Australia - mapping the Internet

A broad mapping of the internet
see also The Internet in Australia

The Internet is everywhere: at work, at home, and on the move. If Kevin Rudd's plans come to anything, it will soon be in every school. The underlying technologies are scarcely three decades old; some of the most popular sites such as YouTube and Facebook, only a few years. But this new world of information and communication is now, for many of us, an utterly everyday experience.

What is equally remarkable is how little we really know about how the Net is used, where and by whom. The Net may be all around us, but it is still very strange.

We know that the Net is changing rapidly, with broadband and new kinds of social media. But we don't know what difference broadband actually makes, and whether it will be worth the $5billion or so the Government is planning to spend. Recent work in Australia by researchers as part of the World Internet Project is tackling these and other questions on several fronts.

Like the global Human Genome Project, this study of the Net is an ambitious, collaborative, world-wide attempt to map something that was very recently unthinkable. It has the potential to tell us a great deal about who we now are or more precisely, who Australians are becoming in the new era of networks. The work will also help us gauge the real prospects for turning Australia into one of those new, desirable ''knowledge economies'' based on innovation and creativity.

Perhaps the most striking finding of the project so far is that while the Net may seem to be everywhere, a fifth of Australians have never used it. And in Britain, the non-users are almost a third of the adult population. In other words, there is a digital divide in Australia and it reflects patterns of uptake that are repeated elsewhere in the prosperous West.

If you're male, employed or studying, if you have a university degree and a higher than average income, you are more likely to be online. These patterns are familiar, but the Net is changing, and computers have been getting cheaper. The divide is not as simple as the old idea of the better-off information ''haves'' and the struggling ''have nots''.

Lower-income families with children are much more likely to have access to the Net than those without children. Many older non-users actually do access the Net through their friends and families. So the digital divide is, in some cases, more likely to be a digital choice. At the same time, new divides are appearing around the more recent Internet technologies.

In Australia, just under four in five home connections are now broadband. That means that about half the population have it, and half don't, but that's changing quickly, because the technology is in a rapid take-up phase. Although the quality of our broadband may not match that of some European and Asian countries, Australia has recently jumped a few notches in the OECD's league table in this area.

Broadband is much more than an improved version of the old dialup access: it seems to change what people do online in quite fundamental ways. It is helping to transform something we have long thought of as dry IT into a social, cultural and political technology. Broadband users spend more time on the Net.

Six out of 10 users under the age of 30 say they watch less TV. For women even more than for men, broadband dramatically changes the online experience. So the Net is now coming into its own. It's shaking up traditional media, especially television, less so newspapers, books and magazines. And it's changing politics, as we saw in the federal election last year. Those who are online think the Net matters politically; those who are not are unsure.

What is the point of this sort of research? A global, long-run study of the Net is useful for many people: for policy makers, for consumers, businesses and innovators. This kind of knowledge has another possible benefit, if it can help make what now seems strange a bit less scary. We could then spend a little less time worrying about what the Net might do to us or our children, and some more time figuring out what it could achieve for us all.

Professor Thomas works in the ARC Centre of Excellence for creative industries and innovation at Swinburne University.