Every day when you log online, you enter the world wide web: A place where most of Africa has disappeared and China has eclipsed Russia as the country with the world’s largest land mass.
At least that’s what the world looks like according to a new map published by the Oxford Internet Institute, which has enlarged and minimized countries according to their internet population.
In May, it was pointed out on USENET newsgroups that 50 percent of the world’s population was in a very concentrated circle in Asia. This continent is by far the biggest market in the world. Now, with Oxford’s latest maps, it’s also the world’s biggest internet market as well, by a stretch.
Taking 2011 data on both a country’s internet users and total population from the World Bank, this map actually presents us with two different bits of knowledge. The countries themselves are scaled up and down, depending on how much of the total internet population they’re contain. The color of the countries, however, remains insular—the darker the red, the higher the percentage of that country’s population that’s online.
So in places like China, which boasts a huge number of internet users mostly due to the fact that it has a massive population in general, the percentage of citizens actually on the internet is way lower than some European countries. One thing this map doesn’t show us, however, is how quickly these countries are growing.
