When we strip away all the shiny, smiley-faced rhetoric about the Internet and get down to the hard, empirical facts about Net usage, almost all of what we know is driven by the market intelligence requirements of large advertisers and Web site producers. We routinely hear questions such as: How many women are on the Net during the workday? How many college-educated 18- to 34-year-olds are we getting at our lifestyle site? How many of our site’s visitors are buying our products?
These questions are necessary if the economic turbines of the Net are to keep humming along at hyperspeed. But they are not, in the greater scheme of things, the truly important questions we need to be asking about this wired life.
By my count it’s been roughly five years since the mass migration to the digital world began in earnest–a human tide of some hundred million souls at the very least. And yet most of the studies that have been done fail to grasp one overarching truth: It’s not about the box. It’s about the way we live.
Now, at long last, it looks as if we’re going to have a serious, scholarly and comprehensive look at what the Net is doing to the way we live. This past week, UCLA announced an ongoing study to document large-scale changes that have been brought on by the advent of the Net–shifts in everything from consumer behavior and politics to family and community life. The fact that the study is underwritten by Microsoft, America Online, Disney, Sony, GTE and Pacific Bell is telling. Some of the largest names in the Net business have set their bitter rivalries aside long enough to get behind basic research–work that’s needed to ensure the long-term vitality of the entire Net community.
The study, to be conducted by UCLA’s Center for Communication Policy in conjunction with universities in Singapore and Italy, represents a significant milestone for the study of digital culture: It will look at how individYuals behave both on-line and off. It will look at how behavior and attitudes toward technology change from year to year and over a span of many years. And it’s designed to eventually be global, with at least 15 additional nations signing on in three to five years.
The principal investigator for the U.S. segment of the study is Jeff Cole, director of the Center for Communication Policy (www.ccp.ucla.edu). “About two years ago, I noticed something unprecedented–overall (television) viewing by kids under 14 was going down,” Cole said in a phone call last week. “I didn’t have hard evidence to prove the Net was the cause, but when you talk to parents, you get a clear indication that that’s what’s changed. Television is about leisure. This, on the other hand, is about everything–work, school and play. There’s nothing about life that the Net won’t change.
UCLA’s segment of the project, which is budgeted at approximately $800,000 per year, will track 2,000 demographically representative U.S. households.
Cole acknowledges his inquiry is absurdly ambitious. “Everyone understands this is a daunting task, but better to do it now than 10 years from now, right? Unless something goes terribly wrong, we’re in this for the long haul–a generation at least. If we’d done this with television in ’48 we’d probably still be doing it.”