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DAVE GUSSOWOnline travel directions are highly rated, but the phone and the stereo beat e-mail and online music, a Pew survey finds.
The Internet has not conquered all. Not yet, anyway.
Sure, people shop online, but even a majority of the savviest Web users still do most of their shopping offline, according to a new survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project released Wednesday.
E-mail? People love it, but a majority use phones and other offline communications more often to stay in touch with family and friends.
The killer application of Internet horsepower for everyday activities: online maps and directions, the only task among 18 in the survey that people do online more than they do offline.
"Think of the whole Internet phenomenon as an evolving process," said Deborah Fallows, senior research fellow at Pew and author of the study. "The numbers are big and the numbers are growing."
Indeed, the Internet as a consumer frontier is only about 10 years old. Still, the survey, based on phone interviews of 2,013 adults by Princeton Survey Research Associates, shows that the Internet is playing an increasing role in how people do everyday tasks, and an overwhelming majority of Internet users think of the Net as a good place to get information.
It also indicates that traditions die hard. Digital music gets a lot of attention as an "in" category now, but the survey suggests that fewer than one in four users actually use the Net to listen to music or radio. Fallows said it's still just plain easier for people to turn on a stereo or car radio.
"Users turn to the Internet most when it offers advantages in speed, convenience, time and other measures of efficiency," the report says.
If there was a surprise in the findings, Fallows says, it was the overwhelming reliance on online maps. She said some people in the survey said they like Internet maps so much they will call a friend while driving and ask him or her to go online and get them directions.
While an earlier study suggested that spam is beginning to have an effect on people's use of e-mail, Fallows says there has been no research yet on whether this year's outbreak of spyware, viruses and other malicious code is affecting people's online habits.
However, the fact that increasing numbers of people are doing everyday activities online suggests it is not. "Even though people may have heard about bad things happening," Fallows said, "they're not taking it seriously enough or worrying about it seriously enough so that it's discouraging them from doing it."
Dave Gussow can be reached at gussow@sptimes.com or 727 771-4328.