A great report out yesterday from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found that cable leads the pack as the campaign news source, and Facebook and Twitter play only modest roles. Fewer Americans are closely following news about the presidential campaign than four years ago.
Also of note: 68% say they prefer to get political news from sources that do not have a political point of view, compared with just 23% who prefer news from sources that share their point of view. (via)
On The Media: Teens Care About Privacy Online
An interesting segment with Pew Senior Researcher Mary Madden on teenage behavior in regards to privacy, but one thing really caught my attention. Madden at around 1:46,
But they also have a variety of ways to customize and cloak their messaging on social media. Teens use private messaging channels, they use slang, they use jokes that may only be understood by peers. So just because someone is posting something broadly to a network it may not actually be intended for everyone in the network.
In case you missed it, be sure to check out Mary Madden’s discussion of teens, privacy, and social network sites with Brooke Gladstone in last week’s On the Media here.
PS: The findings Mary discussed are from a larger report about teens’ positive and negative experiences on social media; the full report is available (for free!) on our website.
New Report: 58% of all adults say they go online for no particular reason other than to pass the time or have fun
Americans are increasingly going online just for fun and to pass the time. On any given day, 53% of all the young adults ages 18-29 go online for no particular reason except to have fun or to pass the time. Many of them go online in purposeful ways, as well. But the results of a survey by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project show that young adults’ use of the internet can at times be simply for the diversion it presents. Indeed, 81% of all young adults in this age cohort report they have used the internet for this reason at least occasionally.
These results come in the larger context that internet users of all ages are much more likely now than in the past to say they go online for no particular reason other than to pass the time or have fun. Some 58% of all adults (or 74% of all online adults) say they use the internet this way. And a third of all adults (34%) say they used the internet that way “yesterday” – or the day before Pew Internet reached them for the survey. Both figures are higher than in 2009 when we last asked this question and vastly higher than in the middle of the last decade.
Among teen social media users:
- 93% have an account on Facebook
- 24% have an account on MySpace
- 12% have an account on Twitter
- 7% have an account on a Yahoo site
- 6% have an account on YouTube
- 2% have an account on each of the following: Skype, myYearbook, and Tumblr
- 1% have an account on Google Buzz
Read more in our recent report: Teens, kindness and cruelty on social network sites.
New report: Why Americans use social media
Our latest report takes a quick but informative look at why Americans use social media:
Two-thirds of online adults (66%) use social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace or LinkedIn. These internet users say that connections with family members and friends (both new and old) are a primary consideration in their adoption of social media tools. Roughly two thirds of social media users say that staying in touch with current friends and family members is a major reason they use these sites, while half say that connecting with old friends they’ve lost touch with is a major reason behind their use of these technologies.
Other factors play a much smaller role—14% of users say that connecting around a shared hobby or interest is a major reason they use social media, and 9% say that making new friends is equally important. Reading comments by public figures and finding potential romantic partners are cited as major factors by just 5% and 3% of social media users, respectively.
The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism looked at how mainstream media outlets use Twitter.
A new report from PEJ, based on analysis of more than 3,600 tweets over the course of a week, finds that news organizations use “Twitter primarily as an added means to disseminate their own material.” Read more in the full report at journalism.org.
From our new report: Teens, kindness and cruelty on social network sites
Part 2: What teens experience and how they behave on social network sites
The majority of teens have positive online experiences, but some are caught in an online feedback loop of meanness and negative experiences:
- Most of the 77% of all teens who use social media say their experience is that people their age are mostly kind to one another on social network sites—overall, 69% say their experience is that peers are mostly kind to each other in social network spaces. Another 20% say their peers are mostly unkind, while 11% volunteered that “it depends.”
- However, in a similar question asked of adults 18 and older, 85% of social media-using adults reported that their experience was that people are mostly kind to one another on social network sites, while just 5% reported that they see people behaving in mostly unkind ways.
When we asked them to describe how people act online, the results were pretty negative:
…but the teens who were asked about how they thought people should act online gave responses that were substantially more positive:
From our new report: Teens, kindness and cruelty on social network sites - Teens and social network sites
We have a huge new report out today about how teens navigate interactions on social network sites and Twitter. It’s a big report, and covers a lot of ground—the above infographics are just from the first section, an overview of how many teens are on social media, who they are, and what they do there. More to follow…
What we're reading: “Why Parents Help Their Children Lie to Facebook About Age: Unintended Consequences of the ‘Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act’”
by danah boyd, Eszter Hargittai, Jason Schultz, and John Palfrey, First Monday.
