Jeff Cole is director of the UCLA Center for Communications Policy and principal investigator for the World Internet Project, the leading long-term study of Internet use around the globe. At the February iMedia Brand Summit, Cole spoke with Upstream Group’s Doug Weaver about the soon-to-be-released results from the fourth year of the study. It was an energetic and thought-provoking session, and here is the first of a 3-part series that will let you listen in.
DW: [The World Internet Project] is to me the bible of where things really stand in terms of consumer adoption of medium, in terms of consumers really using digital tools and the Web and wireless and everything else to really change their lives… This is a long-term, longitudinal look at the effects of computer and Internet technology, not just on the media world but on all aspects of society. At the announcement of the project in June of 1999, Vice President Al Gore praised Jeff as a true visionary, providing the public with information on how to understand the impact of the media. Now I know that an Al Gore endorsement doesn’t go as far as it used to, say, four weeks ago, but it’s substantial nonetheless. Jeff has testified before Congress on television issues and has spoken at more than 200 conferences on communications issues, and he may be the only guy that I know of who’s worked closely with both the Clinton and George W. Bush White Houses on any topic, but he’s worked with both on media and telecommunications issues, including detailed briefings on the center’s work. So please join me in welcoming Jeff Cole.
JC: Thank you, Doug. It’s nice to be here in South Florida, one of the sacrifices I have to make.
DW: Yeah, it’s rough. It’s rough, getting out of those cold California temperatures.
So before we get started really talking about the issues… I’ve been a student of the UCLA Internet Report for a number of years, but I hope that you can share with the audience why this research is different and what it really stands for, and give us some context on the work that you’ve done.
JC: Sure. Let me tell you just for a minute where this work came from a little bit about how it’s organized, and I’ll tell you how I think it’s different from what other people are doing.
This work came out of a lot of work I was doing with the broadcast networks pretty intensely in the ‘90s on television content issues, and I discovered something in 1998 that really changed my thinking forever. I discovered something from the network research departments, which they still don’t acknowledge publicly, that beginning in 1998, television viewing among kids under the age of 14 began to decline for the first time in the history of television, and the explanation was singularly computers and the Internet.
In the world I grew up in, that’s a pretty important statement -- that kids finally were starting to watch less television, and in America, television is about leisure and entertainment. The Internet, potentially, like the printing press, has the ability to transform how we work, which it already has done, how we play, and perhaps most importantly long term, how we learn.
And the heart of what we do is based on something I was taught about television, which was that in the 1940s, we blew it where television was concerned. We knew that television was going to be an important mass medium, and what we should have done and didn’t do is track people before they had television and then gone back, year after year, to look at the same people and to see how their lives changed. How much sleep and exercise, where the time for television came from, consumer behavior, civic engagement, desire to travel, who they wanted to be when they grow up and a thousand other things.
So believing that the long-term impact of the Internet would be far more significant than television, four years ago we launched a study of the Internet that we think should have been conducted of television. We go into 2,000 households a year, talking to individuals. We talk to them in the household, but we’re interested in how they use the Internet and other technology at home, work, school, library, other people’s houses, anywhere they use it. And we go back to the same people year after year, and we track people as non-users become telephone modem users as modem users become broadband users as about 3 percent drop off every year. We’re able to track and see if they stay off or if they return, when they return, and more importantly, why, and we’re able to track individual users to see changes over the years. And we’re now doing this in 24 other countries. We run it at UCLA, but a month ago, we released our first 15-nation comparison.
And this is different in just a couple of key ways. It’s different first of all that it looks not just at what people do online, which is a key part, but we’re just as interested in what people do off line -- all their other media, how conventional television and print and radio and film use changes, and sleep patterns and exercise and socializing with family and friends.
It’s different than a lot of research, not all, in that we focus on non-users as much as users. We watch what happens to them as they become users, and it’s very international and very longitudinal.
DW: So four years into the project, talk to us in broad strokes about where you see Internet penetration today and where you see the real adoption of digital media.
JC: Where do we start? First of all, the meltdown notwithstanding, the Internet is as healthy as it’s ever been. I think it’s starting to become as healthy economically or more so than it’s ever been. We never saw any drop off in the use of the Internet, despite the fact that some talked about it being dead.
