New Survey of Elders’ Online Usage

[EDITORIAL NOTE: This evening on ABC-TV's World News with Charles Gibson, a story about "innovative retirement" will feature elderblogger Millie Garfield of My Mom's Blog. The program usually airs at 6:30PM on the coasts and 5:30PM Central Time, but check your local listings to be sure.]

The eighth annual survey by the Center for the Digital Future of trends in internet usage was published a couple of weeks ago and according to findings released in conjunction with AARP, Americans aged 50-plus are doing a lot more than dabbling in the internet these days and in some activities, they match their younger counterparts: Examples:

Online Games: play daily
Under age 50 – 22%
Over age 50 – 18%

Shopping: browse in stores, buy online
Under age 50 – 72%
Over age 50 – 68%

Important to Maintaining Social Relationships
Under age 50 – 46%
Over age 70- 46%

In the third dataset, you may be asking yourself where people between the ages of 50 and 70 went. Good question. Unknowable – at least to the budgetarily challenged.

The Center for the Digital Future, administered at the University of Southern California by the Annenberg School for Communication, releases only selected information. The entire study is available for a price: $500 for individuals, so you won’t be getting answers from me.

Obviously, AARP made a deal of some sort with the Center to publish limited data relating to elders. But making a comparison with a 20-year gap in age groups - particularly crucial middle years - isn’t useful, or valid in determining how elders use the internet compared to others.

It gets worse. In all the rest of the findings published by AARP, people 50 and older are compared only to people age 16 (the lowest end of the 2000 respondents in the survey age range) to 19 - two groups known to have interests as widely differing as their ages.

The Center for the Digital Future may have withheld their data on people in the absent 30-year age bracket, or AARP may have chosen not to publish it. There is no way to know since no mention is made of the discrepancy. Either way, from the information given, it is impossible to form conclusions on this important survey of age-comparative internet usage.

Nevertheless, here are some other findings which at least give us percentages of people older than 50 who participate in certain internet acitivities:

Internet as News Source: at least once a day
Under age 20 – 18%
Over age 50 – 42%

Important Source of Information
Under age 20 – 85%
Over age 50 – 76%

(The percentage of people over 50 who say the internet is an important source of information grew by 51 percent over five years, 2002-2007.)

Participation in Online Communities: at least once a day
Under age 20 – 47%
Over age 50 – 58%

Social Activism – increased since joining communities for social causes
Under age 20 - 29%
Over age 50 – 36%

Online Communities Important to Them
Under age 20 – 68%
Over age 50 – 70%

You can find out more from the AARP information here. Some additional data about other kinds of online usage is contained in this release from the Center for the Digital Future (pdf).

[At The Elder Storytelling Place today, Robert Lamb gives us an enigmatic tale titled Black Coffee.]