Approaching Ubiquity: Global Trends and Issues in ICT Access and Use

After more than a century of telephony and twenty years of the Internet, the world presents a mosaic of the application and use of information and communication technologies. The influences of ICT form and function are organized by the authors into four realms of ICT characteristics. Each dimension is a classification employed across space to show the scale and scope of ICT use. Within each dimension there is a range of experiences evident across the global information society, so that it forms a spectrum. The four spectra that help define information society are devices, access, culture, and governance. The paper examines how different places are experiencing recent and new information technologies, and draws attention to the importance of the local, as well as the global, when analyzing ICT. The four spectra are represented by data from 19 city states and heavily urban areas globally to illustrate the rich diversity of the ICT landscape. Evolving characteristics of ICT application and use show how different places—cities, regions, countries—create different environments for ICT.