We see about 74 percent of Americans access the Internet at least once a month. 63 percent have connections at home. The average American is online about 11.8 hours a week. Broadband changes this considerably. I think we’ll get into broadband a little bit. We’re seeing it grow fastest in the populations that we were afraid were not going to get online since we’ve reached almost saturation or close to it with whites and Asians and younger people and college-educated high income.
We’re seeing the fastest growth among older people, among Latinos and African-Americans, among the less educated. It’s become an absolute regular part of American life. We find this is really a pretty compelling statistic: 64 percent of Americans check their e-mail at least once a day -- 64 percent of Americans online, which translates into over half of Americans. So this has become an activity now that literally half the country engages in every single day of their lives. About 14 percent check their e-mail at least once an hour.
So the Internet is healthy. It’s healthy and has always been healthy as far as people’s interest and use -- and we’ll look a little bit at some of that -- sometimes to the detriment of other media.
DW: One of these we talked about over breakfast this morning was ultimate PC penetration. You said that right now about 64 percent?
JC: 64 percent at home have access almost exclusively by PC. The US is still a third world country where wireless is concerned, and I wish that weren’t true, but if you compare how people use wireless in Europe or Asia, especially Korea -- so almost all Americans are accessing the Internet through PCs. We’re starting to see the rise of some on PDAs and in other places as well, but about 64 percent.
DW: What do you think the upper threshold for PC ownership and access to the Web at home is going to be?
JC: The work we do seems to indicate that PC ownership is probably pretty close to peaking. What we see, when we talk to people who drop off the Internet -- I said it averages about 3 percent a year. So you can’t generalize too much. It’s a pretty small number. But the major reason people are dropping off is they lose access to a PC or they’re not getting enough use that they want to go back and buy what three years ago was a $1,600 PC.
Of course, the price has dropped like a rock, but people are buying PCs who don’t need PCs. People are buying PCs just to surf the Web or to send e-mail, and there really is a need for some kind of inexpensive -- we’re starting to see it -- box that doesn’t have to be updated every two years. People online are demanding it.
So I don’t think the actual upward penetration of the PC is going to go much higher than it is. I think the upward penetration of the Internet, which right now is about 74 percent accessing at least once a month, will go up ultimately, but not for another 20 years, to over 95 percent. But that’s going to take the passage of a generation.
The best analogy we’ve seen are ATM cards, and bringing some of the same issues -- the obvious convenience of 24/7, of getting your money on your terms, also concerns about security. And if you talk to college students, the penetration rate for ATM cards is about 98 percent. If you talk to our parents, it’s under 40 percent. They’re just not comfortable doing it.
That’s going to take -- you know, I’ve never found a good phrase for this. If any of these experts in advertising and marketing have a good phrase -- it’s going to take the passage of the generations, or as people die off, although the word “die” is not a great word to use. But whatever it is…
DW: We call that market maturation.
JC: It’s going to take market maturation to really see Internet get above 95 percent, although we do see the fastest growing among the older. But eventually, I think the Internet will get up in the high 90s, but that’s a long time off.
DW: Now, the one piece of technology that hasn’t changed over the last ten years is the clock. There’s still 24 hours in a day, and I don’t know that we’re sleeping that much less than we used to. So the question for you is where is the time coming from, both in terms of the media landscape -- where are people finding the media time -- and also what is changing in people’s lives because they’re using online more and more?
JC: Where the time comes from is a question that was asked for television. 1960, when Americans were watching three hours of television a day and we were asked where those three hours came from, we didn’t know. We weren’t sure where we had grabbed them from, what we were doing less. So that was one of the things we wanted to look at from the beginning from the Internet.
We actually have some pretty good answers where the time comes from. It doesn’t seem to come from sleep. Internet users get about an hour less sleep over the course of a week. The difference is insignificant. We went into this, incidentally, looking at this stereotype that Internet users have red eyes because they’re up all night. They’re fatter because they’re sitting in front of computer screens. They’re less social. They can’t get a date, which is why they spend so much on the computer. They’re alienated, lonely, and depressed. Found literally none of that to be true. It may have been true among the first 5 percent who used the Internet back in the early ‘90s.
DW: Well, the red eyes and lack of sleep might apply to this crowd, but that’s just because of last night.
JC: But we found that actually Internet users are a little less alienated, a little less lonely and depressed, a little more social, exercise -- they’re still a little younger -- about a half-hour more per week...
Tomorrow: Cole gives a definitive answer to the question: Where is this increase in time spent online coming from? Surprisingly, it’s not just from TV.
