As of August 2012, 85% of American adults use the internet, up from 82% in April and 80% in February.
Those with no high school diploma are the least likely to use the internet - 61%.
See more: pewrsr.ch/JCxHSa & pewrsr.ch/NgJGmd
(Source: pewinternet.org)
Fast Facts: Cell Phones
Mobile phones have become a near-ubiquitous tool for information seeking and communicating—83% of American adults have a cell phone of some kind. Though roughly nine in ten (92%) adults ages 18-49 own a cell phone, ownership starts to drop off after age 50, with 82% of adults ages 50-64 and 55% of those 65 and older owning a mobile phone.
Text messaging and picture taking continue to top the list of ways that Americans use their mobile phones—three quarters of all cell owners (73%) use their phones for each of these purposes. Other relatively common activities include sending photos or videos to others (54% of cell owners do this) as well as accessing the internet (44%).
Among cell phone owners, 42% own a smartphone. That translates into 35% of all adults. Several demographic groups have high levels of smartphone adoption, including the financially well-off and well-educated, non-whites, and those under the age of 45.
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New report: Search and email still top the list of most popular online activities
Search and email remain the two online activities that are nearly universal among adult internet users, as 92% of online adults use search engines to find information on the Web, and a similar number (92%) use email.
Since we began measuring adults’ online activities in the last decade, these two behaviors have consistently ranked as the most popular, even as new platforms, broadband and mobile devices continue to reshape the way Americans use the internet and web. Even as early as 2002, more than eight in ten online adults were using search engines, and more than nine in ten online adults were emailing.
Read the full report: http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2011/Search-and-email.aspx
New on the site: A quick guide to our new (and old) teens data resources. This short piece walks you through a decade of data on 12-17 year-olds with our brand-new teens trend charts, from a snapshot of teen internet user demographics to a closer look at teens’ online activities.
Note to data hounds: We’ve also got a new spreadsheet of teen tech activities since 2000 to complement our usual array of data sets in several formats. Start downloading!
Nielsen’s monthly analysis of 65,000 mobile lines shows that smartphone usage has grown from an average of 230 megabytes last year to 435 MB this past quarter. Heavy smartphone users, naturally, are driving the growth. Data usage for the top 10 percent of smartphone owners jumped by 109 percent, while the top 1 percent rose a massive 144 percent (from 1.8GB last year to 4.6GB).
Platform-wise, Nielsen notes that Android users typically consume more data (582MBs per month on average) compared to iPhone users (492MBs). Windows Phone 7 users have also doubled their mobile data usage in the last two quarters.
As the internet has increasingly gone mobile, laptop computers have grown in popularity. Since 2006, the proportion of Americans who own a desktop computer has fallen slightly from 68% to 59%, while the proportion with a laptop computer has increased dramatically—from 30% in April 2006 to 52% in September 2010.
18-29 year olds are currently the only major demographic group for whom laptops are notably more commonplace than desktop computers. Nearly three-quarters of 18-29 year olds (72%) own a laptop computer, compared with 56% who have a desktop computer.
Video: AARP/The Atlantic Technology Symposium
AARP recently sponsored a forum with The Atlantic on the future of technology—and how it will shape and be shaped by the Boomer generation.
People are not substituting technology for ‘real’ life, says Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project. If you’re social and successful in the analog world, that can carry over to the digital realm, and vice versa.
(Source: aarp.org)
Texting is the form of communication that has grown the most for teens during the last four years. The data show that between 2006 and 2009 the percent of teens who use texting to contact friends outside of school on a daily basis has gone from 27% to 54%. Face-to-face contact, instant messaging, mobile voice and social network messaging have remained flat during the same period, while use of email and the landline phone have decreased slightly. Read more…
Source: Teens and Mobile Phones, by Amanda Lenhart, Rich Ling, Scott Campbell, and Kristen Purcell (2010), based on Pew Internet September 2009 survey data
These are the tumblings of the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project (Pew Internet for short). We study how Americans use the internet and technology in their daily lives. You can browse our (free!) reports—and steal our data—at pewinternet.org.
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