Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
For most Americans, multiple information services and gadgets are usually nearby. Penetration of devices and services nears or surpasses 60% or more in four of the ten technologies categories we queried. As the table shows, Americans approach or top the 60% mark for the Internet, computer use, cable subscription, and cell phones – a first […]
A quarter of Internet users consider spam to be a problem. While just about every emailer complains about spam, we wanted to see who is particularly aggrieved by spam and why. We looked at the 25% of Internet users who, when asked to describe how spam has affected their life on the Internet, answered that […]
Americans are reluctant to part with some old media and some new, but traditional print media don’t fare well. With the proliferation of communications devices and services, it is worth examining the relative strength of preferences among Americans for their gadgets and services. Although the technologies by which people receive and process information may be […]
Internet penetration is not spread evenly over all regions, and users in different regions do different things online.
The South has the nation’s least experienced Internet user population, and has the highest proportion of novice users. Users in the seven Southern states (West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas) stand out against those elsewhere in the nation for several reasons: The South has the lowest rate of Internet access of any […]
For more than a decade, globalization has been a deeply divisive topic among social activists, intellectuals, business leaders, policy makers and politicians. But the global public is less divided on the subject. To varying degrees, people almost everywhere like globalization. The 38,000 people surveyed in 44 countries by the Pew Global Attitudes Project report that […]
Online commerce swims against the tide of falling consumer confidence Even with so many dot-com companies going out of business in the past two years, online purchasing by consumers has followed a steadily upward path. In March 2000, 40 million Americans – or 48% of Internet users – had purchased a product online. That number […]
Holidays online In the early winter of 2002 the tracking survey of the Pew Internet & American Life Project showed that 57% of U.S. adults use the Internet – that comes to about 109 million people. Of those Internet users, more than 66 million have purchased a product or service online at some point in […]
A Pew Research Center Note