Irene has an interesting post up at Neweurasia on the number of bloggers in Kazakhstan: 3450 blogs registered in Kazakhstan. Compared to China, which has 19.87 million blogs(!), the number is very low, especially when you look at it per capita. 1 in 65 Chinese has a blog, but only about 1 in 4347 Kazakhstani is a registered blogger. The post then asks why Kazakhstan is so slow. It led me to thinking about the Internet and Kazakhstan. There is an assumption generally that new technology is good and that people will naturally incline towards use of new things, if any technical barriers are sufficiently reduced. So in the interests of making Kazakhstani computer-literate and Internet-savvy in general, the government is working on a program to provide cheap, high-speed Internet cafes throughout the country, as well as trainings. The theory is that Kazakhstan doesn’t use the Internet because it is expensive, not widely available, and because they don’t know how. Reduce those barriers and everyone will be jumping on a computer to use Wikipedia and start a blog! In turn this will help convert Kazakhstan to a knowledge-based economy and the money will start pouring in!

This begs the question of whether the Internet has anything to offer Kazakhstani. We assume that technology is good and everybody needs it. However there are features of Kazakhstan culture and social life that make me wonder if Internet usage will ever reach the levels of the US, for example. (more…)