The International Telecommunications Union has issued its report: ‘Measuring the Information Society Report 2014’.

This 240 page report can be freely downloaded here:

http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Documents/publications/mis2014/MIS2014_without_Annex_4.pdf

It is interesting for what it says and for what it doesn’t say.

Here are two extracts from the Foreword:

‘Over the past year, the world witnessed continued growth in the uptake of ICT and, by end 2014, almost 3 billion people will be using the Internet, up from 2.7 billion at end 2013. While the growth in mobile-cellular subscriptions is slowing as the market reaches saturation levels, mobile broadband remains the fastest growing market segment, with continuous double-digit growth rates in 2014 and an estimated global penetration rate of 32 per cent – four times the penetration rate recorded just five years earlier. International bandwidth has also grown steeply, at 45 per cent annually between 2001 and 2013, and the developing countries’ share of total international bandwidth increased from around 9 per cent in 2004 to almost 30 per cent in 2013. Overall, almost all of the 166 countries included in the IDI improved their values in the last year. Despite this encouraging progress, there are important digital divides that need to be addressed: 4.3 billion people are still not online, and 90 per cent of them live in the developing world.

‘While the prices of fixed and mobile services continue to decrease globally, in most developing countries the cost of a fixed-broadband plan represents more than 5 per cent of GNI per capita, and mobile broadband is six times more affordable in developed countries than in developing countries.’

I have not had time to read the report in detail, but it appears to say very little, if anything, about content. I could find no mention of the problem of information overload, nor of the predominance of English and a few other languages; no mention of the prevalence of poor quality information and deliberate misinformation; no mention of the difficulties to differentiate reliable from unreliable information; no mention of the controversy around the ‘commercialisation’of top-level domains such as .health; and no mention of the potential for communities of practice (such as HIFA) to enable wider engagement in international health and development.

It is to be expected that ITU would have a primary focus on the technical. But the scope of this publication is far less than promised in the title: ‘Measuring the Information Society’.

Best wishes,

Neil

Lets build a future where people are no longer dying for lack of healthcare knowledge – Join HIFA: www.hifa2015.org