hightext

Digital divide narrowing

Nothing surprising, but just for the record.

Needing control

Blog backlog 3. More from the Financial Times mobility issue of November 12 2005.

The final article in the mobility issue was about people who choose to cut themselves off from e-mail or not to have a mobile phone. It focuses on Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen, who now routes e-mail through his assistant and Jonathan Liebenau, a senior lecturer in Information Systems, who chooses not to have a mobile phone and asks students and colleagues to e-mail him instead. As the writer says, it is about which particular dragon you wish to control.

It also seems to me about how people view and manage their networks. Sen stopped trying to deal with his e-mail because of the overwhelming number that came in after he won the Nobel Prize. Liebenau feels e-mail is better than people asking quick casual questions face to face, because such questions are better articulated in written form and better dealt with by him as an e-mail response. I suspect that Sen is far more relationship focused than Liebenau, and felt panicked by the volume of e-mails because of the number of relationships that might potentially need nurturing that it represented. Liebenau is far more task focused, and presumably is not going to waste time in e-mails building a relationship.

Personally I (secretly I hope) react badly to calls coming in via mobile phone or work phone, feeling it is an intrusion of my privacy or flow of work. I use e-mail all the time though, both to build relationships and to get task related questions dealt with. Having said that, I often use the phone to talk to customers because I think I get better idea of what their true reaction or wants are and also to talk to colleagues in more relationship oriented countries like Spain or Italy.

Time and IT

An amusing article from the San Jose Mercury on a survey which shows how electronic communication is making us all polychronic. Even the boss of the company who conducted the survey interrupted his own meeting with the journalist to answer a call from his mother. Reminds me of a previous posting of mine.

Hat tip to Techdirt News.

The telegraph and the internet

Nice quotation from George Orwell blogged by Tom Hume, which led me to look it up in my Orwell anthologies, and so will quote it in full myself:

The middle-class families celebrated by Kipling, the prolific lowbrow families whose sons officered the army and navy and swarmed over all the waste places of the earth from the Yukon to the Irrawaddy, were dwindling before 1914. The thing that had killed them was the telegraph. In a narrowing world, more and more governed from Whitehall, there was every year less room for individual initiative...The one time empire-builders were reduced to the status of clerks, buried deeper and deeper under mounds of paper and red tape...From that time onwards it has been next door to impossible to induce young men of spirit to take any part in imperial administration.

'The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius', 19 February 1941

I bet there are plenty of Japanese expatriates working for Japanese companies overseas who feel similarly stifled by the way that e-mail now forces them to involve the Japanese headquarters in every decision.

Structuration theory (ooh)

A highbrow research paper from Geoff Walsham, Research Professor of Management Studies at the Judge Institute of Management Studies, Cambridge University has been sitting in my in-tray for a while, but I promise not for the four years since it was published!

I read it a while ago but did not blog it as it kicks off with a discussion of structuration theory as applied to globalization and Information and Communication Technology, which I was reluctant to try to sum up in a blog entry, but here goes.

Structuration theory was developed by Anthony Giddens, a sociologist of some repute. The idea is that human action and social structure are a duality rather than a dualism. So rather than seeing human action taking place within the context of the 'outside' constraints of social structure (a dualism), action and structure are seen as two aspects of the same whole (a duality). Giddens says 'structure exists only as memory traces, the organic basis of human knowledgeability, and as instantiated in action'. So structure is seen as rules of behaviour and the ability to deploy resources that exist in the human mind itself, rather than outside.

According to Giddens, contradictions do not inevitably breed conflict if the actors in the situation are able and motivated to act on them. Conflict occurs if interests are threatened.

Walsham looks at three case studies, including one looking at a technological partnership between two global players in the electronics industry, one Japanese, one British. Attempts were made to get the British and Japanese engineers to work together and share knowledge, but these were largely unsuccessful.

Structure and culture differences:
- the nature of engineering knowledge as embedded and potentially encodable (UK) versus embodied and encultured (Japan)
- group work and knowledge sharing through sequential stages and document transfer (UK) or through intensive interaction in multifunctional teams (Japan)

ICT role:
Computer systems embody systems of meaning and norms of behaviour more closely aligned to British engineers' structural attitudes
They can thus be used as a political resource to complain of lack of rigour on the part of the Japanese engineers
And can also be used to advance the counter position - that much know-how cannot be captured by computer systems

This led to conflict which was not resolved and abandoned in favour of a compartmentalised approach to later projects. They found it very difficult to abandon their own cultural style, as it would have undermined their own position as knowledgeable engineers based on their own tradition.

