visitors to www.ciolek.com since 08 May 1997.
Document created: 9 Mar 1998. Last revised: 4 Sep 2004
The WWW took the world by storm and within a few months, it became the widest known, used and talked-about technology for fast, elegant and simple provision and reception of large volumes of coherently structured online information. This WWW explosion (from less than 1,000 Web servers in January 1994 to over 6,000,000 in March 1998) [and over 46,000,000 in early 2004, see http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/. tmc, 04 Sep04] has made a major impact world wide on research and tertiary education organizations. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the number of people connected to the Internet, the range of its uses as well as the amount of time being spent on browsing the Net have grown dramatically over the last 3 or 4 years.
However, despite several large-scale of Internet surveys (GVU 1997) precise details of these trends remain unknown. This research note aims to redress the situation.
asia-www-monitor@coombs.anu.edu.au - 566 subscribers central-asia-studies-l@coombs.anu.edu.au - 300 subscribers tibetan-studies-l@coombs.anu.edu.au - 279 subscribers pacific-islands-l@coombs.anu.edu.au - 286 subscribers asiandoc@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu - 110 subscribers south-asia-studies-l@coombs.anu.edu.au - 87 subscribers asia-vl@coombs.anu.edu.au - 39 subscribersAllowing for a 10% overlap between memberships of these electronic agoras an estimated total of 1590 individuals were approached with the survey. During a two week period 20 Feb - 6 Mar 1998 a total 280 valid responses were received which sugests a 17.6% response rate. These 280 self-selected responses came from 38 countries (see Table 1), including 53 replies from persons resident in Australia. [1]
TABLE 1
Respondents' country of residence
Country Frequency Percent
-----------------------------------------------
US 108 38.7
Australia 53 19.0
Canada 12 4.3
Germany 12 4.3
UK 12 4.3
Japan 10 3.6
NZ 7 2.5
Netherlands 7 2.5
Israel 5 1.8
France 4 1.4
Malaysia 4 1.4
Singapore 4 1.4
Denmark 3 1.1
HK 3 1.1
Italy 3 1.1
Norway 3 1.1
Spain 3 1.1
Switzerland 3 1.1
China 2 .7
Indonesia 2 .7
Russia 2 .7
Austria 1 .4
Bahamas 1 .4
Belgium 1 .4
Cayman Isl. 1 .4
Fiji 1 .4
Finland 1 .4
Greece 1 .4
India 1 .4
Mexico 1 .4
Palestine 1 .4
Philippines 1 .4
Poland 1 .4
Portugal 1 .4
S.Korea 1 .4
Sweden 1 .4
Taiwan 1 .4
Thailand 1 .4
Missing data 1 Missing
-----------------------------------------------
Total 280 100.0
TABLE 2
Respondents' Employment
Place of work Frequency Percent
-----------------------------------------------
Government 14 5.0
Research 86 30.7
Education 109 38.9
Business 36 12.9
NGO/Not For Profit 16 5.7
Other 19 6.8
-----------------------------------------------
Total 280 100.0
TABLE 3
Years of Experience with Internet
Years Frequency Percent
-----------------------------------------------
1-3 118 42.4
4-6 120 43.2
7-9 24 8.6
10+ 16 5.8
Missing data 2 Missing
-----------------------------------------------
Total 280 100.0
Range: 1-25 years of experience with the Internet [2]
Average: 3.9 years of experience with the Internet
These data suggest that participants in this survey have much
longer experience with the Internet that did respondents in the
Oct-Nov 1997 Survey (GVU 1997) where 10,108 participants reported
that 74.7% of them had 1-3 years experience with the Net, 18.2% - 4-6
years, and 6.9% - 7 or more years.
TABLE 4
Hours per Week of Online Work in 1997
Hours Frequency Percent
-----------------------------------------------
5 and less 27 9.7
6-10 32 11.6
11-15 38 13.7
16-20 39 14.1
21-25 24 8.7
26-30 10 3.6
31-35 14 5.1
36-40 9 3.2
41-45 2 .7
46-50 6 2.2
over 50 13 4.7
Unspecified no of hrs 63 22.7
Missing data 3 Missing
-----------------------------------------------
Total 280 100.0
Range: 1-95 hours of online work per week (0.1-13.6 hrs/day) [3]
Average: 19.7 hrs of online work per week
The collected data indicate that in 1997 people working predominantly in
research and tertiary education environments (with a bulk of
them likely to be concerned with Asian and Pacific studies) have
on average 4 years of experience with the Internet and that every week
they work about 20 hours (or 4 hours each workday) on the Net.
Moreover, as the Table 5 shows, there is a positive and
statistically significant (Chi square=4.47855 df=1
significance=.03432) correlation between the length of
experience with the Internet and the total numbers of hours a
person is likely to stay online.
