Research Reviews

The use of the internet is continually increasing as access regimes, such as the National Broadband Network (NBN) in Australia, and others in many more nations, continue to improve. At the same time, access to the internet is increasing through the use of mobile devices such as cell/mobile and smart phones, tablets, ereaders and more. For example, the Australian Communication and Media Authority (ACMA), in a 2009-2010 communications report about Australia in the digital economy: The shift to the online environment found that around 90% of Australians accessed the internet and that the most frequent users were people aged between 14 and 34 years. Access to blogs and online communities was almost equal at 35% for people using computers and mobile phones. However, what is often hard to understand is the extent to which internet services are used globally. The Oxford Internet Institute (OII) has considered the issue of how to visualise the use of the interactive internet globally. The OII has now been in operation for ten years and is a widely respected and a prolific publisher of research and papers about the use of the internet. The possibility of a global information architecture that includes education and research may begin to emerge as the semantic web, that is, the capacity to link to large interactive databases of information, grows.