Much of what influences people’s choices and activities online are driven by how relevant the content or services are to meet their daily needs. The most popular activities cut across what is considered ‘public’ and ‘commercial content’. The capability for the personalization or customizing of consumption and the commensurate need to design technical protocols to facilitate this has implications for the other opportunity of providing generalized, collectively valued information and services on the Internet. This raises questions about whether as the Internet matures there will be a propensity for the expansion or narrowing of options and choices of what content will be developed, how online communication services will be used, who should provide the general interest intermediary role to ensure that different needs (economic, social) will be met.

If we flip the analytical perspective around and, instead of starting with technology, consider how technology serves as a resource in a broader social context, used to meet a wide range of socio-economic needs and activities, then a fuller understanding is possible. This understanding permits analysis of how new technology may be used as a resource to meet existing and changing needs in a real life social context.

Many of the more recent new users of the Internet have gone online not because just because of a greater awareness from public discourse, though this may have piqued their initial interest, but because they see a potential for the technology to meet some existing need of themselves or someone in their family. As opposed to the upper income households who have largely gone online to meet some general need such as education, entertainment or work/business activity, many in the lower socio-economic groups respond positively to going online if they perceive that the technology meets some very basic needs, what we can call their CHEEF needs.¹⁷ These individuals must make tough choices about what they spend their disposable income on, an amount that is much less than upper SES households. CHEEF needs, which form the building blocks for other activities in life, are : Clothing, Housing, Education, Employment, Food. The key question for many is how will online service help improve their potential for meeting their needs in these and related areas?

¹⁷ PIAC, The Dual Digital Divide, 2000, p. 19.