Mobile devices preferred for social networking in Asia

A recent survey indicates that in at least four Asian countries – China, India, South Korea and Thailand – mobile devices are the preferred tools for accessing and using social network sites. More than 50 per cent of respondents in these countries reported accessing social network sites using a mobile phone weekly.

This is not surprising since the "digital divide" is being bridged by the mobile phone, not the PC. Long before the electric grid makes it to rural villages, mobile phone signals are available, increasingly with Internet capability. An article in the Economist mentions how university students in remote regions of China buy high-end smart phones in part because "phones are often the only practical way for students to access the web for their studies."

The design of Door43, the wiki where we are building free & open discipleship tools, reflects this trend toward the use of mobile phones in both the use of discipleship tools as well as the creation of them. We plan to provide mobile-friendly versions of the site that make editing content in the wiki as easy as possible.

Photo made available by JonathanCohen under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.