Walsham concludes that the notion that globalization has brought with it cultural homogeneity is simplistic. It can even be argued that some elements of globalisation, such as increased cross cultural contact can mean that differences between cultures are now more visible and important.

His recommendations for achieving more effective cross-cultural collaboration include being aware and acting on cultural preferences for particular media, linked to different ways of working and interacting. Interaction may be particularly dependent on face to face interaction.

He cites a study by Maznevski and Chudoba where they found that members of a team in an East Asian site preferred a sequence of a faxed agenda for discussion, informal discussions over the phone, then faxed confirmation of decisions made during the discussions. However the non-Asian team members made no effort to accommodate these preferences.

So, not too painful, and, I'm wondering, as I often find with these avowedly academic papers, if the author has found it necessary to jemmy fancy theories into practical, almost banal findings.

Hofstede on communication technology adoption

SIETAR UK (Society for Intercultural Education Training and Research) had a 'Business of Culture' conference on March 12th in London, at which one of the founders of the discipline, Geert Hofstede, spoke. From the various notes I scribbled on his handouts, the points that struck me most were:

- What keeps multinational companies together is shared practices, not shared values. Practices consist of symbols, heroes and rituals. Similar practices can be learned by people with very different values. Values are the mental programmes we acquire in our formative years. Given sufficient effort, practices can be changed (and values not?)

- There has never been any study or proof that showing that national cultures change, so it does not matter if Hofstede's data is from the 1960s/1970s. He later said that national cultures do sometimes shift - particularly on the individual versus collectivist dimension, but that these shifts tend to happen across most cultures at once, so the relative position of each culture does not change.

- Organizational cultures cannot be described with national culture dimensions. Differences between national cultures are anthropological, between organisational cultures sociological.

- Hofstede's Uncertainty Avoidance dimension should not be confused with attitudes to risk. In fact, in cultures where uncertainty avoidance is high, his research shows that there is more religiosity, xenophobia, identity card obligation, faster driving and in general more 'neurosis'.

- Looking at research into consumer behaviour in 15 EU countries 1970-2000, he judges that adoption of new communication technology is not influenced by national wealth, but is slower where uncertainty avoidance is stronger. (I wonder about Japan, where uncertainty avoidance is high, but adoption of mobile technology was very fast). There are lasting differences in what the internet is used for. Feminine cultures use the internet more than masculine for education, leisure, chatting. Small power distance cultures use the internet more than large power distance cultures for business. Weak uncertainty avoidance cultures us the internet more than high uncertainty avoidance cultures for mail. So Nordic cultures, which are small power distance, weak uncertainty avoidance and feminine, use the internet for all these things.

- consumer behaviour in EU countries diverges once a product is no longer scarce. For example, when a country becomes richer, everyone buys a car. But in more masculine cultures, it becomes common to buy two cars, one for the man, one for the woman. Consumers have not become 'globalized' in their behaviour because of increasing wealth. However it could be argued that individualism is related to wealth. But Hofstede would argue that the causation is from wealth to individualism rather than individualism creating wealth. In other words, he would say we need to fight poverty if we want to promote human rights/individualism, rather than promote individualism/human rights as a way of fighting poverty.

- he also asked us to remember in our training that his IBM data comes from surveys not interviews and from employees, not managers only.

- finally, he really hates Trompenaars (and by association Charles Hampden Turner), some of the other leading lights in intercultural theory. I had heard this before, but it was fun to see it! "Never guilty of original thought!" "Quack" "A quack's assistant!" "Just blah blah!"

Friends abroad

A start up in the UK called FriendsAbroad is starting to get some publicity. The founder is Simon Murdoch, who started Bookpages which was then sold to Amazon.com, with Murdoch ending up as VP of Amazon in Europe.

It's in its beta phase at the moment, and is free - the idea is that you plug in which language you can speak and which language you want to learn and then you are matched with someone you can communicate with by e-mail or text chat. They are hoping to add Voice over IP later on.

The target group is people who have failed so far to learn a language. As Murdoch rightly says, to learn a language properly you need to practice regularly if not daily, so the immediacy and ease of use internet based communication should help. I do have some doubts about the form of language people will end up learning - being able to write e-mails or TXT is useful but may not be much use for conversation or formal business communications. But it does at least take some of the fear out of making mistakes when it is not face to face ro real time, as studies of multicultural e-learning have shown.

