Now Playing: Associated Press via King 5 News
Topic: Willapa Magazine
I started with a computer in the very early 1990's and used something called Prodigy. I had not interest in going on to the Internet. Now, when Bay Center got DSL and dial-up was not longer our option, we were in seventh heaven.
[excerpt]
Survey finds split in Internet, cell phone patterns
02:26 PM PDT on Sunday, May 6, 2007
NEW YORK - A broad survey about the technology people have, how they use it, and what they think about it shatters assumptions and reveals where companies might be able to expand their audiences.
The Pew Internet and American Life Project found that adult Americans are broadly divided into three groups: 31 percent are elite technology users, 20 percent are moderate users and the remainder have little or no usage of the Internet or cell phones.
But Americans are divided within each group, according to a Pew analysis of 2006 data released Sunday.
The high-tech elites, for instance, are almost evenly split into:
-- "Omnivores," who fully embrace technology and express themselves creatively through blogs and personal Web pages.
-- "Connectors," who see the Internet and cell phones as communications tools.
-- "Productivity enhancers," who consider technology as largely ways to better keep up with their jobs and daily lives.
-- "Lackluster veterans," those who use technology frequently but aren't thrilled by it.
John Horrigan, Pew's associate director, said he started the survey believing that the more gadgets people have, the more they are likely to embrace technology and use so-called Web 2.0 applications for generating and sharing content with the world.
"Once we got done, we were surprised to find the tensions within groups of users with information technology," Horrigan said.
Many longtime Internet users, the lackluster veterans, remain stuck in the decade-old technologies they started with, Horrigan said. That a quarter of high-tech elites fall into this category, he said, shows untapped potential for companies that can design next-generation applications to pique this group's interest.
Read the entire article at King 5 News' online site
