The Internet As A Transnational Communicator

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In 1999, Nielsen found that more than 100 million people had Internet access, while 44 million were actual Internet users. That same year, a USA Tofaizy/CNN/Gallup Poll found that percent of Americans think that the Cartier Replica Internet will alter society more than the telephone and television did. The number of "Internet hosts, or networked computers, have grown more than six fold since 1995. Most countries are connected, but access is patchy. Nearly two-thirds of the world's hosts are in the U.S." Whereas it "took television 13 years to acquire 50 million users, the Internet took only five."

Three years ago, the average customer for America on Line (AOL) spent fourteen minutes a day on the Net. In 1999, the average amount of time spent was an hour. In 1996, AOL had 6 million subscribers; by 1999, the number had grown to 17.6 million. To increase the amount of time subscribers spend on AOL, the company has partnered with 3Com Corp to permit Palm Pilot users to get their AOL e-mail. The Palm Pilot is a wallet-sized device that permits its ...
... owner to keep track of appointments by maintaining and changing a datebook. In the offing is AOL on cellular phones and AOL-TV. AOL-TV will help viewers make sense of the ever-increasing number of television channels by superimposing program and channel guides and by creating chat-rooms where AOL users can discuss the program they are watching.

The Internet has transformed media that once reached only a local audience into international communicators. Audio-streaming on the Web carries radio to the United States from places as distant as Beijing. Audio-streaming compresses audio information to reduce the amount of data sent to the computer and then decodes and decompresses the same material. Online from either Philadelphia or Minneapolis, we can access one another's hometown newspapers as well as the newspapers from most other cities in the United States and many from elsewhere in the world. Want to read USA Today. Try www.usatoday.com. Futurist Alvin Toffler projects that in the future "you're going to turn on your TV and get Nigerian TV and Fijian TV in your own language."

The Internet can also continue to function after other media channels have been knocked out. "During the bombing of Kosovo," for example, "the Serbian government's online Radio Yugoslavia broadcast to an international audience long after its television and radio stations were rubble." The United Kingdom site www.live-radio.net carries more than 2,000 stations from more than 100 countries.

This capacity makes the Internet a natural medium for organizers. Elizabeth Economy, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Breitling Replica Watches Relations, for example, noted in 1999 that "the China Democracy Party, whose leaders were arrested last year, was found to have used the Internet to organize across the country. The thing that was so threatening was certainly not the number of people, but rather that this was inter-provincial, that in over two-thirds of Chinese provinces, the China Democracy Party was able to establish branches. . . . The China Democracy Party still exists. It's still there, and it can emerge at any time because of the Internet."