The State of the Internet

“The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.”-Eric Schmidt, Google CEO

http://www.focus.com/ has published a beautiful series of graphs called the State of the Internet. Here is a summary of the results

- An equal number of men and women use the Internet (74%)

- Age matters. 93% of young adults 18-29 use the Internet while only 38% of senior citizens do.

- Income matters. Those with more money have faster Internet access.

- Education matters. Users without a high school education: only 39% while 94% of college graduates use the Internet.

- The most surprising graphic to me was the frequency of Internet use, pictured above. Only 38% of those surveyed say they use the Internet several times a day. %21 once a day. The majority are infrequent users. This explains my sister who does not check her email very often.

- Laptops are now in 46% of all homes.

- Scandinavia has the best Internet penetration into homes. Nothing else to do in the dark, cold, winter perhaps? The US is #5 after Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Netherlands.

- The US is horribly behind in Internet speed. Appx 5 mbps vs 61 mbps in Japan. (mbps = megabits per second)

Bottom Line

I’ve been an Internet user since the 1980’s when my college, Michigan State, gave everyone access. Then AOL in the early 1990’s, then Netscape and now mostly IE. I consider it one of humankind’s greatest inventions.

I used to buy reference books or seek out information at reference sections of libraries. But informational books can quickly become dated. Now I take for granted the easy access to global information on any subject – for example, yesterday I was looking for vendors of Pinewood Derby tracks for Cub Scouts and the costs. Did you know tracks come in wood, plastic and metal with laser controlled times on the finish line?

For more interesting Internet facts check out http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/02/08/15-fantastic-firsts-on-the-internet/ which describes 15 firsts like the first email, first spam, first web site, etc.