Surveying the Digital Future:  A Longitudinal International Study of the Individual and Social Effects of  PC/Internet Technology

(To download the 2008 Report - please follow the link)

Using a combination of well-accepted scientific survey methods and techniques for social science data analysis, the research team at the Center for the Digital Future is conducting a long-term longitudinal study on the impact over time of computers, the Internet and related technologies on families and society. Funded by the National Science Foundation and some of America's leading corporations, the Center's Internet Project is based at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and being conducted in Singapore, Italy, Sweden, Britain, Germany, France, Hungary, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, India, Iran, Chile, Argentina, Bolivia and a growing list of additional countries. The results from the first year of the project were released to nationwide acclaim in October 2000 and now the project is entering its seventh year.

The research team became interested in this project while doing extensive work over the past five years on television and its content. In 1998 television viewing by children under the age of 14 in the United States dropped for the first time in the 50-year history of television. For the very first time children found something more appealing than television: computers and the Internet. While television has had an unprecedented influence on American culture (witness the debate after the April 1999 Colorado school shootings), television has been primarily about entertainment and leisure. It is now becoming clear that computers and especially the Internet are producing effects comparable to television? on work, school and play.

Believing that the importance and influence of computer technology and the Internet will dwarf that of television, this is a project designed to do the important research that should have been conducted on television in the 1940s. The research plan calls for drawing a truly random and representative American sample comprising computer and Internet users and non-users as they are accounted for in the national population. Each year the project will conduct an extensive survey of these 2,000 households and then, using standard longitudinal methods for retention, watch as the non-users become users and as the users become more advanced and comfortable users. The study is based on the belief that the use of the Internet will continue to grow (though probably through wireless and television devices rather than through computers) until it reaches television-type levels of 98.3%.

This project will be able to determine why non-users do not participate and what their sense of the connected world is. Then we will learn what compels many of them to become users and how their already-established patterns of media use, child-rearing policies, economic and political behavior and other activities change. If penetration of the Internet into homes reaches 90%, the study will be able to determine who the 10% non-users are, why they remain non-users (economic or psychological issues) and how they do off-line what most of the nation is doing on-line. In short, this project will look at the hundreds of things that are likely to change and remain vigilant to examine the thousands of things that cannot be predicted to change. In addition to providing reliable information about who is on-line and how and why, the project will trace whether a situation of information haves and have-nots develops and the ways in which our social, political and economic lives are changing.

A major focus of the work is examining the ways in which technology is affecting current media use ranging from films in the theater, home video, television, radio, newspapers, magazines, books and video games. Great attention is paid to how Internet use may affect these media and the ways in which people use each for information and entertainment. Special attention is also paid to attitudes and behaviors regarding intellectual property, downloading and peer-to-peer networks to see the ways in which they are used, the frequency of use and the effectiveness of measures to protect IP.

The relationship between households and business is changing and those changes will be an important part of the study. Are consumers willing to purchase goods on-line? When they do so, does computer shopping make them become more conservative shoppers purchasing only what they came for, or do they spend more money? Can small retail stores compete with Internet business? What goods and services lend themselves to computer commerce (we know book sales do) and which goods and services will consumers be unlikely to buy on-line? What are the consequences of more and more shoppers purchasing on-line out of state where they do not presently (in most instances) pay sales tax? What are the implications of this information for the nation, businesses and the economy?

Knowing that this spread of technology is not merely an American phenomenon, the project began at its inception with partners in Singapore and Italy and has added more than 24 countries during the second, third and fourth years. The objective is to coordinate a truly international effort over the long term to understand how both industrialized and non-industrialized countries are affected by the use of information technology.