No one goes online anymore

If you haven’t already, subscribe and join our community in receiving weekly tech insights, updates, and interviews with industry experts straight to your inbox.

Discover insights and exclusive interviews from the global LEAP community – in your inbox every week. 

This week we’re quoting…

Andrew Fenner (Director General, WYSE Travel Confederation)

What Fenner said: 

“Younger travellers increasingly expect travel to function like the rest of their digital lives: instantly, intuitively and with as little friction as possible.”

The end of going online

That sentence is about travel. But we think it describes the internet today pretty accurately in general. 

Because somewhere over the past two decades, ‘online’ stopped being a destination, and became part of the way we live our daily lives. 

Remember a time when the internet felt distinctly separate from ordinary life? You sat down at a computer. You heard the dial tone and you logged on. And eventually, you logged off again.

Today, that separation barely exists. The internet is now at work underneath almost everything we do: 

• Communication
• Entertainment
• Work
• Travel
• Shopping
• Navigation
• Relationships
• Payments,
• Even memory 

And we hardly noticed it happening. 

The internet in numbers

The scale of the shift becomes clearer when you look at the timeline.

Global internet users:

• 1990: ~2.6 million users worldwide 
• 2000: ~361 million 
• 2010: ~2 billion 
• 2025–26: more than 5.5 billion 

That’s one of the fastest behavioural transformations in human history. But raw user numbers only tell part of the story – the more important change is how deeply connected technology has embedded itself into ordinary routines.

Life is now permanently connected

Research from DataReportal shows the average person now spends around:

• 6 hours 38 minutes online every day
• 2 hours 20 minutes daily on social media 

Meanwhile:

• Smartphone users interact with their phones roughly 2,600 times per day
• Americans check their phones around 205 times daily

So at some point, connectivity started to feel like the weather: ambient and pretty much unavoidable.

It means the word ‘online’ feels outdated now. We don’t consciously enter the internet anymore; we move through connected systems all the time, often without really noticing them. 

Like when maps reroute us around traffic in real time, or when we buy a book that a social media algorithm has pushed in front of us. Or in the way we use AI tools to draft emails and suggest travel itineraries, or how messaging apps blur the line between physical and digital conversation. 

We used to ‘use the internet’. But now the internet mediates our lives constantly. 

The best tech doesn’t announce itself 

The most successful technologies today are the ones that remove friction without us even noticing: 

• Contactless payments
• AI recommendations 
• Biometric authentication
• Live translation 
• Cloud collaboration 
• Connected customer support 

It all just makes life feel smoother. The old categories separating different parts of our lives are beginning to dissolve – travel overlaps with work, social media overlaps with entertainment, AI overlaps with education, digital identity overlaps with physical identity. 

The internet has become so embedded in our lives that we stopped noticing where it ends. 

So we don’t go online anymore. We just live there – inside a permanently connected world. 

Register now for LEAP 2026 

Join us at LEAP from 31 August – 3 September 2026 to meet the entrepreneurs, investors, and global business leaders creating tech for a better world. 

Have an idea for a topic you'd like us to cover? We're eager to hear it. Drop us a message and share your thoughts.

Catch you next week,

The LEAP Team