Has the Internet become indispensable?

As was empirically demonstrated in [3], “the adoption rate of the Internet has exceeded that of earlier mass communication technologies by several magnitudes,” making it an “irreversible” innovation. Studies have also shown that for the generation of U.S.-based youth that grew up with the Internet, it is gradually displacing television as their main source of entertainment, communication, and education [6]. Here, we explore how the Internet has become indispensable to people in their daily lives and develop a conceptual model allowing us to address the associated research questions. The idea is that the Internet has become so embedded in the daily fabric of people’s lives that they simply cannot live without it. How is the Internet indispensable and in what ways? For which groups of people is it indispensable, for what tasks, and how has BY DONNA L. HOFFMAN, THOMAS P. NOVAK, AND ALLADI VENKATESH