Broadband: Creating the new digital divide
This recent study (PDF download) by the PEW Internet and American Life Project assesses the implications of the proliferation of Broadband Internet access among American netizens.
Fifty-three percent of internet users now have a high-speed connection at home, up from 21% of internet users in 2002. Not surprisingly, the groups who were initially most likely to lag in adopting the internet now lag in access speeds. Those with less education, those with lower household incomes, and Americans age 65 and older are less likely to have embraced broadband than those who are younger and have higher socio-economic status.
And one conclusion the research reached is the wide disparity of online behavior between Broadband and non-Broadband (i.e., dial-up) users.
Broadband access is now a more significant predictor of
online behavior than years of online experience. Previously, the Pew
Internet & American Life Project reported that if an internet user
had three or more years of experience online, he was more likely to
take part in a wide range of activities on a typical day. Now that most
of the internet’s heaviest users have upgraded from dial-up to
high-speed access at home, broadband users are pulling away from
dial-up users in many aspects of online life, regardless of the years
of online experience they might have.
Not surprising, if
you ask me. After all, the Internet at the speed of thought is surely
different from the Internet at the speed of having to wait a couple of
minutes for a webpage to load. And lately, Internet-based applications
have been very bandwidth heavy, being multimedia-rich. The effect?
The people with slow access are being left behind. It’s just too time
consuming to navigate the Web these days on dialup. Broadband is the
wave of the future, but most, especially in developing countries like
the Philippines, still have to contend with bandwidth limitations.
This is perhaps the reason why several design schools of thought are moving towards the simpler, lighter approaches. And this is also my personal design philosphy: less is more.
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