The Increasing Use of Internet
Description:
Rapid growth of internet technology has stimulated the idea of 'Global Village'. A global village can be understood as inter-connectedness of world's entities. The entites may be in a form of people, organization, state, or even devices. As we all might have seen, internet nowadays has played important role on underpinning processes and activities in almost all aspects of human life. Communication, media, and education, for intances, has been benefited by the advance of internet in a sense that internet provides new ways of communicating, informing, and educating that cease 'time' and vanish 'space'.
Enablers:
- The advance of computer and mobile technology
- The more and more affordable price of computer
- The advance of network technology: Wireless Network
- Better education level, especially in the 3rd world countries
Inhibitors:
- Internet security issues: its vulnerabilities to cybercrime
Paradigms:
Emerging paradigm associated with the advance of internet:
- e-government
- e-commerce
- e-business
- e-learning (Distance learning)
- Semantic web
Experts:
- Marshal McLuhan
- GVU's WWW survey
- IDC
- Nua Ltd.
Timing:
In a www survey conducted by GUV in 1995, internet connection speed at 14 kb/s had the highest percentage with 33.7%, 32.72%, 22.95% in general part of the world, U.S, and europe respectively. In other words, the most common connection speed is 14 Kb/sec (33.70%) followed by 28 Kb/sec (26.63%). In year 1998, the same survey resulted in 31.4% for connection speed at 56 Kb/sec. This fact however has shown how internet technology has grown rapidly within three years.
In terms of internet usage, internet user has grown from 16 million (0.39% of world population) in December 1995 to 580.78 million (9.75% of world population) in May 2002. Those data are based upon research from Nua Ltd. and IDC respectively. This means internet user had grown 35.3% in seven years from 1995 to 2002. Therefore, in year 2020 we might expect internet will overwhelmingly used by people and become a backbone of human's technology civilization.