Google - still great but...

I am taking this story with a large pinch of salt. Much though I still love and rely on Google, I don't think even its algorithms can work out whether a man is a CIA spy or not. Being a journalist is a very good cover for being a spy - Whittaker Chambers who spied for the Soviet Union whilst being a Time journalist for example.
And being a journalist wasn't much help to Terry Anderson or Daniel Pearl in denying that they were spies to their captors.

Whittaker Chambers at Time in 1939

Virtual ummah

Dr Olivier Roy, professor at the Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, has a new book coming out called 'Globalised Islam: the Search for a New Ummah' which he is plugging in an article today in the FT (sorry no link available) and also at Chatham House tomorrow. From the FT article:

The ummah [universal community of Muslim believers] that the fundamentalists are fighting for is not based on a territory: it is a dream that finds on the internet its virtual existence. Websites and chatrooms compensate for the lack of real social roots.

As he says at the beginning of the article "few, if any, among the children of Europe's Muslim immigrants return to wage jihad in the land of their ancestors" and those that join the Iraqi Sunni insurgents tend to be Saudi, Syrian or Jordanian, not volunteers from the west. Salafism (neo-fundamentalist islam) is a tool for uprooting traditional cultures. It rejects cultural dimensions of religion and replaces them with a code of Islamic conduct to suit any situation, from US to Afghanistan. The prime target of the Taliban is not the west, but traditional Afghan culture.

"[Fundamentalism] appeals to an uprooted, disaffected youth in search of an identity beyond the lost cultures of their parents and beyond the thwarted expectations of a better life in the west... a chance to build a new and positive identity."

It brings to mind a fascinating article I read in the Atlantic Monthly a month or so ago called 'Inside Al-Qaeda's Hard Drive' (subscription necessary), written by a journalist who managed to buy an Al Qaeda laptop with all the e-mails and files still intact. From the e-mail correspondence described, you certainly did get a sense of a group of people quite adept at networking with each other, keen to establish their own status and sense of purpose through bickering about budgets and office equipment - just like a multinational corporation in fact. So in their deadly and terrifying pursuit of trying to find a purpose, identity and belonging, these disaffected youths have succeeded in creating a virtual version of the kind of secular organisation they have rejected, or feel rejected by.

Distributed development

One of the biggest barriers people face when working in the overseas operations of a Japanese company is that Japanese corporate culture necessitates consensus building, developing a network of relationships and high context, indirect communication that is best done face to face when decisions are required. Yet the people you need the decisions from are several time zones and an expensive plane journey away. I encourage people to find any excuse they can to visit the Japan headquarters of their companies as often as possible, but obviously this has its practical limitations, so I receive many requests in my seminars for guidance on how to use e-mail etc effectively with Japanese counterparts during negotiations and decision making.

According to this article (direct link to pdf download) by academics at the University of Victoria, Canada and the University of Technology, Sydney, there is an increasing requirement for this kind of e-mail based negotiation and decision making between teams located in different countries in software development. Software engineering is making a transition from traditional co-located develpoment to a form where global software teams collaborate across national borders. From my experience with clients I would say this is true of hardware too - where the information sharing, project management and negotiation that goes into globally distributed product development is done by e-mail, teleconferencing, videoconferencing and 'virtual' meeting software.

As the article points out, there are many challenges faced by teams doing this:

1) Diversity in customer culture and business
For some cultures stability is very important. So when it comes to requesting requirements for a new release, customers may ask for requirements purely because they were in the previous release of software. Customers from other cultural backgrounds may ask for entirely new features just because they want to be up to date and progressive in their approach to technology. It seems to me this is especially a problem if there is a dominant customer culture (usually the Japanese domestic market for clients I work with), because it may lead to the sense that other customers are being ignored.

2) Achieving appropriate participation of system users
In other words indirect communication from end-users/clients sometimes gets distorted or misinterpreted on the way to the developers. Customer visits to development sites are rare and there is a tendency to rely on written communication - which was "very poor" in communicating clear requirements according to the companies studied for this article.
Again, the hardware people I've met had a few stories like this too.

