopolies, it offers a way for a country to increase its
telephone penetration extremely quickly. By 2001, there were 25
countries where cell phone users made up between two-thirds and
nine-tenths of the connected populace. In these countries, none of
them wealthy, a new telecommunications infrastructure was deployed
from scratch, during the same years that keynote speakers and
commencement invitees were busily and erroneously informing their
listeners that half the world had never made a phone call.

* Two Answers

So, in 2002, what can we conclude about the percentage of the world
that has made a phone call?

The first, and less important answer to that question goes like this:
Between 1995 and 2001, the world's population rose by about
8%. Meanwhile, the number of land lines rose by 50%, and the number of
cellular subscribers by over 1000%. Contrary to the hopelessness
conveyed by The Phrase, telephone penetration is growing much faster
than population. It is also growing faster in the developing world
than in the developed world. Outside the OECD, growth was about 230%
for land lines and over 2,400% for cellular phones -- 14 million
cellular subscribers in 1995 and 342 million by 2001. If we assume
that LeVert's original figure was right in 1994 (a big if), the new
figure would be "Around two-thirds and still rising."

There is another answer to that question though, which is much more
important: It doesn't matter. No snapshot of telephone penetration
matters, because the issue is not amount but rate. If you care about
the digital divide, and you believe that access to communications can
help poor countries to grow, then pontificating about who has or
hasn't made a phone call is worse than a waste of time, it actively
distorts your view of the possible solutions because it emphasizes a
statist attitude. 

Though a one-time improvement of 5% is better in the short run than
a change that improves annual growth by 1%, the latter solution is
better in the medium run, and much better in the long run. As as
everything from investment theory to Moore's Law has shown, it's hard
to beat compound growth, and improving compound growth in the spread
of telephones requires reducing the barriers between demand and
supply. Some countries have had enormously favorable rates of growth
in the last decade, so we should ask what has gone right in those
countries. It turns out that money is less important than you might
expect. 

* Examples from the Real World

In 1995, Brunei had almost twice as many land lines and 50 times as
many cell phones per capita as Poland, not to mention more than twice
the per capita GDP. By 2001, Poland exceeded Brunei in land lines, and
had even matched it in cell phone penetration. Brunei is smaller,
easier to wire, and much much richer, but Poland has something that
all Brunei's money can't buy -- a dynamic economy. Ireland similarly
outgrew Denmark and Egypt outgrew Kuwait, even though the faster
growing countries were the poorer ones.

The Democratic Republic of Congo lost 16 thousand of its 36
thousand fixed lines but grew overall, because it added 140 thousand
cell phones. Its unsurprising that people would abandon the state as a
provider of telephones in a country riven by civil war. What is
surprising is that Venezuela had the same pattern. Venezuela, with a
monopoly telecom provider, saw its per capita penetration of land
lines fall by 0.3% annually, while cell phone use exploded. In both
cases, the state was an obstacle to telephone usage, but the presence
of a private alternative meant that telephone penetration could
nevertheless increase.

Bangladesh, with a per capita GDP of $1,570, has had annual
cellular growth of nearly 150%, in part because of programs like the
Grameen Bank's Village Phone, which loans a phone, collateral free, to
women in Bangladeshi villages, who in turn resell the service to their
neighbors. This is double leverage, as it not only increases the
number of phones in use, but also increases the number of users per
phone.

These examples demonstrate what makes The Phrase so pernicious.
Something incredibly good is happening in parts of the world with
dynamic economies, and that is what people concerned with the digital
divide should be thinking about. If the world's poor are to be served
by better telecommunications infrastructure, there are obvious things
to be done. Make sure individuals have access to a market for
telephone service.  Privatize state telecom companies, introduce
competition, and reduce corruption. And perhaps most importantly, help
stamp out static thinking about telecommunications wherever it
appears. Economic dynamism is a far better tool for improving
telephone use than any amount of erroneous and incomplete assertions
on behalf of half the world's population, because while The Phrase has
remained static for the last decade or so, the world hasn't.

---

NOTES: The statistics on teledensity used here are drawn from the
International Telecommunication Union (http://www.itu.int/). The
statistics page is at http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/statistics/, and
the documents concerning compound and overall growth in main telephone
lines and cellular subscribers between 1995 and 2001 are at
http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/statistics/at_glance/main01.pdf and
http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/statistics/at_glance/cellular01.pdf
respectively.

The estimates for the developing world were derived by treating the
membership of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and
Development (OECD, http://www.oecd.org) as a proxy for the developed
world. Growth in the developing world was then derived by
recalculating the totals from the ITU documents after removing the 30
countries in the OECD.

The figure for population growth was derived from the US Census
Bureau's estimates of world population in 1995 and 2001.
http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/worldpop.html

The original Toronto Sun piece, from the Business section of October
13th of 1994) read:

  So you think the world is wired? Half the world's population -- an
  astounding three billion people -- has never made a phone call, a
  telecommunications conference was told Wednesday.
  
