A Mainstream Internet Still a Decade Distant

On the eve of yet another new year of the Internet era, the Pew Internet and American Life Project has provided a comparative analysis of data it began accumulating about the online medium in March 2000. According to a story about the report in The New York Times, 66 million Americans now log onto the Internet daily, compared to 52 million almost four years ago.

That hardly makes the Internet mainstream — access still varies from community to community and according to socio-economic differences, the so-called digital divide. Television, which boasts a 98 percent penetration rate, is mainstream, and Pew projects that a mainstream Internet is still a decade distant. “The trajectory of this only increases as more devices connect to the Internet, as it becomes easier to use, as it becomes easier to search and sort,” said Lee Rainee, who edited the Pew report. “One day, we’ll look back on these days of Google searches as laughably simplistic.”