Download PDFLiz Gannes points to a new study by the Center for Digital Future that addresses the growing impact of the internet and a variety of online tools on American Society.
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.
This is a really interesting set of findings. I like to think of it as ammunition against the forces that tend to trivialize the value and impact of social tools on our collective futures, be they on or offline.
For more than 2 years, I have argued that the nature of social tools and applications is horizontal more than vertical. In the initial days of the Internet, “online” was a luxury - a vertical enhancment to an existing series of towers. Over time, however, it transitioned away from being a luxury and emerged as a utility - much as we treat water and electricity today.
It’s actually more interesting that individuals would question the role of social tools in systems designed to mimic and foster human relationships - we’re social by nature. To deny their role denies our own humanity.
This is certainly one genie that never really was in a bottle to begin with.
technorati tags:social+tools, research
December 29th, 2006 at 6:41 pm
You can probably guess what I think about social knowledge creating-building-sharing tools and horizontality, and the range of accompanying social-and-knowledge-based renegotiations that will be created as the future unfolds, so I won’t bore you except to say that I agree … the structures that have mitigated the sociality since the early 1900’s contrinbuted much to a certain kind of efficiency and scaling as the infrastructure of commerce and government in which we know live was built, but they are beginning to show their age, methinks.