Common Tech Still New For North Koreans

While the rest of the world has made huge technological strides over the past few decades, North Koreans have been kept quite literally in the dark. One of the most famous images of North Korea was taken from space and it shows the southern half of the Korean peninsula illuminated in light while the north is pitch black. Even if North Koreans had regular access to electricity in recent years, many of them wouldn't have had much use for it anyway.

While Americans will be reading about the historic summit in Singapore on their smartphones and tablets, viewers in Pyongyang will be lucky to catch a fleeting glimpse of the negotiations on their old, fuzzy TV sets, permanently tuned to the state channel. All of the common media devices westerners take for granted are still too expensive in the world's most reclusive state and many of them have only become available recently.

Take television as an example. It's been a common part of U.S. life since the late 1940s but in North Korea, it only really caught on in the late 1990s. USB sticks are becoming more common in North Korea too. More often than not, they are smuggled across the border and pre-loaded with subversive material like K-pop songs. The North Korean data for this infographic came from a report from Intermedia.