Web-Savvy Iceland Iceland’s President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson made some interesting comments last week that got me thinking about how you never know where technology will take hold. Grimsson said that social media has more influence over global affairs than governments now. It’s a surprisingly sophisticated viewpoint from the leader of one of the world’s smallest nations. And it illustrates how some of our smallest societies are also some of our most tech-savvy. Grimsson’s comments, of course, come in the wake of the Arab Spring revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya as well as uprisings and protests in Syria, Yemen, Algeria, Jordan, Morocco, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and other countries. "I know it's a strong statement, especially coming from someone who spent most of his life within those institutions,” Grimsson told CNN. “But the power of the social media is, in my opinion, transforming the political process in such a way that I can't see any chance for the traditional, formal institutions of our democratic systems to keep up." What strikes me most about these comments is where they’re coming from—the president of a small island nation with a population of only 318,000. (Wyoming, our least populated state, has over 500,000 people in it.) It would have been an insightful comment from the leader of a superpower, but it’s even more insightful from the leader of a small nation. But looks are deceiving, aren’t they? Some of the world’s smallest nations actually have some of the highest Internet penetration rates. Internet penetration in Wyoming is at 76%, according to the U.S. Census Bureau (just below the U.S. rate of 78%). It’s a good bit below our highest state New Hampshire at 85%, but it’s still very respectable. However, it doesn’t come anywhere near Iceland’s 97%. You might not expect it, but Iceland has the second highest Internet penetration rate in the world, according to InternetWorldStats.com. Iceland also has a really high Facebook penetration rate at 67% (the U.S. is at 48%). As it turns out, there are a lot of surprising countries with high Internet penetration rates. The country with the highest? Monaco, the principality with a population of 36,000, at 97.6%. (Even Greenland with 58,000 people is at 90%.) I thought it would have been Japan (78%) or some other Asian nation, but most of the highest percent nations are in Europe, and most of them are in Northern Europe.
Feel free to make a crack about the dark and cold and what else are they gonna do (besides drink, that is), but that doesn’t explain it. Northern Europeans put a strong emphasis on education. They can always speak perfect English and at least a couple other languages, can’t they? So it makes sense that they’d put a strong emphasis on Internet and technology as well. "Reading was always important to people in Iceland and a literary creativity," he said. "Somehow, with the digital revolution, this interest was transported over to computers, websites, mobile phones and so on. So Iceland now ranks among the top countries in all of these areas, and it has brought forward a new generation of people who are creating companies in these fields." Huh. That might explain it. In any case, Grimsson is understandably pushing hard on technology as a way to escape the financial woes of the last couple years. According to CNN, Iceland’s unemployment rate has dropped from 8.5 to 6% this year (the U.S. unemployment rate is still at 9%). Maybe I can sum up the whole thing with this— In July 2010, Iceland made Internet broadband access a legal right for all its citizens. It was the first country ever to do that. Pretty progressive, huh?