Over the past few years at the Pew Internet Project, we’ve found that we continue talking among ourselves about some Internet topics long after we have issued formal reports on them. Sometimes, that’s because new or newsworthy events change the landscape of the issues we’ve worked on, encouraging us to revise, or at least edit our thinking. Other times, we are provoked by questions from the media that lead us to look at our findings in a different light. Frequently, we have more to talk about than we had room for in the reports or memos.
We decided to share the fruits of some of these more informal discussions and reflections with you in this virtual space. We’d like you to think of PIP Commentaries as the background hum behind our formal reports. We’ll offer a sampling of the curious, the compelling, or even the anecdotal evidence we work with every day. Most of the statistics and carefully couched language of the reports will stay behind, and instead we’ll present you with comments driven by our collective instincts and intuitions that come over time from living with our data, our reports, and your reactions.
