We’ve shrunk the world, and now it’s portable and harder to see. That’s good and bad. To paraphrase Norma Desmond, is it just the pictures that have gotten smaller, or is some part of us also diminished? In the macro, it’s a huge victory, but there are losses even in the greatest gains. From Neil Gough at the New York Times:

“For the first time, more Chinese people are gaining access to the Internet with mobile devices than with personal computers.

The shift is significant, if expected, in China, which is the world’s biggest market for both Internet and smartphone users.

China had 632 million Internet users at the end of June, an increase of 14.4 million since the end of December, according to a semiannual report published on Monday by the official China Internet Network Information Center, which is known as CNNIC. Of those, 83.4 percent reported gaining access to the Internet with mobile devices, exceeding for the first time the percentage who reported using computers to go online, at 80.9 percent.

The results of the survey showed that more Chinese were heading online to send instant messages (through popular mobile apps like Tencent’s Weixin, or WeChat), listen to music, play video games and read.”