You can read the full article at the link above, or read danah’s blog post summarizing the results at the Digital Media and Learning Blog.
Half of Adult Cell Phone Owners Have Apps on Their Phones
Our latest report explores recent trends in app downloads: Who uses apps? What do they download? Who pays for apps—and how much? Read more…
What effect do tablets have on news consumption habits?
The Project for Excellence in Journalism (a fellow Pew Research project) and The Economist Group have collaborated on the most comprehensive and detailed analysis to date of tablet users and how they get news on their tablets: To what extent are people using their tablets for news rather than other activities? Are they getting more news now than before they had their tablets?
The multi-phase study of nearly 1,200 tablet users and nearly 900 tablet news users offers unprecedented findings on many questions, and will be available on www.journalism.org on Tuesday, October 25.
The Media Primary: How News Media and Blogs Have Eyed the Presidential Contenders during the First Phase of the 2012 Race - Project for Excellence in Journalism
In the first months of the race for president, that weeding out period before citizens ever vote or caucus, Texas Governor Rick Perry has received the most coverage and the most positive coverage from the news media of any GOP contender, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.
The study, which examines news media and blog coverage of 10 GOP contenders as well as the president, also finds:
• News coverage of Herman Cain has been moderately more positive (28%) than negative (23%) overall. But most of that flattering narrative has come recently. From May through July, however, Cain was largely ignored, and his coverage was more negative or mixed.
• Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann’s coverage has been substantially more positive (31%) than negative (23%). But she had the wildest ride of any candidate. She moved from a long shot to a surprise contender, to an object of scrutiny, to a straw poll winner and back to unlikely underdog. At the same time, she has been largely pummeled in the blogs throughout.
• Though she never entered the race, Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin was the fourth-most-covered Republican figure in news coverage, and the most-discussed candidate in blogs. And despite her complaints about what she calls the “lamestream media,” Palin enjoyed coverage that was considerably more positive than negative—by a factor of almost 3-2—and much more positive than she received among bloggers.
Read more at journalism.org
In case you missed it: We recently came out with a great new report with the Project for Excellence in Journalism about how people get news and information about their local community. Some of the major findings include:
- Local TV news remains the most popular source for local information in America, but adults rely on it primarily for just three subjects—weather, breaking news and to a lesser extent traffic.
- Newspapers (both print and on the web) are the source Americans turn to most for a wider range of information than any other source.
- The internet has a strong hold in the local community, as web-only outlets are now the key source of information on some key subjects such as education or local business and restaurants. Among adults under age 40, the internet rivals or surpasses other platforms on every single topic area except one (breaking local news).
Want to learn more? You can explore for yourself the changing ecosystem of how people get local news with this interactive infographic, or read the report in full on our website.
Another lovely infographic for your Friday morning…
We just noticed that the folks at Visible Technologies have pulled some stats from our recent report on mobile and social location-based services, particularly the section about social media users who have set up their accounts to automatically include their location in their posts. (Click here for a larger version.)
Highlights from the mobile findings:
- 12% of smartphone owners have used a geosocial (“check in”) service such as Foursquare or Gowalla.
- 55% of smartphone owners have used a location-based information service to get directions or recommendations based on their current location.
And the social:
- 14% of social media users have set up their account to automatically include their location in their posts.
Want more data? Read more in the full report on our website.
(Source: cmswire.com)
Both cell ownership and text messaging are nearly universal among 18-24 year olds—95% own a cell phone and 97% of these cell owners use text messaging.
18-24 year olds send or receive an average of 109.5 text messages per day—that works out to more than 3,200 messages per month. The median 18-24 year old texter sends or receives 50 texts per day, or around 1,500 messages per month.
To put these numbers in comparison, the average of 109.5 texts per day among 18-24 year olds is more than double the comparable figure for 25-34 year olds, and twenty-three times the figure for text messaging users who are 65 or older. Read more in our most recent report, Americans and Text Messaging.
