"Why do Estonians and South Koreans love cell phones, PCs, and the Internet? Delivering the answer to that question is not the punchline to a very niche racist joke, it's actually the subject of serious research by Dawn Nafus, a Cambridge PhD wielding anthropologist for Intel.
The Index shows some surprises. The United States, for example, doesn't stand out as a particularly fast tech adopter relative to our level of wealth. Why not? Nafus explained that population size is actually a constraint on technology adoption, just the sheer number of connections betweens people seems to slow adoption.
As for Estonia and South Korea, her team found that they both have agile governments, strong offline social networks, and major upheavals in living memory (the transition out of Communism and the Korean War)."
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