NEWS

N.C. Internet use growing, but still mostly for the elite

By CARLENE HEMPEL and ANUPAMA REDDY
UNC-CH School of Journalism and Mass Communication

CHAPEL HILL – Traffic on the information highway is increasing in North Carolina.

The percentage of adults who said they had used the Internet in the previous seven days doubled between February 1996 and November 1997, according to the latest Carolina Poll. Their number rose from 14 percent to 29 percent in that period.

The survey was conducted Nov. 1-9 by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Journalism and Mass Communication and Institute for Research in Social Science. Part of the gain in Internet use could be due to changes in question wording, but the trend is clear, said Dr. Donald Shaw, a Kenan professor of journalism.

Despite its growth in North Carolina, the Internet is still used mainly by the young, the affluent and the well-educated. Forty-seven percent of state residents who earn $50,000 or more use the Internet, according to the poll, compared to only 29 percent of those earning at least $30,000 but less than $50,000. Among those earning less than $30,000, Internet use drops to 19 percent.

Internet use was about equally divided between home and work.

Other poll findings showed that Internet use increases dramatically with education level. For example, 22 percent of respondents with only a high school diploma had used the Internet in the previous seven days, compared with 37 percent of persons with two-year degrees and 51 percent of college graduates.

“I believe this proves that today, the Internet is a very elitist medium,” said Dr. Debashis Aikat, an assistant professor at the journalism school who studies communication technology and its impact on society. “It's only being used by the rich, who are getting richer with the information. It's ignored by the poorer parts of the population; it's not the medium of the masses.”

On-line users are most often younger and better educated for two reasons, Aikat believes: the Internet itself, while created in 1969, has only become a viable form of communication in the last five years; and the World Wide Web was developed, and is rooted, in universities.

“So it doesn't come as a surprise that the younger people are using the Internet,” he said.

Aikat said he was pleasantly surprised by increased use by women, according to the poll, although the numbers are still higher for men. Thirty-four percent of male respondents said they went on-line the previous week compared with 26 percent of women. But in 1995, only 20 percent of women said they used the Internet.

“It exposes the fact that more women are up on the Internet and breaks the myth that it's a man thing,” Aikat said.

Poll results on overall Internet use show an even more dramatic increase from three or four years ago, Aikat said, when only about 6 percent of people were going on-line for information. “This reflects that the Internet is emerging as a very significant medium,” he said, adding: “The Web has not been in the American mainstream for more than 1,500 days.”

The Carolina Poll is conducted at UNC-CH twice a year. Some questions are often repeated so that social change can be tracked, according to Paul McCreath, a doctoral student and field manager for this year's poll.

Internet use will join newspaper reading and TV news watching as behaviors to be tracked indefinitely so researchers can follow the state's changing news habits, said Shaw, director of the Center for Research in Journalism and Mass Communication, and Beverly Wiggins, associate director of research development for the Institute for Research in Social Science.

The November poll found that the Internet is less trusted than newspapers. Asked which they would believe if they read conflicting stories in the newspaper and on the Internet, users favored newspapers by 45 percent to 28. The rest considered it a toss-up.

The poll used random-digit dialing to reach 771 adults from across the state. Its error margin is plus or minus 3.6 percentage points. That means the probability is 95 percent that any given result varies by less than 3.6 percentage points from what would have been obtained if every phone in the state had been dialed. Error margins for subgroups are larger, however, depending on the size of the group.

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School of Journalism and Mass Communication contact: Philip E. Meyer, 919-962-4085

News Services contact: Laura J. Toler, 919-962-8589