3) Lack of informal communication and reduced awareness of the local working context.
No corridor/water cooler/coffee machine chats, which means assumptions are made without any basis. In the article they mention that the Australian development group kept asking for requirements to be defined by the US Project Office and the US project office members were waiting for system components to be delivered, based upon 'understood' requirements.

4) Reduced level of trust
A project manager is quoted as saying that 'the most trusted people are those that are most accessible or available'. So when meetings happen between people who have not had access to each other very often, they tend to be extra cautious and conscious in making commitments and worried about 'hidden agendas'. Again, something I hear a lot of from participants in my seminars.

5) Difficulty in managing conflict and having open discussions of interests

7) Ineffective decision-making meetings
Due to the degree of pressure in setting up meetings - a lot of preparation and time, and the participation of key decision makers add to the tension. Those that take place via teleconferencing need documents to be sent well in advance and participants must express themselves concisely and clearly. Different time zones mean somebody somewhere is inconvenienced. People come and go, the mute button is used - all adding to a loss of trust. Sometimes the pagination of documents do not match, leading to confusion.

8) Delay
A small issue with a requirement can take days back-and-forth e-mail discussions over e-mail to resolve, which could have been resolved immediately face to face. Not helpful in the fast moving software industry.

The authors point to a couple of cultural differences - that perhaps the American managers had a more top-down management style and did not involve the Australian stake holders in the development team as much as the Australians would have liked. (A power distance issue). Also that trust was more important to the Australian teams than to the American teams, so perhaps Australia is a more high context culture than the USA. But as they acknowledge, most of the research that Hofstede and others have done show little cultural difference between Australia and the US in communication preferences, so in the end they conclude 'that perhaps national culture is being used as a scapegoat in both organisations to cover up ineffective management practices at various levels.'

So, when I talk about how the purpose of a meeting is different in Japanese corporate cultures, hence people should not expect decisions to be made in those meetings, I might also refer to this article, especially points 4) and 7), to show that it might not just be a 'Japan' thing, but a 'distributed product development' thing too.

Work-life boundaries and the internet

I would assume the results of this survey sponsored by Yahoo of Americans deprived of the internet for two weeks would probably apply to most cultures. In particular, the focus on using internet to maintain sociability and to keep a private space at work make me conclude that internet-using workers in all societies are finding new ways to define work and private life boundaries.

Net balls

Ah sport and the interweb, bringing nations together in happy harmony...

A quote from an article in the New York Times on China's angry reaction to being defeated by Japan in the Asian Cup football tournament:

China's fast-growing Internet is the main forum for this anger. Lu Yunfei, 29, runs Patriots Alliance Web, a nationalist Web site that boasts 76,000 registered members and 100,000 daily visitors. Last year, Mr. Lu's group rallied online opposition that helped kill a deal for a Japanese group to build a bullet train from Shanghai to Beijing. The group has also turned a territorial dispute between China and Japan over the tiny Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea into a rallying cry of Chinese patriotism.

I read elsewhere that Japanese fans in China had adopted the Millwall slogan of 'nobody likes us and we don't care"...

Children playing football outside the walls of Beijing's Forbidden City.

Cultures of music piracy

I hope the US and European record industry takes note of this important article,(link is to a pdf) by MIT Assistant Professor in Japanese Cultural Studies Ian Condry. He contrasts the two approaches of the record industries in the US and Japan, respectively the world's largest and second largest music markets, to file sharing and piracy.

Whereas the US (and by association European) record industry seems bent on prosecuting its own customers, presumably with the intent of somehow creating an atmosphere where young people will come to realise that file sharing is wrong, and will stop doing it, the Japanese record industry is seeking ways to rebuild customer loyalty rather than demanding customer obedience. As Condry says, imagine the following conversation:

Student A: "I got the new KRS-1 album. It's great.'
Student B: 'Cool. Could I borrow it some time? I'd like to hear it.'
Student A: 'No, I think we need to protect the copyrights of artists, record companies and publishers. Please go and buy the CD yourself.'
Student B: 'Loser.'

As he says 'music falls into that category of things that you are normally obligated to share with your dorm mates, family and friends.' I would have to agree, as a member of the (old crock) generation that was warned that 'home taping is killing music', and nonetheless lovingly crafted and was given lovingly crafted compilation tapes as tokens of friendship and more.

