New technologies

Evolutions and surprises of digital uses in the world

The digital advisor of the Régie de quartier de Villetaneuse, in the suburbs of Paris, supports residents in their dematerialized procedures. March 2023. © Olivier Favier

Text by: Olivier Favier Follow

5 min

What language do you use on the web? Where are the majority of Internet users? Who are the most connected populations? Which computer or phone is the essential tool for digital access? These are some of the questions a recent report by We Are Social and Meltwater tries to answer. We present here a synthesis, the original document in English being accessible at the end of the article.

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The world's population exceeded 8 billion in November 2022. Just over 57% of the population lives in urban areas. This is less than single users of mobile phones – 68% of the world's population – Internet users – 64% – or social media users – 60%. The growth rate of users of new technologies – between 2% and 3% – is far higher than population growth – 0.8%. The raw number of internet users has doubled since 2013.

These overall results hide large disparities from one country to another. It is well over 90% in North America and Western Europe, and 95% in Northern Europe, but is less than a quarter of the population in East Africa. In terms of overall population, nearly a quarter of internet users are in East Asia – the continent as a whole accounting for well over half of the world's users.

These figures are misleading, however, when we know that more than a billion people in South Asia alone, more than on the entire African continent, remain away from the networks. More than one in two Indians and one in four Chinese are unconnected.

The mobile phone far ahead of the computer

There is no mechanical link between access to electricity and access to the internet. In Afghanistan, for example, access to electricity is widespread when less than 20% of the population is connected. In some sub-Saharan African countries, on the other hand, there are more people connected than people with access to electricity. Another example is North Korea, where Internet access is simply blocked for almost the entire population.

The average time spent on the internet, on the other hand, has been virtually stable for ten years – it fluctuates between six and seven hours a day. It is slightly higher in men than in women and tends to decrease with age, in a population ranging from 16 to 64 years. If among people with Internet access, telephone use is massive all over the world – 92% – that of the computer is much lower – around two-thirds – and reveals great disparities, for example between most European countries – often more than three quarters – and sub-Saharan African countries – one in four Nigerian Internet users, Like what.

Worldwide, while mobile internet use accounted for just over a quarter of connections in 2013, it is now in the majority. This trend is less pronounced in most rich countries. The disparities in the speed of connection on mobile phones are very noticeable between on the one hand Western countries, the Near East and Southeast Asia – China, South Korea, among the highest in the world – and on the other hand those of sub-Saharan Africa, India or Indonesia.

Five per cent of the world's population without any mobile coverage

A similar observation can be made for fixed connections, with some surprises: the average connection in Greece is faster than that of India and the fastest in the world, ahead of China, is in Chile. Thus, in the latter country, if a fixed connection is eight times faster than a mobile connection, it is four times easier to surf on your phone than on a computer in Lebanon.

The fact remains that 30% of people over 18 in the world had not had access to the internet, according to figures from the end of 2021 and that while the average price of the flow has fallen considerably in the poorest countries, a part of sub-Saharan Africa in particular still faces the excessively high costs of new technologies. Finally, for 5% of the world's population, or 400 million people, the immediate environment has no mobile coverage. The populations concerned are often poor and rural.

Much has been predicted, feared or desired, depending on the case, for massive and irreversible changes in habits generated by the pandemic. Most of these changes have in fact only been temporary, but there is still a marked increase in online purchases – one in six purchases now worldwide – especially for consumer goods. The main beneficiary of this crisis concerns advertising spending, three-quarters of which is now oriented towards digital.

English dominates the Web

More than half of the sites are in English, with French coming in fourth place after Russian and Spanish with a share of less than 4%. With a slightly higher number of speakers worldwide, Chinese is present on less than 2% of sites. On a smaller scale, Arabic is also a widely spoken language and largely under-represented on the Web.

All minds are now turned to creative artificial intelligence (AI) tools, whose performance is growing at a very fast speed and questions as much about their new applications as about the abuses they can generate. The proliferation of erroneous information at work for several years is already accelerating dramatically, thanks in particular to the extremely easy creation of increasingly convincing computer graphics.

Only a little more than half of users say they are concerned about the accuracy of the information found on the Web. This proportion is much lower in most European countries, with large disparities however – 70% of the Portuguese, but less than a third of the Austrians. Globally, this concern is most prevalent among women, with the gap narrowing and then reversing with age.

The full report in English.

Our selection on the subject:

• Listen:

→ Behind the scenes of the infox

→ Eco-responsible digital

→ Digital: what place for African languages on the internet?

• Further reading :

→ The pitfalls of disinformation: knowing them to better thwart them.

→ Information-disinformation: identifying images generated by AI, mission impossible?

→ A Digital New Deal for Africa

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