Study Finds Internet Getting More Social
American internet users spend an hour more online each week than they did in 2005, according to a study released today by The Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School. That’s 8.9 hours per week online on average, for the 77.6 percent of Americans who use the internet.
Use of online social tools is becoming more widespread, with 56.6 percent of online community members logging on at least once per day, 23.6 percent of all internet users posting photos online, 12.5 percent of internet users maintaining their own web sites, and 7.4 percent of internet users blogging. The percent posting photos and blogging have seen the most noteworthy gains, both more than doubling over the last three years. For comparison, 90 percent of internet users use email, and 51.1 percent of them buy stuff online.
The internet is also encouraging social activity offline, with 20.3 percent taking offline actions related to online communities, and 64.9 percent involved in social causes that they didn’t work on prior to participating online.
Speaking of familiarity with online social tools… Just for fun, here’s my list of the top five responses I got when I told relatives and friends I was a professional blogger while visiting Michigan over Thanksgiving.
- How do you find stuff to write about? Do you just make it up?
- Oh, a blog… right. Have you ever heard of Boing Boing?
- You write about MySpace and Facebook and YouTube? Kewl!
- Oh really? My uncle just made a social networking site! Maybe you can write about it. [No really. It’s called PeopleKlick.]
- That’s great, honey. Could you please pass the pumpkin pie?
The linked press release says “A significant majority of members of online communities (56.6 percent) log into their community at least once a day.”
That’s not “56.6 percent of Internet users”, it’s “56.6 percent of online community members”.
You’re right, sorry. I’ll adjust the post.
Is the market ready for Antisocial Networks yet :)
Blogging is interesting, it has a similar feel (to me anyway) of the early text internet – its about good writing rather than pictures, and the audience still seems to be fairly “early adopter” in style…the griefers are still a tiny minority.
And the point is that your relatives are cutely naive? or that people from Michigan since they’re in flyover country are morons about the web? or both?
My point was that I got a little bit of a reality check when I escaped the insular tech blogging world for few days. Use and awareness of social software was very high among most everyone I talked to. No morons were involved in the making of this post.
fair enough. a little bit sensitive having recently moved to michigan from SF. went to a meeting in LA a little bit ago at an emerging media lab and the woman in charge started talking about all the mayonaise everyone eats in the midwest and i nearly choked on my fried bologna sandwich
I’m one of these spending an increasing amount of time online. I think the problem now days is that there is so many great sites out there and only so many hours in the day. It’s a struggle to juggle work, family life and your “internet” activities.
Example * You have your own blog * You belong to 1 or more social networking sites * You like to read and comment on news at sites such as Giiga.com * You like to watch internet tv / video * You like to post your own videos I could go on. So how many hours a day should this take?
[...] we will see more and more tipping in the future. Tipping is the logical extend of the currently increased social activity on the web. Recent research shows that people are clicking less and less on advertisements and honestly I [...]
[...] we will see more and more tipping in the future. Tipping is the logical extend of the currently increased social activity on the web. Recent research shows that people are clicking less and less on advertisements and honestly I [...]