Digital Futures

The internet is everywhere: at work, at home, and on the move. And if the federal government has its way, it will soon be in every school.

But despite its ubiquity, we know very little about how the net is used, where and by whom. The World Internet Project is attempting to answer these questions and the Australian arm of the project has just released its initial findings with some surprising results.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority has just announced that four new members will be joining its Communications Consumer Consultative Forum (CCF) including CCI's Julian Thomas. Julian is Professor of Media and Communications at Swinburne University of Technology and heads the International Creative Content Cultures and Australian Advantage program at CCI.

The main report from the survey will be released in April 2008. Thereafter we will be preparing for publication a number of articles based on the survey findings. In addition we will be providing presentation briefings to organisations including Telstra, the Australian government’s Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, and Multimedia Victoria. The first international comparative report from the broader project will be published in the first half of 2008.

In 2007 we hosted Professor Fred Fletcher as a Visiting Professor at Swinburne. Professor Fletcher is a distinguished Canadian media scholar. Based at York University, he is a key member of the World Internet Project.

The first survey has now been completed. It was administered by the Computer-Assisted Telephone Interviewing team at the Swinburne University of Technology’s Australian Centre for Emerging Technologies and Society. We achieved the 1,000 responses we were aiming for and met quotas in terms of gender, region and age.

In July 2007 the Institute for Social Research and CCI jointly hosted the annual World Internet Project 2007 partners' meeting at the Melbourne Museum over three days (July 10-12). The 22 members in attendance represented 12 countries; in addition to the members, speakers and CCI and ISR staff, they were joined by representatives of Multimedia Victoria and the Department of Communications and Information Technology and the Arts (DCITA).

The meeting was a great success, and attracted significant coverage in The Age newspaper, which published some of our interim findings from the survey.