- The number of Americans using the internet for news and information has grown nine- or tenfold in the last ten years. 21 mill. haev used political videos (Feb 2007), 75 million used the internet in connection witht he political campaign of 2004.
- Composition of political online population has changed radically – was white, young, male, urban, well-educated; now (in 2006) gender parity, median age grown (1996: 33, in 2006: 39, which is close to the voting population), minorites has double.
- growth in number who say the internet is their primary source or a crucial source for political information.
- Spread of broadband underbuilds this; a third of the growth of use of internet for politics explained by broadband access. New cohort – broadband users under the age of 35 are just as likely to cite hte internet as television 1as television, and the internet is more important than newspapers.
- Convenience important, but also more information available, access to more voices, more in depth information, can contribute information of their own.
- Highly forensic quality to the kinds of searches they’re doing. They like immediacy, check out sources, like the transparency.
- Half of people using internet for political sources say an important reason is they get access to other voices: comedy sites (YouTube, Jon Stewart, The Onion, Colbert), blogs, mailing lists, candidates websites –> a new understnading of what constitutes news. In early years: local perspectives that weren’t available in local media were important. However people talk less about this now. Pew doesn’t know why this is.
- Political videos are incredibly important now as political information. Brand new information (not previously released) 15% of internet population has already accessed political videos, every indication that this number will grow.
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[…] siste nytt om nettets politiske rolle i USA ved Lee Rainie fra Pew Internet Research. […]
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[…] Last night one of my best conversations was after I left the conference, beat. I walked out the door at the same time as Dan Newman of MAPlight.org, a website that gives people access to information about representatives in congress, showing how much money they were given by which organisations and lobby groups and how they voted on different bills: “Money and politics: illuminating the connection”. Using the internet to make information available and to make it easier to see connections seems like a wonderful way to use it, and a very interesting way of making an argument that is about transparency and showing the data rather than persuasion. It also fits what Lee Rainie from Pew called the forensic way we’re reading these ways. […]