The various marketing surveys have found that the people most likely to use the Internet are those with a University education. This is a reasonable finding if for no other reason than the Internet can't be used unless there is access to it. The most likely places to get access are at either an educational institution or at one's job, and the types of careers most likely to offer access to the Internet are the types that require college educations [Ducker, 1993]. However, this study has shown that a) the influence of the University is not clear, predictable, or overt, and b) that access itself is not enough to elicit adoption. Whether or not the Internet will be used is based entirely on the individual.

This audience/user-centered theoretical approach used by the uses and gratifications [U&G] theory applies well to modern communications technology. One of the important ideas from this approach is that the media/technology does not necessarily create the need for itself. It may entice people, and it may have been adopted by enough people so that people will perceive that they do need it based on peer pressure [notice how many friends of the Berkeley respondents used the Internet] but the medium does not define its own use. This was true with the telephone which went from being intended to broadcast concerts to being used as the inter-personal communications medium that it is today. A similar pattern of evolution appears to be true for the Internet. The Internet's technology can do any number of things, but in the future Internet applications are going to be based on the types of uses people have already found for it. For instance, if no one is using Finger, then finger will never be included in the Internet software packages.

Another important idea from U&G is that the relationship between the medium and the individual is unique to the extent that the individual is unique. For instance, to the extent that women are the same as each other they tend to follow the same adoption patterns for the Internet, but their patterns are not the same as those for men.

Thirdly, every medium competes with every other medium. People have needs, such as a need for news. The TV competes with the newspaper and the radio to satisfy this need, but now all three are competing with the Internet. But as seen by this sample, the Internet has not usurped the role of the traditional media in that the users do not believe the Internet can satisfy their need for news as adequately as the other media. Of course, part of the problem may be that the users aren't aware of the extent of the Internet's capabilities. If they approached the Internet first because they heard about email, they may have learned email and stopped there without exploring the Internet further. Such is a consequence of the University not requiring learning the Internet.

There is also in U&G research the idea that the audience chooses to use the medium based on three elements: the content of the media itself, the exposure to the media, and the social context surrounding the exposure. With the Berkeley sample, women preferred the content they and their friends made themselves, while men were more interested in the informational content. Exposure to the medium came from there being access to it and the students having a reason to use that access, in this case because of their friends (and not because they were required to). And again, the social context of being female or being rich shaped the context with which the Internet could be experienced.²⁴

One last point from U&G that applies well to the Berkeley sample has to do with needs. There were very few people who expressed absolute need for the Internet [the few that did usually had employment as Internet consultants and stood to lose their livelihood if there were no Internet!] Additionally, there was nothing completely new about the Internet. Everything it could offer could be had in some other form, be it from the telephone, a newspaper, or a real visit to the library. There will rarely be a case where an individual has a specific need that can only be addressed by the Internet. However, Elliott talks about the difference between "deficiency needs," which there aren't in this situation, and "growth needs." These types of growth needs are learned. [Elliott, 1974] In this case people, after being introduced to the Internet, can decide if it satisfies their needs better than any other medium. Also, having been exposed to what the Internet can do, the individual might come to invent some new needs, just because the Internet can satisfy it. Evidence of this in the Berkeley sample appeared when people discussed what would happen if the Internet disappeared and many speculated that their phone bills would go up. It was not as if they were dependent on the Internet to stay in touch [necessarily], but they found that it suited them better than anything else and therefore it came to satisfy a need. This type of example shows how there was a point at which people had adopted the Internet to the extent that it had started shaping their behavior. The important idea to remember is that these changes are the effects of gratifications and not the initial uses.

Rogers's [1995] work on the diffusion of innovations parallels some of what was explained in terms of the U&G model. In his model for the Innovation-Decision Process, there are several stages before an innovation is adopted by an individual. The first is the knowledge stage. This is where the characteristics of the audience/individual are most important. These, as have been demonstrated, include socioeconomic status, personality variables, and communication behavior. These characteristics will either shape the individual's need for an innovation or their potential for finding out about it.

There is some debate as to which comes first: the need for an innovation or awareness of one. However, in the U&G discussion it was demonstrated how in this sample, the knowledge of the innovation came first. This idea is further confirmed by the sample with the non-users who felt satisfied though they did not use the Internet and that there was no one who expressed having felt a need that the Internet can satisfy and then lo and behold happening to come upon the Internet itself. Instead they first found out about the Internet and then were in a position to decide whether or not it was useful for them to adopt.

