Mobile internet is now just the internet

Mobile internet is now just the internet
The Christmas holidays are the time of year when different generations of the family gather around the dinner table. So it’s a perfect opportunity for a spot of tech anthropology. Here’s how to do it. At some point, insert into the conversation a contemporary topic about which most people have strong opinions but know relatively little. Jeremy Clarkson, say. There will come a moment when someone decides that the only thing to be done to resolve the ensuing factual disputes is to “Google it”. Watch what happens next. The younger members of the group will pull out their smartphones and key in the search terms. Most of the older members will do nothing – other than make a mental note to look it up when they’re next at their PCs and wait for the smartphone owners to report what they have found. What does this experiment demonstrate? Two things, one trivial, the other profound. The trivial one is that there is a generational gap in attitudes to networked technology. The profound one is that it no longer makes sense to talk about the “mobile internet”. For most people in the world now there is only one internet – the one they access via their mobile phones. Or, as the tech analyst Benedict Evans puts it, “Mobile is not a subset of the internet any more, which you use only if you’re waiting for a coffee or don’t have a PC in front of you – it’s becoming the main way that people use the internet.”