Anatomy of the cybernaut

UNESCO Courier, Dec, 1998 by Sophie Boukhari

More and more people are using the Internet.

Who are they? Where do they live? What do they want from cyberspace?

Internet users are among the world's most closely observed specimens of humanity. Consultants and marketing experts scrutinize them, monitor their desires and anticipate their reactions, for they know the future of the information economy is in their hands. Data about them is everywhere.

But the character of the Internet (or Net) user is changing all the time. In the virtual world's Stone Age, in the 1970s, the Net was the preserve of a tiny, very uniform group of specialized researchers. Gradually it spread to a rather wider group of university people and computer experts.

During the "Bronze Age", which ended with the invention of the World Wide Web(1) in 1992, the typical "netizen" was easy to describe. He was a highly educated, comfortably-off, English-speaking white male around thirty years old, living in a town or city. This is still pretty much true today. Netizens are still mostly young Anglo-Saxon adults with some kind of higher education earning about $50,000 a year.

"This image is out of date," however, says Frenchman Christian Huitema, who works for the US telecommunications firm Bellcore. "As time passes, the typical Internet user is becoming more and more like the average citizen. This trend is bound to continue."

Several recent developments confirm his analysis. First there has been a tremendous influx of women into cyberspace. At the beginning of 1994, only five per cent of Internet users were women. Today the figure is 38 per cent, according to surveys. Their initial absence is easily explained. "The Internet first developed among engineers and technicians, few of whom are women," says Huitema. Christine Maxwell, of the Internet Society, says that "because of the kind of work most women do, they have less opportunity to connect to the Net from their workplace. But they are logging on more and more from home as computer prices drop."

This year, according to several sources, more women than men have become Net users for the first time. Some 52 per cent of people who have been connected for less than a year are women. But the situation varies greatly around the world. In Europe and South Africa, a quarter of all Net users are women, compared with 25 per cent in Brazil and New Zealand and 40 per cent in the United States. In the Middle East, the figure is only four per cent. The virtual world closely mirrors the real one where equality between the sexes is concerned.

But Maxwell thinks things will change: "In Saudi Arabia, which has barely begun to connect up to the Set, women are not allowed to drive motor vehicles. But they're driving along the information highway, and that will change a lot of things."

The Internet is also increasingly popular with young people. Student Monitor magazine, which does a survey each year of American students' favourite pastimes, says nearly three-quarters of those asked said Net-surfing was the coolest thing to do. Up until now, their favourite activity has always been beer drinking. In the countries of the South, new Net users are younger than elsewhere. In the Middle East and Asia, the average user is under thirty.

Americans a minority among Net users

The trend towards younger users goes along with a slight fall in the level of education, especially in the United States. There are fewer Master's degrees and Ph.Ds among Net newcomers than among the "experts" - those who have been on line for more than four years. The newcomers also cover a broader range of activities: fewer than one in ten works in computers, compared with one in three in 1994. They are also a bit less well off: only 30 per cent earn more than $50,000 a year, as against 50 per cent four years ago.

These socio-economic shifts are coupled with changes in the geography of the Internet. The US research firm Emarketer says 1998 was a landmark in the history of cyberspace. For the first time, Americans became a minority among Net users. In 1995, two-thirds of all Net users were American.

But Europe still lags behind and the continent is not geared to catch up, says Forrester Research, a firm which predicts that in 2001, only 13 per cent of Europeans will be connected to the Net compared with 40 per cent in the United States. It attributes this big gap to the cost of telecommunications, which are five times higher in Europe.

The major countries of the South, however, seem to be advancing at top speed. The communications group Saatchi and Saatchi Worldwide reports that the Internet is growing twice as fast in Latin America than anywhere else: it grew by 788 per cent there between 1995 and 1997, while globally the Net is only doubling in size each year. At the end of October, the US market research firm IDC admitted it was "surprised" at the expansion of the Internet in China, which by 2001 is expected to be second only to Japan in number of people connected.

New languages on the Web

The entry of people from the South into cyberspace has introduced new languages to the Web, and this is an atttraction for non-English-speakers. All studies show that people prefer connecting to sites in their own language, even if they know English well. At the start of the 1990s, English dominated almost all the Web. Now it only accounts for three-quarters of it, according to a study by the Agence de la Francophonie, which monitors use of the French language.