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.

internet use in Norway 2003

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.

2 thoughts on “what norwegians do online

  1. jill/txt » Trondheim talk

    […] ally we don’t just read, we want to write as well. A lot of our time online is spent seeking out other people who share our interests. Maybe you’re pregnant – you’ll search fo […]

  2. 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!

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