Going mainstream and going there fast -- that's the picture of today's Internet population according to research released Thursday.
The percentage of the US population online nearly tripled over the past three years, jumping from 14 percent in 1995 to 41 percent in 1998, according to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.
Along the way, Web surfers shifted their attention from technology news to weather and entertainment. They also shopped online more and began using email less as a tool for work and more as a regular feature of life.
Pew canvassed 3,184 adults for the study in November 1998. The research followed up on the group's earlier efforts to understand the media phenomenon that has so dramatically changed American life.
While the assertion that the Internet is growing is hardly news, the survey does provide insight into the composition and habits of the vast number of Net newbies born in the past year.
For instance, those who came to the Net last year were almost twice as likely to never have attended college than experienced users. And new users were less wealthy, with 23 percent reporting income under US$30,000 annually, compared with 16 percent for longtime users.
"This growth in the online population is changing the way Americans use the Internet," the Pew researchers said. "New Internet users go online less often than those who started using the Internet more than a year ago... [and] when they do, it's typically for fun, not for work or research."
The survey also confirmed what online retailers found to be true this past Christmas season: Web-based purchasing is on the rise, with 32 percent of online users saying they click to buy. By contrast, during the Web's infancy in 1995, only 8 percent of online users reported ever having shopped online.
News has always proven a big draw for Internet users, but the researchers said that the flavor of news being sought online does appear to be shifting. Two years ago, 47 percent of users went online to check the weather; now, it's 67 percent. Meanwhile, technology and business news, once the dominant interest, has been flat at about 60 percent of users.
Finally, the survey put the kibosh on the myth that the rise of the Internet has left Americans trembling under the weight of an information overload.
"Fully 62 percent of Americans say they like having so much information to choose from, compared with only 28 percent who say they feel overloaded," the survey found. "These numbers are virtually unchanged from 1995 when 64 percent liked all the options and 23 percent felt overloaded."
