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The curious case of the decline and fall of “internet”

It's dex night and I would like to be out in the desert with my telescope since the moon is down all night. Unfortunately I'm sick and I hurt my leg and the weather is apparently lousy, so instead I'm sitting at the computer clicking aimlessly at whatever catches my eye.

This means I'm going to torture you with another Ngram chart. This one compares how often English-language books mention various sources of news and entertainment:

(Actually, the most common thing books mention is books. Surprise! But I took it out so the others would show up better on the y-axis.)

The high point for radio is 1945, which is unsurprising. However, the high point for television is around 1958, after which it dips and then grows only slightly. This is sort of peculiar, no?

Newspaper has been slowly dropping since 1940 but then flattened in 1980. That was about the time the newspaper biz started to crater, so apparently being mentioned in books isn't correlated much with financial success.

Magazine has been pretty steady the entire time.

But then we get to the really surprising thing. With the exception of newspaper, everything takes a huge dive starting around 2000 or so. This includes both web and internet, which hardly seems possible.

Why? Your first guess—and mine—is probably that this is just some artifact of Google's database. But I tried out a whole bunch of ordinary words and there was absolutely no consistent decline starting around 2000. Every word acted fairly normally, which suggests the database is reasonably reflective of reality. The only words I found that plummeted were those referring to information and entertainment sources.¹

I'm sure there's an explanation for this, but I can't think of it. Web and internet are the most spectacular losers, which makes no sense at all, but radio, television, and the normally reliable magazine all start dropping more steeply too.

One possibility for the peculiar drop in mentions of web and internet is that generic references have given way to specific mentions of services like Facebook and Twitter. Sure enough, if you add up every reference to either the internet or a specific internet service, it comes to about 0.019% in 2000 and 0.014% in 2019. That's still down, but I only checked the dozen most popular social media sites, and the number would be much higher if I included other specific websites. Still, none of the specific sites started to get mentioned until about 2005, while references to internet and web began dropping in 2001 and 2003 respectively. I suppose that could have something to do with the dotcom bust, though I feel like I'm stretching here, and anyway, it doesn't explain the decline of all the non-internet words.

So what's going on? Is the lesson here that the Ngram viewer just isn't reliable? Or do books really mention internet half as much today as they did in 2001?

¹Except for book, which books continued to love talking about. In fact, mentions of book went up between 2000 and 2019.

26 thoughts on “The curious case of the decline and fall of “internet”

  1. Reverent

    Around here people say online instead of internet these days. Or refer to the specific site (reddit, twitter, youtube, etc).

  2. digimark

    I feel like there's a problem with books being the source to review Internet-related words. Some kind of bias against their use to either develop the story or conversationally.

    1. digimark

      Internal note: I'd also like to see a "Cat Emeritus" section of your sidebar with the prior cats that have departed. Gone but not forgotten?

    2. cld

      I have a similar impression, Ngram is looking only at books and books do not like listing internet sources in their bibliographies; and most information exchange is now entirely on the internet itself.

  3. Larry Jones

    Zephyr nails it, above: In techno-advanced nations, the internet has become ubiquitous, and the majority of us access it only on our phones, so a lot of us don't even know there is an internet.

    You should put this in your quotation rotation: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” (Arthur C. Clarke). For most people, who cares how all this information is being delivered? Might as well be magic.

  4. shapeofsociety

    In the 1990s and early 2000s the internet was new and exciting, now it's old hat. Also, information about tech is less likely to be in book form nowadays. Publishing books about the internet is so 1990s!

  5. MindGame

    I have possibly not thought this well enough through, but couldn't the overall decline be a consequence of the sudden addition of two more words for "information medium"? After all, the total number of references to media in books (from whatever source) is likely a fairly consistent number over time so once the words "internet" and "web" were added, the divisor went up by 50%.

    It's possibly also due to how the internet has become a universal medium for all information, regardless of what format any source may have originally appeared. That has made the mention of any specific medium less meaningful. The Atlantic is as much an internet site as a magazine (or more so) so the reference to its medium declines in importance.

    1. wahoofive

      In 2005 you had to specify if you were buying tickets or ordering pizza on the "Internet" or a "web site." Now if you say you're buying airline tickets for a trip, it's implied that it's online without you having to specify it.

  6. Joseph Harbin

    I'm surprised by the persistence of RADIO, more popular than TELEVISION, and within range of INTERNET. The dates refer to book publication, I believe, so it's not as though the longer corpus of books accounts for the usage.

    But references on the internet show a wide disparity. Using Google hits as a measure, a few terms (YMMV):

    "radio": 5.85 billion
    "television": 3.3 billion
    "tv": 20.4 billion
    "internet": 22.92 billion

    "on the radio": 114 million
    "on television": 64.1 million
    "on tv": 259 million
    "on the internet": 2.35 billion

    Which raises the question, what is the most popular 3-word phrase on the internet? Some examples:

    "apples and oranges": 3.38 million
    "in and out": 283 million
    "the super bowl": 22.3 million
    "the pacific ocean": 38.7 million
    "the united states": 2.87 billion

    Looked at this about 20 years ago, and the answer then is the same as today, probably. Here it is:

    "all rights reserved": 9.29 billion

  7. samoore0

    It could be an effort by authors to keep their work from getting "dated" by using specific technology terms. Tech changes so fast that the words will sound old fashioned in a decade.

    1. Larry Jones

      The internet is the medium, the "pipes" that carry the data - movie streams, email, buy & sell orders on the stock market. The web is the code that makes websites, like this one.

  8. Jasper_in_Boston

    However, the high point for television is around 1958, after which it dips and then grows only slightly. This is sort of peculiar, no?

    No, not peculiar. People switched to calling it "TV."

  9. Jasper_in_Boston

    everything takes a huge dive starting around 2000 or so. This includes both web and internet, which hardly seems possible...Why?

    Because discussion in print of this new phenomenon declined when it was no longer new. In essence the arrival of and existence of the internet was no longer news. That doesn't mean stories involving the internet haven't continued to be hugely important. It's just that, over the last 2+ decades, we increasingly talk and write about the specific subjects driving these stories (Google, Zuckerberg, Spotify, Tik-Tok, Bezos) more than we write/talk about the phenomenon of the internet itself. The latter is now ubiquitous: we don't pay its existence much more heed than guppies notice water.

  10. illilillili

    I can't reproduce these results. "Internet" and "Web" continue to climb post 2000.

    "video", "streaming", "cable", and "film" also seem relevant. "netflix" wasn't hardly mentioned at all. "blockbuster" was ever so slightly mentioned. "dvd" was also not mentioned much.

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