Society and World Wide Web in Developing Countries: The Case of Turkey

Abstract

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) become ever more prevalent in last decade. ICTs profoundly affect both global and national economies. Nevertheless, the common view in the literature is that the development of ICTs has been mostly limited to developed countries and has been relatively slower in the rest of the world. There are many factors, affecting the acceptance and use of ICTs in developing countries. Although one of the most appealing research areas in recent years is technology acceptance of consumers, there is a little evidence that the findings of the majority of the technology acceptance studies, carried out in developed countries, could be generalized to developing countries. In this study, it is aimed to investigate why Turkish people use the Internet. After summarizing the recent household ICTs usage statistics, the most popular online activities, offered by the top 100 Turkish websites have been analyzed.