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Accepting the Internet-of-Things in our homes: The role of user skills

2018; Elsevier BV; Volume: 36; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.tele.2018.12.004

1879-324X

Pia S. de Boer, Alexander Johannes Aloysius Maria van Deursen, Thomas J. L. van Rompay,

Privacy, Security, and Data Protection

The present study investigates whether skills associated with operating the Internet-of-Things (IoT) contribute to the acceptance and (intended) usage of IoT technology and investigates to what extent these IoT skills are influenced by Internet skills.Extending the technology acceptance model (TAM), we conducted an online survey among 1356 respondents, a sample representative of the Dutch population.The results revealed that IoT skills directly contribute to IoT use and testify to the relevance of the TAM for predicting IoT acceptance and usage.However, people's attitudes towards the IoT did not influence its acceptance, suggesting that users are not yet fully aware of how IoT use affects their privacy and quality of life in general.Furthermore, the results revealed that several Internet skills are an important precedent for IoT acceptance and usage.Mobile, information navigation, social, and creative Internet skills directly or indirectly contributed to the level of IoT skills.It can be concluded that people's assessments of their IoT skills and that pragmatic considerations are important for its acceptance and that being skilled in using the IoT requires sufficient Internet skills. IntroductionOver the years, the nature of Internet use has become more complex as the Internet has developed from Web 1.0 to Web 4.0.In Web 1.0, users were limited to reading content, whereas through the introduction of Web 2.0, they were enabled to contribute to the Web by creating, storing, and sharing this content themselves.Web 3.0 goes further by introducing semantics, facilitating smoother communication between humans and machines.Web 3.0 moves away from a connection between data and knowledge, using keywords and tags to a connection based on natural language and intrinsic meanings.This development was initiated to improve information searching and data sharing.Although Web 3.0 is still under development, the era of Web 4.0 has arrived.Web 4.0 involves a connection with the Web anytime and anywhere, personalized services via the use of continuously obtained data, and a continuous connection with other users.These characteristics of Web 4.0 can be referred to as ubiquity, identity, and connection, respectively (Noh, 2015).One of the new technological developments that implies objectification of the three characteristics of Web 4.0 -ubiquity, identity, and connection -is that of the Internet-of-Things (IoT).Although there is no generally accepted definition of the IoT (Whitmore et al.,