Cemeteries, Oak Trees, and Black and White Cows: Newcomers’ Understandings of the Networked World

Abstract

The internet, in its proliferating forms, continues to attract an increasingly diverse set of users. Since the explosion of the World Wide Web and the broadening of internet access in the mid-1990s, the internet is no longer dominated by Euro-American software developers, academics, and government agencies. It is currently estimated that 10% of the world’s population is online—an astonishing figure that includes a large proportion of youth in many countries, as well as many seniors like those in our study (Cyberatlas, 2003). Over half of the Internet’s users are from non-English-speaking countries (Global internet statistics by language, 2003). And of course, most of today’s users of the internet are not professionals or students in computer science and related fields, as was the case in the early years of networked computing.