TABLE 5
Length of experience with the
Internet and no of hours spent working online
YEARS SPENT ON INTERNET
Row
| 1-4 | 5+ | Total
------+------+------+
1-20 | 90| 45| 135
ONLINE WORK | | | 63.7%
HRS/WEEK +------+------+
21+ | 40| 37| 77
| | | 36.3%
+------+------+
Column 130 82 212
Total 61.3% 38.7% 100.0%
In other words, as people gain experience with the use of the network, they also
tend to increase the amount of time spent working with it.
These data are in line with the results of the Oct-Nov 1997 Survey
(GVU 1997) where 10,108 participants reported that 85% of them was
using the Internet daily and that the seasoned users (3 yrs +) are much
more likely to use the Net daily (94%) than novice (0-1 year) users
(78%).
Activities on the Net are twofold: (1) traversing the system and making use of its various information resources; (2) active research and construction work aimed at provision of networked information resources.
Not surprisingly, construction work was less common (and less time-intensive) of the two. This point is illustrated by Tables 6 & 7.
TABLE 6
Percent of Respondents and Average Number Hours/Week
Spent in 1997 Using Internet Resources
---------------------------------------------------------------
E-mail 92.0 %* 2.6 hrs/week** 2.8 hrs/week***
News 83.0 1.6 1.9
Mailing lists 74.9 1.5 2.0
Data bases 73.0 1.3 1.7
Archives 70.8 1.1 1.6
Internet guides 69.7 1.0 1.4
E-publications 67.0 1.2 1.8
Corporate pages 64.7 1.0 1.5
Administration 63.0 1.0 1.6
Personal pages 59.1 1.0 1.7
Business 53.0 0.9 1.6
Internet studies 51.6 0.9 1.7
---------------------------------------------------------------
Total 279 respondents 15.1 hrs/week**
* percent of respondents using the resource
** average for all 279 respondents
*** average for those who were users
TABLE 7
Percent of Respondents and Average Number Hours/Week
Spent in 1997 Constructing/Maintaining Internet Resources
---------------------------------------------------------------
Personal pages 31.8 %* 0.7 hrs/week** 2.0 hrs/week***
Internet studies 28.3 0.5 1.7
Mailing lists 22.9 0.4 1.7
E-publications 21.5 0.5 2.1
Corporate pages 20.7 0.5 2.2
Administration 19.7 0.5 4.1
Archives 18.2 0.4 1.7
Internet guides 13.6 0.4 2.7
Data bases 10.7 0.4 3.3
News 8.6 0.2 2.2
Business 7.1 0.1 1.5
---------------------------------------------------------------
Total 279 respondents 4.6 hrs/week**
* percent of respondents building the resource
** average for all 279 respondents
*** average for those who were builders/maintainers
The data on construction of personal pages are congruent with the results of the Oct-Nov
1997 Survey (GVU 1997) where 10,108 participants reported that 46% of
them have created a web page and where was found that the percentage
of respondents creating web pages increases with the length of their
online experience.
In sum, if we assume a 45 hour working week, it appears that in 1997 an average respondent spent roughly:
Finally, as it was already noted in Table 5, all above proportions are prone to evolve in the coming years towards the increased length of time dedicated to the use and development of the Net.
These findings are, of course, preliminary. Certainly, a more ambitious questionnaire, distributed to a much wider and truly random universe of respondents would be more informative.
[2]
Data on the length of experience with the Internet include
experience with other networks [e.g. IBM's E- mail and mailing lists
network Bitnet (est.1981)]. The frequency distribution for the '10
years +' category is as follows: 10 yrs - 11 cases; 13 - 1; 14 - 1; 16
- 2, and finally 25 yrs - 1 case.
The first subsets of the future Internet were established under the
name ARPANet between 1969 and 1972, or more than 26 years ago (Leiner and
Cerf 1998), Tappendorf (1995).
[3]
The frequency distribution for the '50 hours +' category is as
follows: 52 hrs - 1 case; 55 - 1; 57 - 1; 60 - 1; 62 - 1; 63 -
1; 65 - 2; 76 - 1; 84 - 1; 87 - 1; 91 - 1, and finally 95 hrs - 1
case.
Some of the readers have commented that 95 hours of online work
per week (13.6 hrs/day) is an incredibly large number of hours. I
agree. However, it is also known that in France, in the late 1980s,
some of the Minitel users were found to have used the network for up
to 520 hours over a period of 1 month (or 17.3 hrs/day, 121.1 hrs/week), and the
longest Minitel session have lasted for 74 hours (3.1 days) non-stop
(Rheingold 1994:229).