He points out that sales of CDs in both countries have been falling in the past few years but that in Japan this cannot be laid at the door of p2p networks, as Japanese people are not great users of p2p. A lack of broadband connectivity, a preference for connecting to the internet via mobile phone etc all play a part in this of course but (and this is where this article gets really ground breaking for us interculturalists) "the contrast is less one of 'Japanese culture' being different from 'American culture' but that American and Japanese fans share many attitudes, while the response of the Japanese business community differs markedly from those in the US." Japanese record companies recognise that CD rental shops are here to stay, so instead they try to analyse CD rentals to understand fans better.

In other words sometimes culture is "not necessarily guided by geographical area, but rather by the ways people are positioned in social, business and technological networks." This has been noted before of course - usually in relation to the way that the type of people that attend the kind of international business school I went to have more in common with each other than they have with more deprived social classes in their own countries.

Japanese music consumers are also copying and sharing music non-commercially, but they do it by renting CDs from rental stores for the equivalent of a couple of dollars, and then ripping them. Again, oldie that I am, I remember doing this in the 1980s when I lived in Japan (with records) - I even found a record rental shop that would actually tape the record for you until they got nervous and stopped doing it.

The reasons Japanese young people give for doing this are very similar to the reasons given by American 'pirates', namely that they feel the record companies are ripping them off (prices of CDs have increased by 7.2% 1999-2001 and are even more expensive in Japan), that too many bands are 'manufactured', and too many CDs have only one or two good tracks on them.

When asked under what circumstances they would pay for music, American students interviewed by Condry said they would pay for indie artists, or artists from their hometown or major groups with a solid track record of good albums, or genres of music that have stood the test of time and are not adequately supported by major record companies (jazz, classical). And of course there is the completist, fan instinct to own everything in tangible form produced by a particular artist (David Bowie and Talking Heads for me, Robyn Hitchcock for my husband). Japanese consumers have displayed similar preferences - Condry notes the way that Okinawan band Mongol 800 became a word-of-mouth success.

So Condry's recommendation to the music industry is to find new ways of connecting with and developing fans, if they want them to part with their money (non-stop touring is not recommended for health reasons ;-)) That it is all about the love, man. If music is just a commodity, consumers will get it as cheaply as they can. And that fans worldwide are ethical too - downloading is OK, but downloading and selling is not, even if these ethics are not fully consistent nor fully represent the music business.

(Thanks to Smartmobs who in turn got it from The MIT Technology Review)

British surfers confused or nosy?

Netimperative is spinning this story about a survey done by comScore Networks to mean that as British people use search engines more often than other countries, they are confused or lazy about using the net. As a search engine addict, I think it is more about a large number of British people being knowledge workers, and also having a strong tradition of research, as well as being plain old nosy about other people. But then the French, who are also quite 'high context' and therefore like to know the background of people, use search engines significantly less often than the Brits.

They only surveyed five countries, but it was interesting too to note that Google was by far and away the most popular search engine for the UK, France, Germany and Canada, and it was only in the USA that Yahoo was anything like a close second.

Japanese blogs

I have been lazy about reading Japanese blogs in Japanese. I read Gen Kanai's and Joi Itoh's blogs, which are written in English and mostly link to English language material. I also read blogs written in English by expats in Japan such as the beautiful looking and award-winning Antipixel, Mediatinker and Cerebral Soup.

And now there seems to be some controversy over an article on The Feature which talks about the low uptake of moblogging even in Japan. I've said before that we Anglophones should be very careful about inventing a term, defining it and then assuming that it is the universal term and definition, allowing us to judge whether non-Anglophone cultures 'do it' or are any good at it.

This point came up again at The Royal Institute of International Affairs Japan Group meeting yesterday in London, where someone pointed to a recent survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit, which ranked the UK second in terms of 'e-readiness' and Japan 25th. 'E-readiness' is, according to the EIU, "a collection of factors that indicate how amenable a market is to Internet-based opportunities." As far as I can work out, Japan is placed rather low despite high uptakes of 3G, broadband, local loop unbundling etc - because it scored badly on 'consumer and business adoption' (presumably the low penetration rate of PCs - but what about the fact that people can and do access e-mail, the Web and do e-commerce from their mobile phones?) and 'supporting e-services' (meaning consulting and IT services). Well I guess this criterion has been included because the survey is sponsored by IBM, who want to drop a big hint at Japanese companies and the Japanese government who have traditionally preferred to do things in-house, rather employ consultants...

