Internet Use Triples, Digital Democracy Soars June 4th, 2009
Regina Hopper

From the surge of social networking sites to the everyday use of email, it’s hard to miss the growing prominence of the Internet in our lives.  Now, a new report by the Census Bureau confirms the exponential rise of our connected behavior—revealing that Internet use tripled from 1997 to 2007.  In fact, the number of U.S. households that utilize the Internet from home jumped from 18% in 1997 to 62% in 2007.  The rapid rise of broadband is made vividly clear by the research too, with 82% of us now using a high-speed connection.  And use is spanning an array of demographics with 69% of whites, 73% of Asians, 52% of blacks, and 48% of Hispanics going online.

Just how much has Internet use evolved?  Our government is a powerful example of how digital democracy is transforming modern communications, and creating a dialogue with the world.  This week, President Obama’s highly anticipated speech in Cairo was a living example of this new Internet era.  To reach a global audience, the State Department translated the President’s address in 13 languages and created a website for people to receive speech highlights via text message in Arabic, Persian, Urdu and English.  From a webcast on Whitehouse.gov to the State Department’s live streaming and web chat, viewers could not only catch every word, but also participate through online forums and through text replies.  And, social media also played a pivotal role, connecting worldwide users via Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and more.

As Internet use skyrockets, the way we connect is changing fundamentally too.  And with these revolutionary Internet forums available to us, there’s no limit to what we can accomplish online.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 4th, 2009 at 8:48 am and is filed under Benefits of Broadband, Reports and Studies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.