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Market Research
A Decade of Adoption: How the Internet has woven itself
into American life
by the Pew Internet & American Life
Project
A decade after browsers came into popular use, the
Internet has reached into–and, in some cases,
reshaped–just about every important realm of modern
life. It has changed the way we inform ourselves, amuse
ourselves, care for ourselves, educate ourselves, work,
shop, bank, pray and stay in touch.
This entry is the Pew Internet Project's contribution to
"Trends 2005," a publication of the newly-created Pew
Research Center, a research orgnization that combines
several analytical projects funded by the Pew Charitable
Trusts. Taking a look back at adoption of the internet
in the past decade, the Pew Internet Projects finds:
On a typical day at the end of 2004, some 70 million
American adults logged onto the Internet to use email,
get news, access government information, check out
health and medical information, participate in auctions,
book travel reservations, research their genealogy,
gamble, seek out romantic partners, and engage in
countless other activities. That represents a 37 percent
increase from the 51 million Americans who were online
on an average day in 2000 when the Pew Internet &
American Life Project began its study of online life.
For the most part, the online world mirrors the offline
world. People bring to the Internet the activities,
interests, and behaviors that preoccupied them before
the Web existed. Still, the Internet has also enabled
new kinds of activities that no one ever dreamed of
doing before–certainly not in the way people are doing
them now. For example, on a typical day, 5 million
people post or share some kind of material on the Web
through their own Web logs (or “blogs”) or other
content-creating applications; at least 4 million share
music files on peer-to-peer networks; and 3 million
people use the Internet to rate a person, product, or
service.
The Web has become the “new normal” in the American way
of life; those who don’t go online constitute an
ever-shrinking minority. And as the online population
has grown rapidly, its composition has changed rapidly.
At the infant stage, the Internet’s user population was
dominated by young, white men who had high incomes and
plenty of education. As it passed into its childhood
years in 1999 and 2000, the population went mainstream;
women reached parity and then overtook men online, lots
more minority families joined the party, and more people
with modest levels of income and education came online.
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