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
Introduction The promise of a high-speed data connection into people’s homes has been around longer than the Worldwide Web. Digital technologies developed in the 1980s, which made possible the transmission of voice, video, and text over the same wire, upped the ante in the information revolution. Mass media would no longer mean the transmission of […]
Introduction and Summary The public’s news habits have been largely unaffected by the Sept. 11 attacks and subsequent war on terrorism. Reported levels of reading, watching and listening to the news are not markedly different than in the spring of 2000. At best, a slightly larger percentage of the public is expressing general interest in […]
Introduction Tens of millions of Americans turn to the Internet when they need help with health problems. Health professionals are often apprehensive about the reliability of online health information and wonder how consumers can possibly find good advice in the untamed wilderness of the Internet. In an environment where any quack can create a credible-looking […]
Introduction The rise of e-government has been one of the most striking developments on the Web. In just a few years, thousands of government agencies, legislators, and courts have established a Net presence. Today, all three branches of the federal government are online, and the portal FirstGov.gov claims to link to 47 million pages.[1. http://www.firstgov.gov/top_nav/about.html?ssid=1007419749171196_172 […]
Introduction Cleveland, though not known as a hotbed of Internet activity, is taking some innovative approaches to using the Internet for economic and social purposes. Most prominently, the city is using approximately $3 million in revenue from cable fees to subsidize Internet access and computer training through community development corporations (CDCs). A number of CDCs […]
Hard Times and Hard Policies During the Cold War, public debate over foreign policy focused on the confrontation with the Soviet Union. There was widespread support for the strategy of containment-disagreements were essentially over tactics. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the display of overwhelming American military power in the Persian Gulf War, […]