Predicting Our Digital Future Is Just Not Sport

Newcastle Herald

Monday August 4, 2008

Cheryl McGregor

AUSTRALIANS just don't take sport seriously. That's the conclusion I'd draw from the latest study of how we use the internet.

It's not, however, the verdict reached by the researchers who did it, the Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCi) at Swinburne University of Technology.

They've just produced the first Australian report to be part of the World Internet Project (WIP), making almost 27,000 phone calls not all timed to interrupt people making dinner to eventually come up with their survey sample of 1000.

The WIP is the first co-ordinated survey of world internet users, covering 25 countries and studying the same major areas worldwide in an attempt to predict the "digital future".

Its US originators, way back in 1999, thought the project would have "broad implications for government policymaking, corporate planning and social and cultural study".

In a way, too, it's making up for a missed opportunity: academics regularly regret the lack of such information from the late 1940s, when television began to spread and change the world (just think, where would we be now, eh, without TV-driven "pyjama cricket"?).

The most immediate practical problem the CCi survey highlights is the difference broadband connection makes to internet use.

Campaigners for speeding up the spread of broadband to rural Australia will be able to cite the finding that users on broadband generally spend more than five hours a week online, a volume reached by less than one-third of those on dial-up connections.

Of course, whether this is a good thing is arguable: do we, one of the most obese nations in the world, want our population to spend more time sitting at the computer?

Apparently, if we want a creative and happy population with strong social connections with family and friends, yes, we do.

The survey showed that a majority of Australians (52.1 per cent) feel the net has increased their contact with their family; even more (almost 62 per cent) say it has helped them contact friends more often.

Three-quarters of internet users check emails every day and less than 4 per cent never use email. Some 38 per cent of hobbyists say it has increased their contact with people with similar interests and 51 per cent say it has allowed them to share creative work.

Banking, booking tickets and buying online are the most popular activities, but the numbers who see the internet as very important for entertainment are almost equal to those who rely on television (15.8 per cent compared to 17.2 per cent).

We're a fairly honest group, though: slightly more than half (51.6 per cent) pay for music online. Almost half (48.2 per cent) wouldn't consider buying music or movies online not even legally. And 92 per cent of Australian internet users who buy their music get it from a bricks-and-mortar shop.

For politics online, we're sceptical. Majorities of both users and non-users disagreed with statements such as, "By using the internet people like you can have more power".

But a significant finding was that people who didn't use the internet didn't know whether it had any effect on politics. Asked whether it was important in political campaigns (and this was in the lead up to the recent federal election), 28.1 per cent of non-users said they didn't know. That, as the researchers said, "potentially undermine(s) these citizens' participation in the political process".

Still, most of us have some net contact. A group of Newcastle's recreational fishermen have just formed a fishing club online. Various faceless Novocastrian organisations want to be our Facebook "friends" when our postcodes show up in their search engines. Why bother studying a subject we all know about already?

Well, if you're trying to plan something worth millions of dollars, such as whether to build a new lecture theatre at the university, it's vital. Academics Erica McWilliam (Queensland Institute of Technology) and Norman Jackson (University of Surrey) have written a paper for The Australian Higher Education Supplement on how tertiary institutions are dealing with empty lecture halls, now that lectures are available online.

(Their answer is not, thankfully, to stop putting content online; they want to change the way the lecturers use the halls. Check it out at.apo.org.au, "No longer tuned in to master's voice".)

The net's pretty relevant if you take your sport seriously, too. After you've read all the papers, heard all the talkbacks and watched all the TV, you absolutely need to go online to see if there's anything you've missed. But, you know what? "Most people do not use the internet to check sports information (53.2 per cent)."

Honestly, cobbers: not using the internet for sports? It's un-Australian!

© 2008 Newcastle Herald

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