Pew study on Internet use by region
Aug 29th, 2003 by Jon Stahl
Gideon notes a recent study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
As you might expect, the Northwest (which Pew unfortunately defines as only Washington and Oregon) is one of the most wired regions in the country.
The thing that most jumped out at me was that we have a larger proportion of seniors online than anywhere else. This is good news for environmental groups with greying membership bases.
One counter-intuitive finding was that folks in the Northwest consume online news at a somewhat lower rate than folks elsewhere. “[A]lmost three-fifths (59%) of American Internet users have gotten news online, led by 64% of users in the Border States. However, in the Northwest, only 53% of users have done this, one of the smallest proportions of any region in the country (other regions that score low in this category are the Mountain States at 51% and the Upper Midwest at 55%).”
While I wonder whether 6% is a truly significant deviation from average, this is definitely interesting, as it also correlates with other findings that Northwesterners tend to engage in most web-related activities at lower-than-average rates. (We’re big email users, though.)
