Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Table 1. Online activities, 2008
All internet
users
(percent)
Dial-up
at home
(percent)
Broadband
at home
(percent)
Selected activity that has ever been done by a user
Use an online search engine
89
80
94
Check weather reports and forecasts
80
75
84
Get news online
73
61
80
Visit a state or local government website
66
55
72
Look online for information about the 2008 election
55
37
62
Watch a video on a videosharing site like YouTube or GoogleVideo
52
29
60
Look online for information about a job
47
36
50
Send instant messages
40
38
44
Read someone else's blog
33
15
40
Use a social networking site like MySpace, Facebook, or LinkedIn.com
29
21
33
Make a donation to charity online
20
9
23
Downloaded a podcast
19
8
22
Download or share files using peer-to-peer networks such as BiTorrent or LiveWire
15
15
17
Create or work on your own blog
12
8
15
Source: Pew Internet & American Life Project Survey, April 2008.
e-mail has become more data intensive as people
are more inclined to attach photos and videos to
them. As data intensiveness has increased broad-
band has become more a necessity rather than a
luxury in everyday life. Broadband Internet access,
however, is not uniformly available across rural
and urban America, nor is the broadband access
transmission rate identical across the country.
77 percent, of all persons went on-line during the
year. The CPS data suggests a variation across the
country in the occurrence of persons going on-line
(Table 3). The regions are the four basic Census
regions (Figure 2). Southerners were the least
likely to go on-line of the four Census regions.
Nonmetropolitan areas (aka rural areas), in the
aggregate, had a lower percentage of individuals
going on-line. While the variation in overall on-
line use was insignificant between regions outside
of the south, the same did not hold for nonmet-
ropolitan areas. Only in the Northeast was there
not some drop-off in on-line activity going from
metropolitan to nonmetropolitan areas.
One distinction often glossed over, and often
ignored, though important if remediation is a goal
of government Internet policy, is the distinction
between individuals and households. Many poli-
cies have either an implicit individual or household
impact, where the policy is designed to address
directly one economic actor with only second-
ary effects going to the other economic actor.
PROCLIVITY OF RURAL-
URBAN ON-LINE ACTIVITY
While data from the surveys conducted by PEW
provide an understanding of what kind of adult
on-line activities take place, the Bureau of the
Census' Current Population Survey (CPS) data
provide a better understanding of where, and a
more complete understanding of who, uses the
Internet. Table 3 shows the percent of all individu-
als irrespective of age that went on-line at home,
school, work or elsewhere. A high percentage,
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