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Surveying The Digital Future
A major study of how people use the internet for civic engagement shows intriguing results.
The Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School has released the results of the sixth year of its "Surveying the Digital Future" project. Six years of longitudinal research on use of broadband at home, the wireless Internet, on-line media, user-generated content and social networking.
Interesting findings include:
- 43 percent of Internet users who are members of online communities say that they feel as strongly about their virtual community as they do about their real-world communities.
- More than one-fifth of online community members (20.3 percent) take actions off-line at least once a year that are related to their online community.
- Almost two-thirds of online community members who participate in social causes through the Internet (64.9 percent) say they are involved in causes that were new to them when they began participating on the Internet. And more than 40 percent (43.7 percent) of online community members participate more in social activism since they started participating in online communities.
- In spite of the recent growth of online communication by political parties and candidates, the number of users who say the Internet can be used as a tool to gain political power declined.
