Briefing Papers

"...The United Nations - like all other institutions in the world today - must fully exploit the great promise of the Information Age. Used responsibly, it can greatly improve our chances of defeating poverty and better meeting our other priority objectives.": From the Millennium Report

Vital statistics

It took radio broadcasters 38 years to reach an audience of 50 million, television 13 years, and the Internet just four.
In 1998, there were an estimated 143 million Internet users, with numbers expected to exceed 700 million by 2001.
There were 50 pages on the World Wide Web in 1993; today there are more than 50 million pages.
It is estimated that in just over five years some 900 million electronic devices could be connected to the Internet-equaling the number of telephones in the world.
From just over twenty in 1990, there were more than 200 nations connected by July 1998.
Some 88% of all users in 1998 lived in industrial countries, home to less than 15% of the world's people.
A computer costs one month's salary for the average American, compared with eight years' income for the average Bangladeshi.
A quarter of the world's countries still do not have one telephone per 100 people.
The United States has more computers than the rest of the world combined, and Thailand has more cellular phone than the whole of Africa.