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users.
    Governmental censorship notwithstanding, any one of those users can share knowledge with the other 1,668,870,407 at any time and instantly. And as the knowledge changes, as it surely will, the Internet and its community will update it instantly. Google ‘fellow’ Amit Singhal recently said, ‘Information is being created at a pace I have never seen before and in this environment, seconds matter.’ 6 As an example, it is said that the sequencing of the HIV genome took 15 years. The sequencing of the SARS virus genome took 31 days. According to the UK government’s
Digital Britain
report, 7 494 exabytes were sent around the word on 15 June 2006. That’s 494,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes and bear in mind that one exabyte 8 is the equivalent of 50,000 years of DVD quality video. In 2008, 210 billion emails were sent and, although 78 per cent of them were spam, that’s still a great deal of information moving about the world at practically instant speeds. In fact, it has been said that even if all but 1 per cent of what’s on the web is rubbish, the scale of the thing is such that it would still take you more than a lifetime to read it. Compare that with the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, first published between 1768 and 1771 (note how long it took to publish three volumes), and whose size:
    has remained roughly constant over the past 70 years, with about 40 million words on half a million topics.
    ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopædia_Britannica )
    How do I know this? Wikipedia, in a scholarly and properly researched entry, where the source of this fact is attributed, if you follow the link to footnote seven, to the 15th edition of the
New Encyclopaedia Britannica
. Whatever your views on the academic merits or otherwise of Wikipedia, it stands as a shining example of the democratization of knowledge. ‘To giveevery single person free access to the sum of all human knowledge’, is Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales’s mission for it, yet it does more than that. It allows you to contribute to it. It gives your knowledge a voice. It releases the inner expert. You know about something. You can add your voice and share that knowledge with anyone anywhere and instantly, regardless of who you are. As the saying goes, ‘On the Internet, no-one knows you’re a dog.’ In the early days of Wikipedia, I met a geography teacher who was getting his class to contribute to the entry on their hometown. When one of the facts was challenged by the Wiki moderators and thrown out there was uproar until they were able to convince the Wikipedia people of the validity of their claim. Can you imagine anything like that happening even ten years ago?
    In fact, such are the ramifications of the Wiki way (the word ‘wiki’, by the way, coming from the Hawaiian language and meaning ‘quick’) that in January 2009 the head of
Encyclopaedia Britannica
announced plans for accepting additions and edits from the general public on their online version of the encyclopaedia.
    But let me take you back to Africa where a growing but still statistically small number of the population is linked into the World Wide Web. But let’s look this time, not at PCs, but at mobile phones. According to a 2009 report from the International Telecommunications Union, an agency of the United Nations, more than half the people on the planet pay to use a mobile phone, with the biggest growth in new subscriptions being in Africa. On this continent, whereas only 4 per cent used mobile phones in 2002, by 2007 the number had risen to 28 per cent. 9 The phones are not solely for chatting on either. One of the most popular applications for mobile phones is the safe transfer of money across very risky countries by ‘uploading’ the cash before you leave and then ‘downloading’ it when you arrive. In fact, the term ‘mobile phone’ is already as much of an anachronistic misnomer as ‘carphone’ or ‘Saturday night TV entertainment’.
    And what are mobile