The World Internet Project began a decade ago as an effort to understand how the internet was changing us all. It takes a further step this week with the publication of the first full New Zealand report under the project. Russell Brown interviews World Internet Project director Jeff Cole, visiting New Zealand to mark the report's release and to present at the NetSafe Conference in Queenstown.:

Jeff, it strikes me that the key thing about the World Internet Project is that it’s social rather than commercial research. Is that an important distinction for you?

It’s a very important distinction. First, there are lots of people doing commercial research which is sort of like census, but what we really want to understand is what all this means. How is it going to change people’s lives? And eight, 10 years in, how are lives changing? I started our work in the United States with the belief that we’d always lost this great opportunity with television. Television is the only mass medium we knew ahead of time was going to be a mass medium -- and I was taught what we should have done, but didn’t do, was we should have tracked people before they started watching television to see how it changed their lives.

And I became convinced that the impact of digital technology, first the web and now mobile, was going to be far more powerful than television. So this is really an attempt to see how people’s lives change. So we think there are some ways we’ll see that things will get much better for them and their lives will improve, [and] we expect to see some problems along the way and want to share that information with governments, with international foundations, and with companies and individuals. But this is really an attempt to see how it’s changing people’s lives.

It came out of UCLA. Was the intention from the beginning for it to be global?

Absolutely, it was designed to be global. We were at UCLA, we’re now at the Annenberg School at the University of Southern California, but it was never intended to be an American project. It just started with us in the United States. Within six months we had partners in Singapore and Italy, but the US has been a leader in some areas of technology and there’s things we can learn from America. [But] America’s behind in a lot of ways -- the US is a third world country where mobile communication is concerned.

The rest of the world, using their mobile phones to buy cokes out of machines in Sweden, or paying for parking meters in Estonia. Or you walk out of an office building in Tokyo at lunchtime and your mobile phone will show you all the restaurants in a two-block radius that have tables available. We can barely get our mobiles to work above ground in America for voice. So we always wanted to do the international comparisons. We wanted to see how the world was changing, we wanted to look at differences in developed and developing countries.

One of the things we think, we think the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand and other similarly developed countries will probably end up as the only PC-centric societies on earth. We think –

And the others will be, particularly developing Asian economies will be, mobile internet?

We think when India’s 6% internet penetration climbs to 30 it’s not going to be with PCs on the desk, but it’s going to be with mobile phones. We think you here in New Zealand and we here in America will use mobile phones just as much but we’ll still have a legacy of PCs on the desk.

And yet on the other hand the internet was an American project and I’m sure people in some countries worry that it becomes a vehicle for American culture. To what extent does that happen, or does the internet now have its own culture?

It certainly was a fair concern in the 1990s. The internet was started by the Department of Defence as a way to have American universities share computer resources so they didn’t have to buy a computer for every university in America. The Department of Defence pulled out long before the internet became a mainstream activity and it's given over and now largely supported by commerce.

But the initial signs that the internet was going to be dominated by America or dominated by English, not just in America, were worrisome. It was the developing countries, it was the US, Canada, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Australia who really were leading the way, with some great developments in Scandinavia and South Korea and Japan as well.

Now another thing people have long worried about with respect to the internet is the so-called digital divide. And yet when I looked at the draft of the New Zealand version of the World Internet Project report, I felt somewhat put at ease because it was clear that all groups were, to some extent, using the internet.

Digital divide was a real issue in the 90s. The people who were online in 95, 96, 97, it really was worrisome. They were largely, depending on the country, but largely, white, more male than female, affluent, highly educated. Today we still see divides in poorer countries. Bolivia’s one of our partners. We still see a real digital divide.

But we can now say -- and I’ll say this very carefully because a lot of people get nervous when I say this -- we can now say this in the very developed world, including New Zealand, that just about everybody who wants to be online is online. Let me be careful. Not everybody who wants a PC on their desk has one, not everybody who wants broadband has it, but just about everybody has access from some location, not necessarily their preferred location.

