"Despite the hoopla surrounding the Web, interpersonal communication drives most peoples’ use of the Internet," says Professor Robert Kraut of Carnegie Mellon University.
The findings, which show the impact of new technology on personal lives, could have implications for groups as diverse as online retailers, engineers, and Internet policy makers.
The study, "Information and Communications: Alternative Uses of the Internet in Households," is written by Prof. Kraut, Tridas Mukhopadhyay, Janusz Sacaypula, Sara Kiesler, and William Scherlis, all affiliated with Carnegie Mellon University. The authors used operations research and other techniques to analyze their findings. They based their conclusion on research in which they tracked the behavior of 229 people during their first year online.
Friendship More Important Than Commerce
The study explores the Internet’s place in the home and asks whether family members treat the Internet primarily as a superhighway to information, products, and entertainment – or as a high-tech extension of the home telephone. The study shows that novice home users strongly favor social uses of the Internet.
"An important distinction between the Web and e-mail," explain the authors, "is that a Web site is typically crafted for a broad audience while an e-mail message is written to a particular reader. For this reason, the Web may be less important to people than e-mail…[Previous studies show that] when a new broadcast medium, like television, becomes available, people tend to reduce the amount of time they devote to older media, such as newspapers and movies, for acquiring similar content. By comparison, whenever interpersonal communication becomes easier or cheaper, people communicate more."
Participants in the study used e-mail in more Internet sessions and more consistently than they used the World Wide Web, and they used e-mail first in sessions where they used both. Participants used the Internet more after they had used e-mail heavily but they used the Internet less after they had used the Web heavily.
While participants’ use of both e-mail and the Web declined with time, the decline in Web usage was steeper. Those who used e-mail more than they used the Web were also more likely to continue using the Internet over the course of a year.
Specifically, the researchers examined 66,383 total Internet sessions for 229 people over the course of a year. Overall, participants strongly preferred using e-mail to the Web. They used e-mail in 44% of their sessions but used the Web in only 25%. Among sessions involving both services, participants accessed their e-mail before they accessed the Web 75% of the time.
Among the researchers results were the following:
- Teenagers used the Internet a great deal more than adults.
- Teenage boys used the Internet more than girls, with 60% of boys logged in at least once a week, compared to 54% of girls. Among adults, men also used the Internet more than women, with 51% of men logged in, as compared to 48% of women. Although females were lighter users of the Web, they were heavier users of email than males.
- Whites used the Internet more than minorities. In explanation, the researchers suggest that African-Americans participating in the study may have had fewer relatives and friends with Internet connections than their white counterparts.
- Participants tended to use the Internet more during weeks when other family members were using it.
- Participants reporting more computer skill during a pre-test were heavier users of the Internet throughout the trial.
The Data
The data analyzed in the study comes from HomeNet, a field trial of residential Internet use, in which a sample of 110 households (229 individuals) were given Internet access during 1995 and 1996 in exchange for their providing the authors with data on their use of the Internet. When these analyses were conducted, the participants had had access to the Internet for at least a year.
The participants were recruited through four high schools and four community development organizations in Pittsburgh. Each participating family was loaned a Macintosh computer with a 14.4kbps modem connected to a dedicate telephone line. Every interested family member was given a full Internet account. The computers had a turnkey system for access to the Internet and software for using electronic mail, newsgroups, the World Wide Web, chat rooms, and special HomeNet software.
"Information and Communications: Alternative Uses of the Internet in Households" appears in the current issue of Information Systems Research, an INFORMS publication.
The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS®) is an international scientific society with 12,000 members, including Nobel Prize laureates, dedicated to applying scientific methods to help improve decision-making, management, and operations. Members of INFORMS work in business, government, and academia. They are represented in fields as diverse as airlines, health care, law enforcement, the military, the stock market, and telecommunications. The INFORMS website is at http://www.informs.org.