[Air-l] new technologies: diffusion comparison diagra

[Bernie Hogan]

Hi everyone,

#1 DVD is diffusing faster than the Internet, as is the mobile phone in many
places. It is not unprecedented. Furthermore, the diffusion curve here
suggests that television might have been as steep.
#2 Everett Roger's book "Diffusion of Innovations" is highly recommended. I
haven't read the fifth edition so I cannot speak to it, but the fourth is
really great.
#3 Internet diffusion should be probably broken down by dail-up vs
high-speed and definately by country.
#4 It shold also be noted that this chart wold sugest the internet was
invented 9 years ago. Would that make the chart 2000, and the internet being
correlated with WWW? One should be very careful to make such claims, given
that the role of DARPAnet and all sorts of precommercial work has been
embedded in the history of the Internet's development. It would still behave
like a logarithmic curve but it does inject a different sort of ideology
into the picture about who is responsible for the Internet's diffusion, AOL,
the FCC or general diffusion trends.
#5 There is some evidence to suggest that the Internet will not receive the
total diffusion that telelvision did. It is already being outpaced by mobile
phones in many places.

Nonetheless, this is still an interesting graphic. Thanks!
BERNiE

Bernie Hogan
Ph.D. Student
Department of Sociology
NetLab, Knowledge Media Design Institute
University of Toronto
bernie.hogan at utoronto.ca
http://edublog.com/hogan/