So cost has largely disappeared as a barrier to the broad area of access. People may still want to access differently such as broadband, but cost is not really the reason. The two reasons in the developed world that we see that people are still not online are fear -- the belief that the technology is too complicated to use, or that a misstep online means that you will blow up your computer, your neighbourhood or your country --- and lack of perceived need. Some people –

In New Zealand the application that really embedded the internet in New Zealand culture and made it pervasive was Trade Me, which is a huge, absolutely pervasive auction site. Was that the case in other countries, that there was one particular application?

The one application in the early days, before there was an Ebay or a Trade Me or a MercadoLibre in South America, was email. Email was the original killer application. People understood immediately, particularly when long-distance rates were higher. The trading has turned out to be the second thing and now we’re seeing the third thing that’s been the killer app and that’s social networks. That’s Bebo, Facebook, MySpace. We now see for the first time people are logging onto the internet more to check in on their social network than they are to check email. But it was email, then trading, and now social networking.

Now, you’ve been doing this long enough to have what you set out to get, which was longitudinal data. What are you seeing? How can you characterise the way that trends are going?

Well we’re seeing things, each year our work gets more and more interesting. We’re seeing things we never would have expected to see, which leads some people to ask us the question ‘how long will you be doing this’? And the answer is we’ll stop doing it when it stops getting interesting, which we don’t see happening. But we’re seeing really significant shifts with people moving to mobile, we’re seeing tremendous changes in media. We see in almost every country, and this is where longitudinal really helps, that offline newspaper reading begins to decline when internet penetration gets to about 30%.

We see in every country we’re in, more than from any other place, the time for the web is coming from television. We’re seeing just profound changes and we’re now confronting the issue that people are making it clear they don’t want to pay for digital content. And there’s only three ways to support content, to steal it -- and even those who steal it understand that’s not a viable long-term business model -- subscriptions, fees or subscriptions, which people don’t seem to want to pay -- and advertising.

And we’re probably now at the threshold, and I don’t report this with any degree of happiness, but we’re at the threshold where people are saying ‘I’m willing to make the same deal with television that by and large I made with other media’. Advertising is the price of free content. So we’re also seeing profound changes in politics to the web, certainly in America this year, but all over the world. And the changes just get more and more interesting.

Of course all those changes have a downside and the concern about the established mainstream media is that there will no longer be the revenue stream that supports what they do, that we still regard as a benefit. Are you an optimist or a pessimist about that?

Well first let me start out slightly pessimistically and then come around. All media will survive. I used to teach Mass Comm. There’s never a medium that’s going to disappear. If ever a medium would have disappeared it would have been radio after the beginning of television. When television sucked all the content out of radio and the stars and radio didn’t disappear, it adapted, it changed. So it’s a vital industry. We think most mass media becomes small businesses in a digital era. That’s certainly true of theatrical film, it’s happening right now with music, we think newspapers become smaller businesses in a digital era.

But also keep in mind that for most newspapers 70% of their revenue goes to printing and distribution. On the web that 70% almost disappears. I actually believe newspapers face the greatest opportunity they’ve ever faced. I mean, we talk about the challenge. The opportunity on the web for a newspaper, for the first time in 88 years, since the beginning of radio, they’re back in the breaking news business and now people are on the web, just as my favourite old cartoon from the New Yorker in the 90s showed a dog sitting in front of a computer with the caption ‘on the internet no-one knows you’re a dog’.

Today on the internet, no-one knows you’re a newspaper because a newspaper refers to what it used to be. On the web newspapers are up to the moment, not once a day, literally within 30 seconds, they have video, they have audio, radio is changing. Radio faces a fascinating option. As it goes on the web does it want to remain radio, does it want to really be audio only on the web where it’s distributed around the world or does radio want to add video and become more like television?

