The net widens

The term ‘tipping point’ is wildly over-used these days (thank you, Malcolm Gladwell). A quick Google reveals that in the last few weeks it’s been applied variously to phenomena as diverse as the Greek budget crisis, rising CO2 emissions, The Hurt Locker’s Oscar prospects and the antics of the Chicago White Sox baseball team’s manager. Enough already, one is tempted to say.

Sometimes, though, something really does reach a certain level of ubiquity, passes a point of no return or breaks through into public consciousness in such a major way that the ‘t’ word is hard to avoid. Twenty years or so on from the birth of the World Wide Web, the internet may, definitively, be said to have ‘tipped’.

Our latest poll for BBC World Service reveals that four in five adults across 26 countries surveyed regard internet access as a ‘fundamental right’. That those who use the internet now overwhelmingly regard it as a sine qua non of modern life is less surprising than that over seven in ten of those who aren’t online - that is to say, who haven’t used the internet in the last six months - feel the same way. Yes, those on the other side of the digital divide do know what they’re missing. This raises big questions for governments around spending priorities as they try to bring down budget deficits.

The Economist recently reported that, with its 350 million users, Facebook now has more ‘citizens’ than all countries except India or China. Our poll found that more than half of all internet users enjoy spending their time on social networking sites, and the usage statistics bear this out. We may now be reaching a point where Facebookers have more in common with each other in the way they live their lives and their expectations of their community than they do with their non-connected compatriots. Again, a potentially huge shock for our elected representatives. Nationality is still a big deal in driving attitudes, of course – as our polling continues to show – but for how much longer?

Another straw in the wind – our latest polling on corporate social responsibility has suddenly recorded a substantial increase across many countries in the proportion who look online for information about how responsibly companies are behaving. This is the internet as the modern oracle – the definitive arbiter and repository of collective wisdom about all elements of life; companies, political parties, products and services, celebrities: work, rest and play.

A final and revealing statistic from our BBC poll – nearly half of the web users surveyed did not feel they could cope without the internet. And, let’s not forget, it barely existed twenty years ago. For better or worse, this looks like an evolutionary change. Homo hyperconnectedus, your hour has come.