Not a trivial question at all. Highly important. Let us take off our own blindfolds. A study by the Ministry of Economic Development in NZ concludes with this comment: "However, the cases also illustrate that *the country is a very long way still from having a vibrant information economy*." http://www.med.govt.nz/pbt/infotech/case-studies/conclusion/conclusion.html Sadly the study was so badly constructed, (full of wrong assumptions) it entirely missed discovering "Why this is so". Let me try and make up a definition of the Internet: The Internet: A massive array of perfectly capable computers, each one with peer status at the end of a communication line. Each of those computers is controlled by a person who usually has no idea how the system works, who to contact, what to search for or how to use the system to do anything useful. The Internet is the "superhighway" populated by people who prefer to walk with blindfolds on. (My research suggests that most "connections" get less than 10 emails a week, and used less than once a week to search on Google. The content of an email is usually a joke, sometimes a video link. Occasionally people send photos to each other. People DON'T join lists, or social networks or groups of any kind. This sort of behaviour was typical for +80% of my small sample. (3 yrs ago) I've been talking to 50+ people recently on another study. Nothing there suggests anything has changed.) John Sam Tilden wrote:
I know this is a trivial question! Does anyone have a really good definition of the Internet.
The only ones I have speaks only to the technology.
Sam