But I think even though most are smaller businesses, I think the opportunities digitally are phenomenal. The difference is we may not see 600 newspapers in America, we may not see 10,000 newspapers around the world, we’re going to see national and international newspapers I think get better and better but there may be fewer of them.

Another thing that jumped out for me from the local report was that more New Zealanders cited the internet as a source of information for them than any other of the traditional media. And I wondered whether they were trusting the internet or are we trusting each other in that respect?

We certainly see worldwide that the internet quickly becomes the most important source of information. Now, information is a broader term than news. Information includes news but it also includes what time does a movie start and how late’s a store open till. But it’s quicker and easier to go to the web for information, particularly with broadband, and it’s always on, than it is to go to the telephone book or the newspaper to find out a fact. And one of the biggest activities on the internet is to check facts. But that raises the interesting issue, as you’re looking at information on the web, the editors, the professionally trained people who you can trust simply because of the brand name, that’s not necessarily there.

Now, one of the things we’re seeing in America, but we’re seeing this worldwide, we’re seeing teenagers who have never read the New York Times going to the newyorktimes.com because it’s a shorthand for credibility. One of the areas we see the greatest differences internationally is trust towards information online. Interestingly, trust is highest in countries that have had authoritarian systems where people never trusted the mass media. But we find in most of the countries around the world about half of the people think that most or all of the information on the web is accurate and reliable.

And that’s dropping over the years, which I think is healthy. I think people are becoming more sceptical, going to brand names, wanting to know who they can trust -- but it’s not as easy on the web. When you pick up a big city newspaper, with a few exceptions, you can by and large trust it. That’s not necessarily true on the web.

Just a couple of more questions. You mentioned the New York Times website. That was, about 18 months, 2 years ago, was overtaken as the most popular English language newspaper website by the Guardian’s website. And the Guardian is in a different position than most newspapers in that it doesn’t have a proprietor, it doesn’t have to make money, it’s owned by a trust. I wonder if that is going to be an advantage going forward.

I think newspapers that are owned by trust is an enormous advantage. In Los Angeles our Los Angeles Times has shrunk faster than any newspaper I think in the world, from over a million circulation three years ago to 700,000 and it just got sold. And it was really the desire of those of us in Los Angeles, there were a couple of billionaires, including the music mogul David Geffen who wanted to buy it. And if he had bought it there would have been no expectation it would have made money, he probably would have lost $10 million a year and that means in a thousand years it would have had to go out of business. We like that model.

We have the St Petersburg Sunday Times which is owned by the Poynter Foundation. I think we’re going to see more and more of that. There’s an effort in America to try and get the New York Times to be bought by a foundation where it’s immune to, it still has to make basic amounts of money, but it’s immune to profit margins. I think the Guardian is really blessed and I think we’re going to see a lot more of that internationally.

Just finally, I have a 13 year old son who’s never lived in a house that doesn’t have an internet connection. What difference do you think that’s going to make to him as compared to previous generations?

I spend a lot of time with teenagers. I have a great deal of respect for teenagers, I love teenagers in every way that’s appropriate. First with your son, none of this is a big deal, this is just the way it is. You may ooh and gawk at all the things that you can do, this is just the way it is. He’s probably multi-tasking not two things at the same time but probably four or five things. If he’s a typical teenager he’s probably not wearing a watch.

One of the things we see about teenagers is that they’re not watches anymore, they tell time from their mobile phones. The entire jewellery industry, not to mention the economy of Switzerland, is waiting to see if he’ll wear a watch when he gets older. If he’s typical he probably trusts these unknown peers on Beebo and other sites more than experts. We think he’ll outgrow that.

We think there are profound changes. He expects to be able to move his media freely from platform to platform. If he likes music, he wants to move it from an iPod to a DVD to his computer -- and anyone who tries to stop it he’ll move it sometimes just to prove he can move it. His world will be much more on mobile. He’ll probably never own a landline phone when he gets old enough and moves out and gets his own place. His life will be completely different, it will embrace all of these technologies but to him this is just the way it is.