There is no doubt that a lot of Japanese people are blogging, and have been doing something like blogging from their mobile phones since 1999, when i-mode was launched. It may be that 'moblog' software as has been developed in the US and Europe does not exist in the same way, but being a very visual culture, Japanese bloggers have found ways to incorporate all kinds of images, some from cameraphones, into their websites. For example, this site, Magic Island, hosts over 3 million 'home pages', attracting 900 million page views a month, largely created and viewed via mobile phones.

So over the next few days I will introduce some Japanese blogs, written in Japanese, by Japanese people, that I have randomly picked up and started reading on a regular basis. I'll translate some of their self description and any entry that catches my eye. Here's the first:

a wild flower. "I am a working woman. A mother. One strike against me [Japanese expression for having one failed marriage]. A woman. As such, here are my various feelings... Being a woman is fun..."
Entry for April 27 "I walked home with my son in a pitch black street. Holding hands. His small round hand was warm. 'A shooting star!' he called out, but Mama didn't see it. 'If you see a shooting star you can make a wish.' 'I didn't know that, so I didn't make a wish.' 'Yes, well...' 'If there hadn't been traffic lights and buildings and cars I could have run and caught it.' He's so sweet! [Japanese emoticon for parent silly with pride which I can't reproduce in MovableType grrr] I hope he can somehow put off becoming a difficult adolescent."
Other postings are on the subject of makeup, the Pill, tomatoes, buying male underwear, semi-naked mannequins and Lush (the UK soap shop now in Japan).

I suppose some might find this saccharine and insubstantial. I rather like it.

Dating sites and identity

An article in the online section of the Japanese business magazine Nikkei Business (subscription only) wonders about the connection between Japanese internet dating sites and social software.

The journalist (Kobashi Akihiko) takes as his starting point the coincidence of the recent announcement by the Japanese National Police Agency that they undertook investigations of 1746 cases relating to internet dating sites last year, with the launch by Google staff of Orkut, a social networking service.

The 1746 cases investigated by the NPA represent a large increase on the previous year. There were also 37 more cases than the previous year which had resulted in murder or robbery. Kobashi posits that internet dating sites have a deeper 'dark side' to them than offline dating services. He wonders whether this is because they are used mostly by generations born since the 1960s, the so-called Shinjinrui ("new people" - a bit like Generation Y) who have become so focused on their identities and their individuality, without reference to other people, that they have become over-sensitive to criticism, and withdraw to an inner circle of people they feel safe with. This means that the 'individual self' and the 'social self' become opposed. Not treading on another's individuality becomes the definition of sociability or a socialized person when in fact 'socialization' used to mean being able to change oneself through relations with other people.

He mentions an experiment by a psychologist (Froming? Floming?) in 1982 which showed that people's behaviour changed significantly depending on whether they were in front of an audience or in front of a mirror. In front of a mirror they behave according to their own values, and in front of an audience they try to match other people's expectations. I tried to check this on Google and there seems to be a lot of psychological studies on mirror presence, audience presence and self consciousness but I could not find the precise one he is talking about. Anyway, Kobashi makes the interesting point that the internet is not an audience but a mirror.

People are clicking on the information they want and look only at that information when they go on the internet. They only see what they want to see reflected back at them. On an internet dating site, they are only meeting themselves when they search for someone.

He sees social networking services as something different, however, because other people's opinions are brought into them. He ends on a positive note that perhaps social networking sites will enable socialization and individuality to fuse.

Digital Access Index

The International Telecommunication Union has published its first Digital Access Index. As they say, " the results suggest that English is no longer a decisive factor in quick technology adoption, especially as more content is made available in other languages." The US and the UK aren't even in the top 10 economies with the best digital access for their populations, whereas South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan are.

The index measures the overall ability of individuals in a country to access and use information and communication technology and uses 8 variables:
1. Fixed telephone subscribers per 100 inhabitants
2. Mobile cellular subscribers per 100 inhabitants
3. Internet access price as percentage of Gross National Income per capita
4. Adult Literacy
5. Combined primary, secondary and tertiary school enrolment level
6. International Internet bandwidth (bits) per capita
7. Broadband subscribers per 100 inhabitants
8. Internet users per 100 inhabitants

These variables explain why some unexpected countries (Slovenia for example) are judged to have high access levels. But it's interesting to see that on variable 8, the top five countries are Iceland, Sweden, South Korea, United States and Japan. Again, we should not assume that the internet is only attractive to English speakers.