Post-industrial transformations and cyber-space: a cross-national analysis of Internet development

Abstract

At century's end, a combination of telecommunications and computer technologies has resulted in the creation of the Internet, a global network of computers that has been growing at an exponential rate. Although the Internet/World Wide Web combination is widely hailed as a new, powerful engine of global social and economic change, there has been very little sociological theorizing and even less sociological research on the globalization of the Internet. Using classical macrosocial theories of development as a springboard, we hypothesize that the level of development, political openness/democracy, mass education, the presence of a sizeable tertiary/services sector, and interactions between some of these variables will drive the Internet's growth and spread around the globe. In our cross-national analysis of approximately 74 developed and developing countries, we find that Internet capacity is not in fact a simple linear function of economic and political development, but rather has been driven by complex interactions that could aptly be termed “post-industrialism.” Uncovering some of these structural preconditions and determinants of Internet diffusion provides a first step toward providing a theoretical and empirical sociology of this “third technological revolution.”