Posted by truecreek on March 1, 2010 under More Dam News | 
Interesting Pew Study.
by Kristen Purcell, Lee Rainie, Amy Mitchell, Tom Rosenstiel, Kenny Olmstead.
The overwhelming majority of Americans (92%) use multiple platforms to get their daily news, according to a new survey conducted jointly by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and Project for Excellence in Journalism.
The Internet is now the third most-popular news platform, behind local and national television news and ahead of national print newspapers, local print newspapers and radio. Getting news online fits into a broad pattern of news consumption by Americans; six in ten (59%) get news from a combination of online and offline sources on a typical day.
The internet and mobile technologies are at the center of the story of how people’s relationship to news is changing. In today’s new multi-platform media environment, news is becoming portable, personalized, and participatory:
* Portable: 33% of cell phone owners now access news on their cell phones.
* Personalized: 28% of Internet users have customized their home page to include news from sources and on topics that particularly interest them.
* Participatory: 37% of Internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated it via postings on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter.
In addition, people use their social networks and social networking technology to filter, assess, and react to news. And they use traditional email and other tools to swap stories and comment on them. Among those who get news online, 75% get news forwarded through email or posts on social networking sites and 52% share links to news with others via those means.
Despite all of this online activity, the typical online news consumer routinely uses just a handful of news sites and does not have a particular favorite. And overall, Americans have mixed feelings about this “new” news environment. Over half (55%) say it is easier to keep up with news and information today than it was five years ago, but 70% feel the amount of news and information available from different sources is overwhelming.
Take a look at the study and download it here.
Posted by truecreek on January 26, 2010 under More Dam News |
These statistics are holding steady.
By Lee Rainie:
In a national survey between November 30 and December 27, 2009, we find:
74% of American adults (ages 18 and older) use the Internet, a slight drop from our survey in April 2009, which did not include Spanish interviews. At that time we found that 79% of English speaking adults use the Internet.
60% of American adults use broadband connections at home, a drop that is within the margin of error from 63% in April 2009.
55% of American adults connect to the Internet wirelessly, either through a WiFi or WiMax connection via their laptops or through their handheld device like a smart phone. This figure did not change in a statistically significant way during 2009.
These data come from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. The most recent survey was conducted from November 30 to December 27, 2009, using landline and cell phones and including interviews in Spanish. Some 2,258 adults were interviewed and the overall sample has a margin of error of ± 2 percentage points.
Download the entire Internet, broadband and cell phone statistics survey here.
Posted by truecreek on under Opinions. Everyone has them. |
Very interesting research from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. It’s a hot topic of discussion here at True Creek, for sure. The premise was also the theme for a recent episode of ‘Modern Family’ on ABC.
By Margaret Shapiro
We’ve heard about the gender divide in knowledge and use of technology. It seems the gap may start with the simplest of technologies — cellphones — and at a fairly young age — middle school.
For a study published in December in the journal New Media and Society, University of Alabama at Birmingham sociologist Shelia Cotten asked nearly 1,000 middle school students to rate the different ways they used their cellphones.
The results showed boys much more than girls used their phones to play games, share photos and videos, listen to music and send e-mails. Girls tended to use their phones primarily for talking and or text messaging.
To the researchers’ surprise, the boys used the phones for talking and texting just as much as the girls — in other words, they didn’t use the “complicated features” instead of socializing, but in addition to it. “We would’ve expected that girls would use cellphones for talking and texting because females are socialized to communicate more with others than males,” said Cotten in an online video presentation of her research, “but there were no differences.”
“By these study results, we aren’t saying that parents should buy phones with fewer features for girls,” she said. “But it does point out how much more needs to be done to teach girls” about technology. “Females traditionally have perceived themselves as less skilled in terms of technology, especially with regard to computers.”
Cotten said that 60 to 70 percent of middle school kids report owning a cellphone.
More about Boys vs. Girls on Cellphones here.
Posted by truecreek on December 16, 2009 under More Dam News |
By David Lieberman, Associated Press
The Internet and tech toys get the headlines. But the vast majority of Americans still turn to their familiar televisions, radios, and CDs when they want to be informed and entertained, according a consumer tracking survey released Tuesday by the NPD Group.
“There’s a perception that families spending time in front of a glowing TV hearth has been replaced by glowing laptop or iPod displays,” NPD analyst Russ Cupnick says in a release. While true for some, “TV remains the top entertainment choice by far in the United States.”
More than 80% of the country watches an average of 10 hours a week of non-movie TV programming, according to the online survey of 10,281 people in August, weighted to reflect the general population.
After that:
* 78% said that they listened to music on a traditional AM/FM radio sometime during the prior week.
* 70% sent an instant message or e-mail.
* 60% listened to music on a CD.
* And 58% watched a movie on TV, not including pay-per-view or video-on-demand.
But the survey found that online is becoming an increasingly important part of the mix. Some 47% of the respondants visited a social networking site the prior week.
Read the entire survey, entitled “TV More Popular Than Internet for Entertainment” here.