The second stage is the persuasion stage. At this point the individual gathers input to decide whether or not to adopt the technology. Factors that influence adoption include its relative advantage ["Will the Internet be better than what I already use, like the telephone?"], compatibility [In this case, the Internet had to be compatible with prior comfort with computers], complexity [Here the Internet deters its own acceptance by being too difficult to grasp for some.], trialability [Giving students the opportunity in classes to try out the Internet increases the chances that they will continue to use it, having already seen some of its potential], and observability ["Is 'everyone' using the Internet? Are all my friends using it?"].

At this point the individual is at the third stage and ready to decide whether to adopt or reject the innovation. In this case while many chose to adopt the Internet and thus became "Users", the degree to which they adopted it was reflected by stage four, implementation. Because the Internet is so comprehensive in its uses, when people adopted it they tended to adopt it for its specific applications, not as a holistic medium of various potential uses.

The fifth stage is confirmation, where the individual re-evaluates whether or not to keep using the innovation. For the most part the sample for this study had not reached the fifth stage, but in the hypothetical question for how their lives would be affected if the Internet disappeared showed that even people who had adopted the technology were prepared to re-evaluate their decision to adopt it should it become necessary. This idea of re-evaluation is important if after the students graduate and the school no longer provides access to them that these users may suddenly become non-users.

The Internet has not yet been diffused, but it is rapidly becoming more so, the market surveys predict. Because of the Internet's nature, it is the type of medium that derives its greatest value when it is thoroughly diffused. Marketers know this: Internet service providers can't promise to connect the subscriber "to the world" if most of the world isn't using the Internet. So it might seem, at first, alarming that there are usage differentials between races and particularly genders.

Perhaps women have been historically slow to adopt computing technology, and perhaps it was only very recently that they caught up with men in their propensity to use the Internet. However, this is not too much of a problem because the Internet loses some of its value when people are not using it²⁵. In fact, it may lose its entire advantage if there are segments of the population who aren't using it. Any potential the Internet might have to be a social equalizer would be lost. This type of potential is manifested in the affordability of the Internet [other than buying a computer, the monthly charges for using it are less than phone and cable charges], in the anonymity of the Internet [physical discrimination is impossible - at least right now - because no one can tell if anyone else is black or white or tall or even what gender they are.], and the way that everyone has an equal advantage to acquiring information or exposing their own ideas to the world since they are not subject to the external control that they would be with other media. There is no off-line example which can match all of the Internet's potential.

It is also not a problem that women may not like to use the Internet for getting information. Unlike the example of what might happen to finger, because there are enough people who do use the informational aspects of the Internet, the software that continues to get developed for it will allow for that side to perpetuate. Because the Internet is such a comprehensive medium with so many different uses all rolled up into one technology, the women will still have the option to change their minds and start using the Internet for other purposes in the future. As time goes on, those types of Internet uses may become "growth needs" and thus people may perceive that they have these new needs and use the Internet to satisfy them.

However, while it is not devastating that Internet usage is not more uniform, it is unexpected and avoidable that the University has not been more of an influence to get its students to start using it. The argument has been that usage depends on the needs of the individual, but using the Internet because it is required would count as a need. Furthermore, as Rogers pointed out, the innovation needs to be initially introduced to the prospective adopter. Given the fact that these students have the advantage of a University education, they should not be forced to rely on their friends to tell them about how they could use the Internet.

Therefore, steps the University²⁶ could take are to a) require the Internet to be used in more classes. There is no reason why that should not happen because the Internet can be a powerful learning tool, either as an information resource or as a way to keep in touch with classmates and professors ²⁷, and b) equalize the access more. Currently at UCB the people who want access need to find it based on their own initiative. But as this survey has shown, initiative varies from person to person. An individual with less initiative, less perception of need, will not take advantage of the Internet. This will put that individual at a disadvantage if, sometime after they graduate, the Internet does become more completely diffused throughout society and if it does become an integral part of modern life. Whereas their University education should have put them at an advantage, instead they will find themselves at a disadvantage to perhaps less educated people who have had experience with it.

On the other hand, though the marketing studies attribute the greatest proportion of Internet users to affiliation with a university [or college] in some sense, if the Berkeley sample is at all typical then perhaps the bright prognosis for the expansion of the Internet made by those studies will not come to pass. If these are the people who are the predominant population of Internet users but they can't [or won't] integrate its various functions more fully into their lives, then perhaps the future of the Internet will not be as an unprecedented, open media and instead be simply an esoteric tool. This would be a shame because the Internet is far too revolutionary with far too much potential to let that happen.

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Bibliography

cathyg@csua.berkeley.edu

http://www.csua.berkeley.edu/~cathyg