> I was surprised to see that they weren't like, say, 20 years behind or something
That actually says more about what the Western "First World" media feeds their people, that the rest of the world is 20 years behind and stuff :')
Maybe 10, maybe some places, sure. In terms of social progress and basic rights, hell there are places that are 50 or even 200 years behind (see Afghanistan's treatment of women for example)
But tech-wise, I was surprised when I visited some parts of the Middle East and Asia; almost everything was available online, paid for electronically, clean and effective mass transport, walkable and safe cities..
> That actually says more about what the Western "First World" media feeds their people, that the rest of the world is 20 years behind and stuff :')
More like, "western" media rarely talks about most countries not undergoing a crisis, somehow relevant or close culturally. A British paper will talk about the US and Western EU countries because they're relevant to Britons and close partners; it will also cover Ukraine and Gaza because they're undergoing crisis and relevant. It won't talk all that much about the war in Mali or the local politics of Tashkent. French media will cover former colonies like Mali more due to the shared language and the presence of large amounts of people of that descent in France, but won't cover e.g. what's happening in Sri Lanka day to day.
So the little that the average "westerner" hears about North Korea is the occasional weird case, or when they make missile tests / international threats. The state of urbanism in Pyongyang is irrelevant to most people, so there is little reporting on it.
> But tech-wise, I was surprised when I visited some parts of the Middle East and Asia; almost everything was available online, paid for electronically, clean and effective mass transport, walkable and safe cities..
Wildly location dependent.
> clean and effective mass transport
Big Chinese cities, big former Soviet cities, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Japan. Everywhere else in Middle East and Asia doesn't have effective mass transport there might be a few metro lines like in Dubai, or be rapidly expanding like Hanoi, Riyadh, but nothing else comparable to the gold standards of e.g. Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing, London, Paris.
> walkable and safe cities..
Which cities were walkable? I have yet to visit a developing country where walking wasn't barely an afterthought with little to no sidewalks, no priority for pedestrians, etc. While it's definitely better in some countries compared to others, it's really not the norm in "the Middle East and Asia". It is in most developed countries in those regions, like Japan, China, South Korea, UAE, Saudi (and the last two have temperatures that make it challenging).
> almost everything was available online
My favourite is the countries in the middle. E.g. Sri Lanka, where the railways are stuck in the 1950s from when the British left, everything is on paper (schedules, tickets, etc.) and you have to go to a train station to buy a ticket... but a lot of other things are quite digital. Everywhere has 4G coverage, everyone has a phone with data. But some things are literally decades behind.
> media feeds their people, that the rest of the world is 20 years behind and stuff
Well western or pretty media having no access to the country pretty much guarantees that everything they might be reporting is a mix of speculation and outdated information. Doing the best you can with whatever data is available doesn’t seem like an unreasonable approach.
> see Afghanistan's treatment of women for example
That actually says more about what the Western "First World" media feeds their people, that the rest of the world is 20 years behind and stuff :')
Maybe 10, maybe some places, sure. In terms of social progress and basic rights, hell there are places that are 50 or even 200 years behind (see Afghanistan's treatment of women for example)
But tech-wise, I was surprised when I visited some parts of the Middle East and Asia; almost everything was available online, paid for electronically, clean and effective mass transport, walkable and safe cities..