EMFA: T2E2 - Learning from Internet Demographics - Birdsell

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Theme:  Universal Internet - Essay 2
Author: David S. Birdsell, Associate Professor
        School of Public Affairs, Baruch College
E-mail: David_Birdsell@baruch.cuny.edu


[David Birdsell is the Co-author of "Web Users are Looking more 
like America," Public Perspective, April/May, 1998.  EMFA has a 
link his paper (in PDF) at the bottom of our reports list at: 
http://www.iaginteractive.com/emfa/theme2.htm#Articles ]


"What can we learn from examining national or regional statistics
and demographics," is a question more complex than it might look
at first face.  Let's take a very basic issue: usage.  Internet
demographics have been changing so rapidly over the past 3 years
that it has been very hard to say who is using the 'net at any
given moment.  The broad trends, however -- at least in the
United States -- are somewhat clearer.  As the user population
has grown, it has come to look more like the general population. 
Women, only 24% of the Internet population in September 1995, are
near parity today. We see no significant differences in basic
access among racial groups in the United States.  While
differences in income, education, urbanicity and age remain
(Internet users are wealthier, better educated, more likely to
live in a suburb or a city, and generally younger than their
off-line counterparts), every one of these gaps has narrowed
since 1995.  

The encouraging numbers nonetheless leave unanswered a host of
questions.  They measure, for example, only "use," or "access,"
gross terms badly in need of refinement.  A person who browses
the Web once monthly at the library is not a "user" in the same
sense that a certified cybernaut with a T-1 line is a "user." 
The minimal "access" requirements for a person engaged in
real-time gaming are very different from the minimums necessary
for a person searching for political information or job postings.

To get around these problems, researchers seek information on
more finely-grained habits, such as recency of last access, time
online during a given period, the nature of connections, etc. 
But these, too, are problematic numbers, rendered moreso by the
way that some surveys seek information.  Honestly now, how many
of you can say precisely how many hours you spend online each
week?  How many of you using a LAN-based connection can explain
exactly how you connect to the Internet?  For those who open a
connection and leave it up all day whether using the Internet or
not, how many hours do you count yourself "online?" 

And what does "time online" measure in any case?  As more and
more of my own activities become oriented toward the Internet, I
find myself spending *less* time online because I'm developing
routines and acquiring tools that allow me to use the medium more
efficiently than I did when I was first exploring it.  It's more
important to me, but I need less time to accomplish my basic
goals. 

In short: we're not always sure just what we're measuring, or why
what we're measuring matters.  Patterns we do find may have a
very short shelf life.  The literature regarding online behavior,
for example, relies heavily on a period when the average user
looked very different from today's average user.  Will even the
basic patterns that held true for a technically sophisticated,
wealthy, white, male audience of one million hold true for a
diverse, technically polyglot audience of 70 million?  Or 100
million?  We don't know the answer to that question, but it is
reasonable to assume that it might change.  

Consider this: in January 1997, the Internet was roughly 46% the
size it was in January 1998.  The last time that the US
population was 46% of its current size was in 1930.  Even without
taking growth rates into account, relying on older data would be
much like going back 68 years for our basic information about the
population.  

So while the rapid changes in the Internet population are good
news for those who want to see the Internet grow into an ever
more useful and ubiquitous medium of communication, they should
not be taken to mean that access issues can now be moved safely
to the background.  We will still have to find out much more
about how, when, and why people access the Internet.  In
particular, we will want to study closely the explosion in public
points of access such as after-hours school programs, libraries
and community-based centers.  Early indications are that these
"third places" may already influence the range and nature of
Internet use.

If that is the case, policy makers should address questions of
access quality in these facilities.  Should more money be
invested in supporting the libraries' increasingly important role
in this area? Should nonprofits be evaluated on criteria that
specify levels of access support rather than numbers of boxes or
hours of service?  

Surveys alone cannot answer these questions, at least not yet. 
But they can help us to see trends and respond accordingly.  The
rate of change flatly requires that we use the most recent
numbers available, and that we continue to think both critically
and creatively about what those numbers actually measure.


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