That is one of the reasons why the business world finds cyberspace such a puzzling place. Business folks see the net as essentially just an exciting new way of doing business. But that is perhaps the least interesting or important thing about the network, which is first and foremost a medium used by hundreds of millions of people to communicate with one another. Although the bit-traffic associated with browsing web pages accounts for the vast majority of the trillions of bytes shipped daily across the world, most people's active engagement with the net is accounted for by sending and receiving email messages. Because these tend to be short, they don't show up in the data-traffic charts but still represent the most significant use of the net for ordinary users.
Online shopping is nowhere by comparison.
You'd never guess that from reading the financial press, however, which is obsessed with online economic transactions to the exclusion of almost everything else. But most of the data we have on internet use bears it out. The regular and intensive polling conducted by the Pew Foundation for its project on 'The internet and American Life', for example, shows that whereas 47 per cent of US users send and receive email every day, only a miserly 4 or 5 per cent regularly engage in online banking or shopping. The Pew researchers have just released the results of their survey of online behaviour over the holiday period. While most analysts and commentators anxiously charted the daily ups and downs of the online retail sector during this season,' they report, 'the bigger story about the internet during the holidays was a social one.