Last week researchers at UCLA released a study called "Surveying the Digital Future." It actually didn't do much with the future. Instead the study gave us a look at how the Net has changed life in US households. Also last week, Roper Starch Worldwide announced results of their third Annual Cyberstudy and ESPN let us know about a study they did of young US males and the net. With these and other studies, we're starting to get a clearer picture of what the Digital Future might look like and the Digital Present does look like.
Several studies agree that about two thirds of US adults use the net. While use varies between older and younger, richer and poorer and between various ethnic groups, the single most important determination of whether someone is likely to be online is education.
85% of adults with a college degree use the net, compared with 70% of those with some college, half of those with only a high school education, and less than a third of those who haven't graduated from high school. That's the UCLA study talking and it seems to match up pretty well with surveys by other researchers.
With one exception, the adoption of the Net has followed the same pattern as other social or technological innovation. In the US, those adoptions move from richer to poorer, more educated to less educated, urban to rural and from the coasts inland. The variable in net/web adoption was that college students got free accounts. That meant that younger (and less affluent) folks were online earlier in the adoption cycle.
Still, it's worth noting that not everyone in top-usage demographic categories is online. Last Friday the Most Beautiful Woman in the World and I went to a concert and then out to dinner with friends. Rita and her husband are educated. They have a high income.
Their demographic categories would lead you to expect them to be active online. But they're not. They don't even have a home computer. That's worth remembering if your job is planning marketing campaigns. Volvo is introducing their S60 sedan with online advertising only. The point out that 85% of Volvo users are online. The question is, "What about the other fifteen percent?"
Folks use the net to communicate and gather information. Email remains the most popular use of the net and web, for more than 80 percent of net users in most surveys. The Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 55 percent of Internet users thought email improved communications with family. 66 percent believe contact with friends has increased because of email.
The exact percentages of other activities vary quite a lot from survey to survey. Usually this has a lot to do with the way questions are asked. Even so, we can see some patterns starting to emerge.
Men and women use the net differently from each other. Why not? We do many things, especially communications things differently. Women are more likely than men to seek health and religious information online, to research new jobs online or to play games online than are men. Men seek news, sports and financial information online more than women.
Women are also more likely to seek specific information and to be more loyal to a limited number of sites. Men are more likely to roam around the web with no particular immediate objective. That information is from a Jupiter Communications study called "It's a Woman's World Wide Web."
If you're thinking, "Gosh, that's a lot like the physical world," well, yes, it is. Despite all manner of hype and hysteria about "new economies" and how the "net is different," human nature remains pretty much what it's been for the last geological age. When folks go online, they tend to act pretty much the way they act in the physical world. Just like in the physical world, we tend to mix activities and do more than one thing at the same time. This makes it harder for survey makers to figure it all out.
The Most Beautiful Woman in the World has two beautiful daughters (as do I). A few weeks back I watched her youngest work on a school assignment. She was on the phone to one friend, and carrying on an Instant Message dialogue with another. They were (at least in part) helping her find information on the web that would help with her assignment. It was multi-tasking at its best.
What's also becoming clear is that we're changing things as we let the net into our lives. One interesting finding in the Roper Starch Cyberstudy is that 53% of online households have moved furniture around to make the net more accessible. Phone companies say that, for years, the main reason people gave for getting a second phone line was a teenaged daughter. Now, it's the Internet.
People are spending more time online and it has to come from somewhere. Most studies say that the "somewhere" is television watching. Stanford University researchers found exactly that. Fifty-nine percent of the folks they surveyed who used the net were watching less TV. But the folks at MTV have pointed out that 25% of respondents to their study on PC usage watch TV and use the Internet at the same time.
Something similar is happening with shopping. Folks are shopping online more and more. Half the folks that UCLA talked to who were online also have shopped there. That shopping is coming at the expense of local merchants, mostly. That's because folks shop online mostly for convenience. In a recent BizRate.com survey, 73% of online shoppers cited "avoiding crowds" as their main reason for shopping online. Other surveys have gotten high response to other variations of the convenience theme. Those include things like "can shop any time."
Reading patterns are interesting. Folks are reading newspapers less according to some, but not all surveys. But their prime online source for local news is, guess what, their local newspaper's website. Whether it's shopping online, or reading the news, folks online go back again and again to brands they recognize.
That's probably the bottom line. We're about halfway through the net revolution in life and business and the key finding is that even though technology changes, human nature doesn't. Folks still show up online with the same psycho-biological wiring. They still have the same motivations.
In my family, we have four living generations. We're spread across nine time zones. We use email to stay in touch and send pictures, but we also use the phone and postal mail. We read some of our news online, some in the paper and we get some from TV and some from radio. We haven't stopped using the old channels, we've just added new ones and changed the mix.
What drives us as people is passion and purpose and other people. If the Internet disappeared tomorrow, that would still be true. If it lasts a thousand years it will be true, as well. The art of life in this century is to do it right, using all the tools, to use technology to allow us to be more human, not less.
This feature appeared on 30 October 2000
