While doing some research for a work project I’m doing currently, I came across this illuminating PEW report from January 2005, called Internet Evolution: A decade of adoption: How the internet has woven itself into American life. The following extract is from the introduction, entitled ‘Internet: The Mainstreaming of Online Life’. Here it is, with one comment in italic inserted by me:
“The New Normal
The Web has become the “new normal” in the American way of life; those who don’t go online constitute an ever-shrinking minority. And as the online population has grown rapidly, its composition has changed rapidly. At the infant stage, the internet’s user population was dominated by young, white men who had high incomes and plenty of education [RM: not unlike the make-up of the Web 2.0 Conference attendees]. As it passed into its childhood years in 1999 and 2000, the population went mainstream; women reached parity with men online, lots more minority families joined the party, and more people with modest levels of income and education came online.
This transition altered the internet’s social environment. These early adopters loved the liberation they got from being online. They liked the fact that they could get news from nontraditional sources. Back in 1996, 56% of those who got political news online said they preferred the internet because they could get extra information that was not available from traditional news sources. At the same time, just 18% said they preferred the internet because it was convenient. These early adopters wanted to topple all manner of institutions and establish a new order in virtual space. They had a utopian sense of the transformative power of the new technology.
The later adopters are not looking to this technology to overturn the existing order. They like the internet because it can make them more productive and more connected. Theirs is an unsentimental outlook. Like most later adopters of technology, they need to be shown that there is a real, immediate and practical value in embracing the new.”
What do I take from this?
1) Web 2.0 is still in the 1996 era in terms of Internet take-up;
2) perhaps some of us Web 2.0 pundits have been guilty of focusing too much on “utopian sense of the transformative power of the new technology”; aka the Bubble mentality.
3) the tipping point will be when Web 2.0 becomes convenient and practical for mainstream people to use – making them “more productive and more connected”. We’re still a year or two away from that point, I think.
It’s an excellent report to read and a timely reminder to us all of the context of Web 2.0, within the ongoing evolution of the Internet.
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)