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Since transformations at the end of the 19th and start of the 20th century thanks to the general public's access to electricity, no other revolution of this nature took place until the Internet became commercially available in the mid-90s. This was our civilisations' entry into the digital world.

First, some facts: even though some current statistical data will quickly become obsolete, it easily describes the speed of the Internet's spread, both in terms of access and use. In autumn 1997, fewer than 1% of households within French territory were connected to the Internet. This proportion grew to 4.7% in 1999, 27.4% in 2003 and 35.5% in 2005. Ten years later, in September-October 2015, 85% of households had access. And beyond network access, its use has become widespread: nearly 46 million French people connect to the Internet at least once per month, all screens combined (first quarter 2016).

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The Internet wasn't built in a day 

The Internet is not a recent design. It was necessary for time to elapse between when the technological base appeared (Ray Tomlinson, who died in March 2016, invented email in 1971) and when services suited to the public were deployed. As a point of comparison, the technology to transmit sound via radio waves was known about in the 1890's, but radio as a media didn't exist until 1922-23. TV media was officially created in France in 1949 but transmitting moving images using these waves dates from the 1930's.
The Internet followed this pattern. Its point of departure was the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 at the height of the Cold War between the US and the USSR. This event revealed to President Kennedy the weakness of a centralised system. In 1964 the idea for a decentralised, less vulnerable, network surfaced. A preliminary skeleton was designed in 1969, called ARPANET (for Advanced Research Projects Agency Network); it connected Stanford University, UCLA, UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah. Email has existed since 1971. The technical bases for TCP and TCP/IP protocols date from the 1970's. Microsoft and Apple date from the same decade (1975 and 1976 respectively). 
In 1983, ARPANET divided into MILNET (which was integrated into the American military network) and a new university ARPANET, renamed the Internet in 1986. The http protocol, HTML language and www concept emerged in 1990. The following years saw the founding of multiple major players: Yahoo! and Amazon in 1994, Google in 1998, Facebook in 2004 and Twitter in 2006. 
By the end of the 2000's, the paths leading to the digital world had diversified: new screens were added to the historic personal computer – the smartphone starting in 2007 and the tablet in 2010, which both favoured mobility. People now expect ATAWAD: Any Time Any Where Any Device. In 2015, the average French household possessed 6.4 screens.

Changes due to the digital world

The digital world has created new contexts, in numerous ways. The major reason is digital convergence. One example: the end of the historical model that linked content to a single object permitting access to it (photo and album, radio and transistor, TV and TV set, film and projector, CD and player, etc.) by putting into a single digital format sounds, static and moving images (photos and films, videos), text and data files. Let us illustrate a few transformations in our society.

Relationship to work

Our relationship with work has long been marked by three units: unit of place (for workers with a stable job), unit of time and unit of command. As for place, digital connection has encouraged wider collaborations and cooperation in virtual spaces, to the detriment of deliberating together in physical proximity. To save time, nomadic and remote work have appeared, sometimes a synonym for efficiency, but on the other hand there is a weakening between the concepts of "work time" and "work day", a growing confusion between private and professional space, with its possible consequences over the emotional and family dimension and labour law. The hierarchical value of the command unit gives way to collaborative work, the informal group, freed-up enterprise, but also, at times to the creation of illusory activity, a false shared responsibility and the opening of "parachutes".

Relationship to time

The Internet and digital technology have shortened time, which has accelerated. We increasingly live in a world of immediacy, real time. This is not a new sentiment; on 16 January 1935, in a speech about intelligence given at the Collège de France, Paul Valéry declared "...and, a great innovation, we can no longer bear waiting, we can no longer bear a duration of time..." Nevertheless, the extent of this perceived phenomenon characterises our age. More than 8 out of 10 French people find that "time is speeding up", and that "people no longer take the time to do things". With unintended humour, 80% of people estimate that digital technology has allowed them to "save time" – time freed up that they use in large part to go back to the Internet, especially to media-type content. Marketing is clearly affected by this real time, as proven by the remarkable October-December 2013 issue of the journal Decisions Marketing.

Impact on media

Digital technology has had an effect on the offering and consumption of media. While the Internet is natively digital, pre-existing media, such as TV, have been analogue since their creation. Moving TV to a digital signal, first by cable and satellite broadcast at the end of the '90s, then by DTT in March 2005 (and the switching off of the analogue signal in November 2011, provided in the 5 March 2007 law), led to a noticeable increase in the number of free and paying channels and new opportunities to watch shows via catch-up TV, and has added to the conventional live viewing mode. This, as well as the appearance of other screens (computer, smartphone, tablet), has considerably changed our behaviour as listeners and viewers. Display has become digital, as has the press, and web TV and web radio are now part of the offering.

