Here is a succinct report from the CBC on Internet use in Canada.
"At least one person in 64 per cent of households regularly surfed the net in 2003, either at home or at work, school or a public access site such as a library, said the agency's Household Internet Use Survey."
"Even among households with lower incomes, computers are common. About 45 per cent of homes with incomes between $24,000 and $40,000 had an internet-capable computer in 2003. That's up 13 per cent from the year before.
About 65 per cent of home surfers had a high-speed connection, mostly through a cable link, compared to 56 per cent in 2002."
The survey also found:
• About 38 per cent of households reported downloading music from the internet, down from 48 per cent the year before.
• Almost two-thirds used the internet to look for health-related information, the third most popular use after e-mail and general browsing.
• Online banking is taking off, with 57 per cent of households banking from home compared to 44 per cent a year earlier. StatsCan speculates that people are becoming more comfortable with the security of online financial information.
• Home internet use increases among households with children under 18 and with higher education levels, and is slightly higher in cities than in rural areas.
We have Tipped as defined by Malcolm Gladwell
Is the one dramatic moment in an epidemic when everything can change all at once.
Is the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point, a place where the unexpected becomes expected, where radical change is more than possibility. It is a certainty.
The corner is now turned and any enterprise that does not act to incorporate the web as a main channel will get into trouble. Peer to Peer self help groups will transform healthcare as we use the internet to take charge of our treatment and research. We will also use peer to peer in training and in education. Turning up to class and listening to teacher is a dead process. The day of spin and sound bite will soon be over in politics. Any political party or individual politician that does not have an effective web strategy will weaken. A politician that does not interact with her constituents will lose elections. The day when a few at the top could decide and dictate everything in organizations will soon be over as communities of practice emerge in organizational life. Soon, an organization that does not use social software to connect all its parts and to its customers will die.
All of this will not happen tomorrow but will happen in 3 years - no time at all. There will be winners and losers as there were after Henry Ford changed the world by establishing the production line as the primary process of the Industrial age.
So every CEO, DM, President, Premier has a choice. Not making a deliberate shift of emphasis is to sentence your organization to be a loser.
