It seems just like yesterday, that I was introduced to the web and I got my first email account. Back then, I would travel for miles just to get to a computer to check my mail and this usually happened once in six months. I fell in love with the huge amount of information available online but could not afford to pay for internet time at the few cyber cafés available. A friend sensing my frustration introduced me to “all night browsing”, as we used to call it. Where people spent the whole night at the cafés browsing the internet for a huge discount, it was quite unsafe but the experience was always worth the risk.
Telephones were not available to everyone. A few homes had the landline and it was considered a luxury for the super-rich. (There is no middle class in Nigeria, you are either rich or poor and there were few rich men). Fast forward few years later, the mobile phone was introduced to Nigeria and people literarily killed to get them in those days. More fast forwarding, the use of the mobile phone became ubiquitous in the country.
As I read the article by Everett Rogers on convergence, I could not help but identify with the reasons he gave for the digital divide. Mobile phones may be everywhere in Nigeria now, but only a few people can actually afford computers and internet connectivity. I remember using almost post20 per cent of my income to pay for internet connectivity some years back. The education and socio-economic divides also played out in my scenario. The rich could afford to send their children to great private schools and get computers for them. So, even in a country on the other end of the digital divide, there is also a divide within. Thankfully, business men flooded the country with cheap but functional semi smartphones and service providers made it possible to access the web through these phones. Therefore, I completely agree with Rogers that closing the divide is the sole responsibility of the government as private businesses are driven by profit making.
The last year I spent in Nigeria, I realised that almost all the cafes that sprung up to provide internet access for those that could not afford it in their homes had all gone out of business. Why? A new era had begun and it was the era of Apps. There is a popular saying in Nigeria and it is “Thank God for Facebook!” With mobile phones, people could download and have access to the net via Apps. Facebook App, Yahoo messenger App, Twitter App. LindaIkeji Blog app, WhatsApp, Skype among others, the list is simply endless. People could send messages to others through these Apps. They could connect to one another and have their emails drop in their phones via Apps. People could talk to their friends and relations in other countries through the Skype App. It is a wonderful experience. With these apps, you don’t need a lot of transmission bytes. A few hundred megabytes and you are good to go. While the rise of Apps has not bridged the second divide, which is the differences in the skills to use the internet, according Van Deursen and Van Dijk in their article, Internet Skills and the Digital Divide, it has definitely bridged the divide between the haves and the have nots and that of the original digital divide.
Do I agree with Chris Anderson? Absolutely! My writing says it all. Without Apps, Nigerians would probably still be up all night just to browse the web at an affordable price or spend 20 per cent of their salaries on internet connections like I used to do. Morgan Stanley’s projection that the number of users accessing the net from mobile devices will surpass the number who access it from PCs is so true from my Nigerian experience. In Nigeria, people “use the net, but not the Web” and they have never been happier. So, Thank God for Facebook!
Does this write up remind you of something?
Does this write up remind you of something?
Interesting write up.
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