I find the idea that the Internet’s adoption was related to US presidential election cycles a little bizarre. I know they dominate the mainstream media for a few months every four years but surely the utility of the internet vastly exceeds that?
What about online shopping or even email displacing paper communications?
What they used to call feature phones back then (which I think are practically discontinued now - most current feature phones would be considered smartphones in 2006) supported texting but it was used less than on the 2006 concept of smartphones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helio_Ocean
When they said social network, they meant SMS Twitter. It was a very interesting time with lots of companies vying to be the next evolution of mobile.
Not to mention the rest of the planet. I'd like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that the majority of the world is not-America, and views American presidential elections as a newsworthy diversion for a few weeks every four years, and not much more than that. Those elections don't really drive any changes in behaviour. Hell, my own country's elections don't really drive any changes in behaviour.
The main graph on the top of this page shows Internet Users as proportion of population in Developed countries went from 11% in 1997 to 31% in 2000.
It was basically right at 1999->2000 that you had internet stores completely melt down on Valentine's Day and Mother's Day.
This was the point where the Internet was escaping being some weird techie thing to being something that non-technical people were using.
See also: the internet. People still discussed seriously whether or not it had staying power as recently as 2008. It didn't really take off until the 2008 election pushed so many people to participate in new mediums. 2004 was kind of a prelude with Howard Dean's campaign, but he mostly reached the already online set. I was already on in the 1990s, and it still surprises me when I meet people my own age who didn't get on until the 2000s or 2010s even though it's the more common experience.