Net Users Feel Strongly About Online Ties

About 43 percent of Internet users feel strongly about their online communities even going as far as comparing the value of their online world to their real-world communities. This was found by the sixth annual survey of the impact of the Internet conducted by the USC-Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future.

"More than a decade after the portals of the Worldwide Web opened to the public, we are now witnessing the true emergence of the Internet as the powerful personal and social phenomenon we knew it would become," said Jeffrey I. Cole, director of the USC-Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future.

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"The Internet has been a source of entertainment, information, and communication since the Web became available to the American public in 1994," said Cole. "However, in 2006 we are beginning to measure real growth and discover new directions for the Internet as a comprehensive tool that Americans are using to touch the world."

The project surveys more than 2,000 individuals across the United States, each year contacting the same households to explore how online technology affects the lives of Internet users and non-users. It also examines how changing technology, such as the shift from Internet access by modem to broadband, affects behavior.

The 2007 Digital Future Project found that Internet use is growing and evolving as an instrument for personal engagement — through blogs, personal Web sites, and online communities.

The Digital Future Project found that involvement in online communities leads to offline actions. More than one-fifth of online community members (20.3 percent) take actions offline at least once a year that are related to their online community. Participation in online communities leads to social activism. Almost two-thirds of online community members who participate in social causes through the Internet (64.9 percent) say they are involved in causes that were new to them when they began participating on the Internet. And more than 40 percent (43.7 percent) of online community members participate more in social activism since they started participating in online communities.

Internet users are finding growing numbers of online friends, as well as friends they first met online and then met in person. In 2006, Internet users report having met an average of 4.65 friends online whom they have never met in person. Internet users in 2006 report an average of 1.6 friends met in person whom they originally met online — more than double the number when the Digital Future Project began in 2000.

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