Sean Sharp’s ITRT Blog

THE MORE TIME PEOPLE SPEND USING THE INTERNET

THE INTERNET STUDY: More DetailWhat do users do on the Internet? Click images for larger view

We asked each of our 4000 respondents to select among a list of 17 common internet activities and tell us which they did or did not do. This is what we found:

E-mail is by far the most common Internet activity, with 90% of all Internet users claiming to be e-mailers. Note: the corresponding table has been updated from the previous version of the press release

For the most part, the Internet today is a giant public library with a decidedly commercial tilt. The most widespread use of the internet today is as an information search utility for products, travel, hobbies, and general information. Virtually all users interviewed responded that they engaged in one or more of these information gathering activities.

A little over a third of all Internet users report using the web to engage in entertainment such as computer games such as online chess, role games, and the like. Thus, the current Internet is also emerging as an entertainment utility.

Chat rooms are for the young and the anonymous. While a quarter of internet users claim to have used chat rooms, this activity substantially decreases after age 25. And the chatters report that the overwhelming portion of their chat room interaction is with anonymous others whose identities remain unknown.

Consumer to Business transactional activity– purchasing, stock trading, online auctions, and e-banking–are engaged in by much smaller fractions of Internet users, with only a quarter reporting they make purchases online and under fifteen percent doing any of the other transactional activities. Despite all of the sound and fury, business to consumer commercial online transactions are but in their earliest stages.

This article is very interesting. The part that struck me was the social interaction piece. How much time have we lost to socializing with others because we use the Internet so much? Or is it that we could be doing something other than the Internet and the same thing would happen? How much time do we spend socializing on the Internet, too? Good questions and some good perspective to ponder.

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