Inequitable Distributions in Internet Geographies: The Global South Is Gaining Access, but Lags in Local Content

Abstract

they ate apples, and they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out. Now, this despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria. I had never been outside Nigeria. We didn’t have snow, we ate mangoes, and we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to. My characters also drank a lot of ginger beer because the characters in the British books I read drank ginger beer. —Chimamanda Adichie, 2009 The Internet is not an amorphous, spaceless, and placeless cloud. It is characterized by distinct geographies. Internet users, servers, websites, scripts, and even bits of information all exist somewhere. These geographies of information shape both what we know and the ways we are able to enact, produce, and reproduce social, economic, and political processes and practices. By 2013, the Internet was used by over 2.5 billion people around the world. The fact that over a third of the global population uses the Internet means that there is both figurative and literal space to produce more locally relevant information about much of the world. Even in an age of almost ubiquitous potential connectivity, online voice, representation, and participation remain highly uneven. In this paper, I explore why, in an age of almost ubiquitous potential connectivity, so many people are still left out of global networks, debates, and conversations.