Sociability

"Word of mouth" from school, in small groups, expanded to clans and tribes by the end of the '90s, through electronic mail. Social networks largely took up the baton. In France, more than 3 out of 4 web users have registered on one or more social networks, with multiple motivations: for relationships, to stay in touch with friends or to share passions, comments, events and areas of interest, out of mimicry and out of curiosity. The practice is a diligent one, and all networks combined, 7 out of 10 registered users visit at least once per day. Counterpart: the traces – data – that they leave. These networks have also changed communication methods for brands, which are obliged to follow this new model for connection and sharing.
One question about networks: we create a digital image of ourselves on them, which inevitably differs from our reality, and we create as many images as networks in which we participate. (The representation we make of ourselves is not the same on a network of "friends" and on a professional one.) Can we live harmoniously managing these different images? We are entering into an "icodynamique" society, described by Saadi Lahlou, professor of social psychology at the London School of Economics – in other words, one in which practice is solely determined by the image it gives. 

Consumption

Each of us as an individual-consumer has mutated, at least in two behaviours: the act of purchasing (visiting shops) and the search for information. 
For purchasing, e-commerce and its players are now part of our reality. In spring 2015, there were 35 million online shoppers. In October 2015, before the Paris attacks, nearly 9 out of 10 web users intended to use the Internet to prepare for the December holidays, with 30 million people buying their Christmas gifts online, taking advantage of price differences and delivery services.
Contrary to what some oracles predicted around 2005 pitting shops vs. e-commerce, the former has not disappeared. Nevertheless, points of sale have evolved, become connected, moving from an exclusive role as a purchasing site to one more as an exhibit, a contact with the product and a showroom. They assimilated the facts that the digital world is omnipresent in our daily life, that it has transformed our way of buying, and has integrated new expectations and new behaviours: more than 8 in 10 consumers go to the Internet to seek information before they go to the shop. Now the shop lies in the spectrum with digital technology, and the latter adds its supplementary dimensions to the real world.
Internet has enriched the consumer advantages. Marketing research studies the notion of empowerment, an old concept born in a feminist context at the start of the 20th century, then taken up in 1968 and afterwards, with women wanting to liberate themselves from the various constraints of a male-centred society. Empowerment has also been cited in the political context from the end of the colonial period.
Consumption marketing studies the influence of the Internet in the process of making decisions and individual choices, the modes of acquiring skills and services necessary for good decision-making (such as price comparisons or sharing of customer experiences via social networks), and the degree of autonomy in decision-making. Is a consumer who is (partially) liberated from the merchant relationship and responsible for his/her own choice more satisfied? Wouldn't the Internet allow the consumer to finally get closer to the rational behaviour introduced by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern in 1947?
More generally, beyond an individual "consumption" dimension, the Internet has had a major impact on involvement, exchanges between peers, and disintermediation and access to knowledge, even while the hierarchy and plausibility of the latter are sometimes blurred.

Big data

A major characteristic of the digital world is its capacity to create data. "Big data" is inherent in the digital world. Our behaviours are monitored, stored, and of course, used, which opens up a new era. One example: where the conventional media helped mass communication, with a message content unit, digital communication (using the data it collected) created targeted, optimised addressing that matched individuals' expectations. This type of advertising connection is based on the adage "tell me what you do, and I will tell you who you are and what you want", based on a predictive analysis of the web user's interest centres (even if fleeting). As Jacques Lendrevie wrote: "The Internet will manage to square the circle, becoming an individualised mass media".
Incidentally, this data provides a real momentum to scientific research in analysis and prediction algorithms and models, in storage and computer processing capacities and in encryption methods. In other respects, this data deserves special attention when it is of a personal or sensitive nature; the increasing mathematisation involved in digital technology must be accompanied on the legal, legislative, regulatory and ethical levels so that private life is protected as much as possible, and that inevitable confidentiality loopholes are limited. 

The Future: Connected objects and robots? 

The existence of a protective, evolving framework is even more important as tomorrow will be even more digital. The age of connected devices – the "Internet of Things" – has arrived and is becoming reality. A number between 50 and 80 billion connected consumer devices by 2020 is often cited. Slowly these objects are integrating automated systems (robots), capable of learning and connecting to outside information systems. The progress in artificial intelligence will allow these robots to gather data with all their sensors, interpret it, make a decision and then implement it. The age of robots is the phase following our current digital revolution, and adapting to this will increase our chances of understanding the next one.

Estelle Duval, Director of the Internet Department & Mediametrie//NetRatings and Philippe Tassi, Assistant General Manager of Médiamétrie