Pew Internet provides lots of data on how Americans use the internet, but there aren’t a lot of statistics online about Norwegian conditions. Most of the stats at Statistics Norway are about access and speeds and employment and technical details, and I can’t find much on what people do online. SSB: Norsk mediebarometer does present some statistics, and I found this table in the PDF you can download from their summary.
Social activities or participating in communities doesn’t seem to have been an option in the questionaire. A pity, because according to Pew, 84% of Americans say they’ve “used the Internet to contact or get information from a group”. I suppose group could mean many things, but knowing that 56% of the people who’d contacted a group online say they “joined an online group after they began communicating with it over the Internet”, I think we can safely assume we’re talking about communities. It would be very interesting to know whether Norwegians use the web similarly.
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Marika
I agree, but I am interested in online communication in general. You can’t read much out of the figures presented about patterns for using the Internet to communicate. As the table also illustrates, questions concerning e-mail communication weren’t included before this edition of the media barometer. I do hope they will include more questions next year not only on e-mail use, but on other forms of online synchronous and asynchronous communication. Would be very relevant for my own PhD-project 🙂 Then again, this annual survey on media usage among Norwegians have certainly developed and increased in scope since 1995!