Brendan — I agree the ‘unevenly distributed’ point remains true. The point of the book, however, is that significant things tend to happen when a technology does get evenly distributed. Major second order effects appear only when first order effects have matured. Major highway systems were built only after cars went from being ‘unevenly distributed’ to ‘evenly distributed’ in the US. Similarly, we oughta expect big things when everyone is at a sufficiently high baseline of connectivity.

I deliberately did not bring up Gladwell’s ‘tipping point’ because that is both very narrow and, by recent results (Duncan Watts has showed recently that ‘influentials’ aren’t really, for instance), a flawed argument. Discontinuous change models, as I noted are broader and older than Gladwell — he didn’t invent that conceptual framework anymore than Al Gore invented the Internet. Hayes’ approach to the jump point concept is a little more sound, though still not rigorously argued.

As for predicting the date. Yes, in one way an academic exercise (but then, I like those ), but in other ways, very central. To cite a precedent, the first significant exercise in predicting when the world would face natural resource crunches (the ‘Limits to Growth’ system dynamics/Malthusian exercise by the Club of Rome) got it wrong by at least several decades, though they correctly claim that they were shooting for qualitative/directionally correct results. The question of when the world might be turned upside down is hardly academic — very practical in my mind. If it is 2050, I don’t really care. If it is 2015, I do.

Venkat

So maybe the jump point doesn’t occur when the number of Internet users hits X billion. Maybe it occurs when the people using email or Twitter or Facebook or whatever dream up an innovative way of using this service that leads to deep social transformations.

And yeah, as you concluded, I anticipate a totally different sort of jump point when gas hits $7 or rice hits $4 pound. At that point, only the people who *must* commute to be effective at their jobs will be able to afford to commute. So maybe this jump point of resource scarcity will be the driver forcing people to reach the jump point of a society transformed by Internet use.