The Internet – once the playground of affluent, well-educated men – is going ordinary, reflected in an audience that’s increasingly middle-brow, less work-oriented and female.
Two years ago, when just 23 percent of Americans were going online, stories about technology were the big attraction. Today, with 41 percent of adults using the Internet, the weather is the most popular news draw, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press released Jan. 15.
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Researchers also found that a little more than half the country’s new Internet users since 1996 were women. Almost 40 percent said they never attended college, and 23 percent put their household incomes at less than $30,000 a year. Twenty percent were over age 50, and more than half used the Internet for pleasure, rather than work.
Pollsters of 3,184 adults by telephone during the month of November did find that the majority of Internet users still are younger, better educated and more affluent than the nation as a whole. About 39 percent of Internet users are college graduates, for example, compared to 22 percent of all Americans. Also 80 percent of Internet users are under age 50, compared to 63 percent of all Americans.
Dr. Ruby Roy Dholakia, a professor of marketing at the University of Rhode Island and director of the Research Institute for Telecommunications and Information Marketing, found the results of the Pew Center survey interesting but not surprising.
“The early (Internet) users were the highly educated and men. So as time passed – and Internet time is very short – the only people who are left to come on stream are going to be females or people with lower education or lower income,” Dholakia said.
“The next big thing is the elderly. They’re the ones that you’ll find among new users next,” she said.
Dholakia, who has authored several studies on computer ownership and usage in Rhode Island, guessed that the Internet will become increasingly mainstream as new technologies – from Web television to hand-held devices – make it cheaper and easier to access.
Some other findings are:
The popularity of general interest news is growing at a faster rate than that of political or international news. The number of online consumers who turn to the Internet for news about the weather has jumped 17 percentage points since 1996, from 47 percent to 64 percent. Use of the Internet for local news made similar gains (15 percentage points), as did use of the medium for entertainment news (8 percentage points). Meanwhile, interest in news of an international nature declined by 2 percentage points, while that of a political nature rose only 3 percent points, the survey found.
E-commerce has skyrocketed. Even before the Christmas rush, 32 percent of Internet users had bought something on line, compared to just 8 percent in 1995.
Similar growth is happening in electronic mail, which remains people’s top reason for logging on. Among those who use e-mail, 88 percent do so for personal reasons exclusively (41 percent) or for both personal and work-related communications (47 percent).
Trying to find something on the Internet is the top source of frustration among users, followed by the speed of connections and the speed of searches.
Few Internet users complained of information overload. The majority, or 63 percent, said they spend neither too little nor too much time on line.
Most Americans are not overly concerned about computer crashes in the year 2000. Only 13 percent worry a lot about the issue.
The Internet does not appear to interfere with the use of traditional news sources. Three quarters of heavy online news consumers still get most of their news from print and broadcast outlets. Almost as many (63 percent) say they use other sources just a much now as they did before getting news on line.