  "Most people on Earth live more than two hours from a telephone,"
  Greg LeVert, president of U.S. giant MCI's Integrated Client
  Services Division, told delegates to TeleCon '94 in Toronto.
  
  Things are changing fast, though.
  
  "Nearly a billion more people will have access to a telephone by
  2000," LeVert said.

* Notes from the Web  =============================================
 
- Ted Nelson misunderstands the web -- again

Ted Nelson, hypertext champion and will-be inventor of Xanadu,
whenever it launches, posted a short note entitled "I DONT BUY IN",
which begins:

  The Web isn't hypertext, it's DECORATED DIRECTORIES!  

  What we have instead is the vacuous victory of typesetters over
  authors, and the most trivial form of hypertext that could have been
  imagined.

(More at http://ted.hyperland.com/buyin.txt)

Its astonishing how little he understands the web to this day. The Web
is not decorated directories -- that was Gopher, which the web beat as
the tool of choice, because the web *isn't* a directory -- there is no
hierarachy at all required in the linking.

More importantly, he's right about the web being the most trivial form
of hypertext that could have been imagined, but he fails to understand
that this is why it works. The web was saved by the one-way link and
the 404 -- FILE NOT FOUND error.

Other hypterext systems have all assumed that links would be
implicitly two-way and self-healing, creating a system where you would
be required to coordinate somehow with the outside world before you
altered, re-arranged, or deleted links. The great victory in scale
achieved by the Web came about in part because other people referring
to your things creates no burden on you, and if you want to refer to
other people's things, it creates no burden on them.

This is the same intuition as the Internet Protocol's "Best of Luck"
delivery guarantee -- i.e. no guarantee at all. IP is the the most
trivial form of packet switching that could be imagined.  The
designers of the internet figured out that it is easier to add a
session management layer like TCP on top of unreliable IP packets,
than to try to make the system reliable at its base. In the same way,
anyone wanting a more complex hypertext system, as Ted does, would do
better to layer it on top of the current web, rather than trying to
make a system that was more complex at its base.

(This design pattern was best explained by Richard Gabriel in "Worse
is Better" -- http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html; Gabriel's
site is http://www.dreamsongs.com/.)

- Weblogs and Power Laws

Good lists (http://www.truthlaidbear.com/ecosystem.shtml) and image
(http://www.iwatch.org/Blogosphere.JPG) of the blogosphere from
N.Z. Bear, http://www.truthlaidbear.com/ 

The lists of inbound links are particularly interesting, as the the
number of sites with a decreasing amount of inbound links outnumbers
those with an increasing amount of links of not quite 2 to 1. However,
(as you'd expect) the most linked-to sites have a decreasing-to-
increasing ratio 1::2, while the least linked to sites have a
decreasing-to-increasing ratio of over 3::1.

This exactly matches Albert-Laszlo Barabasi's model for networks where
preferential connectivity drives topology -- the link-rich get richer.
With these lists, you can see the blogosphere resolving itself into a
power law distribution, which will almost certainly distrupt the
egalitarian rhetoric surrounding the blogging enterprise today, by
doing things like making the current daypop statistics irrelevant
(daypop counts number of blogs linking to a story, rather than
traffic-per-blog which, other than daypop statistics, is the bigger
determinant of exposure.)

Glenn Reynolds, InstaPundit.com, has another proposal that may also
accelerate this process: open hit counters. Rather than making traffic
numbers a private matter, Reynolds is proposing that blogs host open,
third-party counters. (http://www.instapundit.com/archives/001895.php)
The effect of this, of course, would be to accelerate the existing
trend separating the few extremely opular blogs from the moderate
number of moderately successful ones and the vast number of very low
traffic blogs.

* Questions I am asking myself  =====================================

- MUDs and MOOs

In the last issue, I asked why MUDs and MOOs were so important in the
literature concering online community, but were not very popular in
the real world. James Grimmelman explained it in part in publishing
terms:

  The default explanation is that there's nothing intrinsic to MUDs or
  MOOs; it's just that some of the seminal papers were on them, and
  after that, the easiest way to write about social software and get
  your paper past peer-review was to write about MUDs.  It's the same
  way in which the literature on aphasia always runs through the same
  handful of patients, and the literature on diffusion of innovations
  always talks about farmers in Iowa.  The publication cycle has a
  certain inherent conservatism, because it feeds as much on itself as
  on outside data.

JC Herz pointed me to Richard Bartle's article on patterns of user
behavior in MUDs, "Hearts, Spades, Diamonds, Clubs",
(http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm) which made it obvious that the
inheritor of the early work on MUDs etc is the massively multi-player
online role-playing games such as Everquest.

* End ===============================================================

Copyright 2002, Clay Shirky
Feel free to reprint, quote, or forward, so long as you credit me.