The Savvy Technologist

Pew project reports on Internet evolution

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has a new report that describes how Americans’ use of the Internet has changed in the last few years. The report concludes that “The Web has become the ‘new normal’ in the American way of life,” but I was most interested in their description of how Americans use the Internet differently depending on the bandwidth that’s available.

Now we are in the midst of yet another important change in the internet—the rapid switchover from dial-up access to high-speed broadband connections. More than half of Americans who go online now have access to always-on connections at home or work, and they are different kinds of users than those with dial-up connections. They spend more time online. They do more online activities, especially those that exploit bigger information “pipelines,” such as accessing streaming video. They are much more likely to create content and share it with the rest of the online population. And they report greater levels of satisfaction with the role of the internet in their lives.

I hinted at it in a previous post on the topic, but it bears repeating. Bandwidth is the new digital divide—or will be soon. I just did a quick check on my Smoothwall firewall network traffic graphs and discovered that over the last week I’ve been averaging 2.1 kB/sec. That doesn’t sound like much, and it’s been a pretty light week for Internet usage at home, but when you work out the math it amounts to over 1.2 GB of downloads. How did I do it? It’s mostly podcasts and other RSS traffic, a Daily Show episode via BitTorrent, some Internet radio listening via my SliMP3 player, and some miscellaneous Web browsing. Can we really expect students to “create content and share it with the rest of the online population” over a dial-up connection?