This piece in The Economist touches on innovations and the subsequent social changes caused by the exploding use of mobile web access. The implications to how our own students access information, identify (or not) the nuances of issues, and comment (at length?) on it, are realities that we we need to begin to leverage, not deny. (Who said it? "All innovation is local.")
In China, for example, over 73m people, or 29% of all internet users in the country, use mobile phones to get online. And the number of people doing so grew by 45% in the six months to June—far higher than the rate of access growth using laptops, according to the China Internet Network Information Centre.
This year China overtook America as the country with the largest number of internet users—currently over 250m. And China also has some 600m mobile-phone subscribers, more than any other country, so the potential for the mobile internet is enormous. Companies that stake their reputations on being at the technological forefront understand this. Last year Lee Kai-fu, Google’s president in China, announced that Google was redesigning its products for a market where “most Chinese users who touch the mobile internet will have no PC at all.”
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