cyberfrance
Pierre Lévy on the Net
Professor Pierre Lévy has worked out a clear history of social communication with three strata:
  1. A tribal age where spoken transactions and the absence of the written ensured that face-to-face communications were always conducted in the same context.

  2. The second age was that of the printed word and broadcast media. Powerful élites could transmit their message directly to an unanswering and aquiescent audience.

  3. The networked age dawned and once again tribes with the same needs and interests could communicate directly across vast distances.

review
Growth of Home Internet in France
1996
1997
1998

Dramatic Growth
The number of French households with Internet access grew dramatically through the 1990s. A survey at the the end of 1996 found 286 200 connected homes. By the end of 1998 this had risen to over a million.


the full statistics
IN HER 1998 BOOK on the cultural issues of the Internet, Marie-Claude Vettraino-Soulard, professor at Paris-7 University, gives a good overview of how France's cybernautes are using the web. The percentages are shown in the table on the right.

quotation in full
Type of Use Percentage
Messages & searching 95
Service or product info 80
News 55
Downloading software 55
e-commerce 9
Web-book page design by Charlie Mansfield 1999