Surveying the Digital Future: A Longitudinal International Study
of the Individual and Social Effects of PC/Internet Technology
The UCLA Center for Communication Policy will soon be releasing its ground-breaking project on the state of the Internet, “Surveying the Digital Future” and will explore the deeper social, political and economic implications of the findings.
This is the study that should have been conducted on television in the 1940s and will allow policy and business leaders as well as journalists, academics and parents to observe first-hand the effects of this revolutionary technology on users and non-users alike. Funded by the National Science Foundation, America Online, Microsoft, Disney, Sony, Verizon, Pacific Bell, Merrill Lynch, DirecTV, the Getty Trust and the National Cable Television Association, the Center’s Internet Project is based at UCLA and being conducted in Singapore, Italy, Sweden, Finland, Germany, France, Hungary, Australia, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and a growing list of additional countries.
Each year, beginning this October, the Center will release an annual picture of the ways in which technology is changing our lives by looking at non-users as they become users, early users as they become experienced users and the difficult question of who remains a non-user.
Why This Project Is Unique
Already the marketplace is filled with studies looking at the impact of the Internet, whether from a business, political or academic viewpoint. The UCLA project differs greatly from studies that have looked at issues of alienation or loneliness caused by technology or those that focus on a narrow, snapshot look at the American landscape. Our project, “Surveying the Digital Future,” is original and comprehensive in several important ways:
1. The UCLA study looks at social impacts as well as computer use. Most studies of technology or the Internet to this point have focused on who is on-line, for how long and what they do on-line. This is one of the first projects to explore the implications of this use of technology and to link it to attitudes and behaviors broader than “why do you use the computer.” (Understandably, most of this previous research has been conducted by marketing companies.) The UCLA study is one of the first projects that will track shifts in media use, economic behavior and political and social attitudes through the use of technology.
2. This study focuses equally on users and non-users of technology. Almost every other Internet study has focused on users of technology. The UCLA project will be one of the first studies to focus as well on non-users to determine a baseline of behaviors and attitudes. This project will watch households over time as they acquire technology and the ways in which their economic and social behavior change.
3. This is a longitudinal study specifically designed to produce year-to-year data. While studies of this kind have been conducted in other subjects, the UCLA project will be the most comprehensive to examine the impact of communications technology. The team will maintain a respondent group with as little replacement as possible to track the changes of technology as people acquire and then become familiar with this technology.
4. The UCLA project is an international study that will look at all regions of the world, using a base of approximately 40 overlapping questions. The research team will be able to examine whether the technology changes the industrialized world the same way in which it may affect poorer regions. The results of the work will genuinely represent an international picture of technological change. In its first year, the study focuses on one European country and one Asian country – Singapore and Italy – in addition to the United States, with increasing depth of countries surveyed in the second year when we add China, Japan, Australia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Sweden, Hungary, Germany and France. Another 12-15 countries are preparing for the third year.
5. This is a policy and business study designed to engage the decision-makers in government and industry who can create policy based on our findings. Our goal from the beginning is to enlist the support of 8-10 companies committed to looking at our results and interpreting them internally. Of course, we maintain total and absolute control over questions, methodology and all else. Our partners in this project include AOL, Microsoft, Disney, Sony, GTE, Pacific Bell, Merrill Lynch, DirecTV, NCTA and the National Science Foundation.
The UCLA study is truly an ambitious project designed to understand year-by-year how the Internet is generating enormous change that is transforming our world.
Using a combination of well-accepted scientific survey methods and techniques for social science data analysis, the research team will conduct a long-term longitudinal study on the impact over time of computers, the Internet and related technologies on families and society. The team is already working closely with comparable teams in Singapore and Italy and plans to add approximately 20 countries to the project over the next three years.
The research team became interested in this project while doing extensive work over the past four years on television and its content. In 1998 television viewing by children under the age of 14 in the United States dropped for the first time in the 50-year history of television. For the very first time children found something more appealing than television: computers and the Internet. While television has had an unprecedented influence on American culture (witness the debate after the April 1999 Colorado school shootings), television has been primarily about entertainment and leisure. It is now becoming clear that computers and especially the Internet are producing effects comparable to television’s on work, school and play.
Believing that the importance and influence of computer technology and the Internet will dwarf that of television, this is a project designed to do the important research that should have been conducted on television in the 1940s. The research plan calls for drawing a truly random and representative American sample comprising computer and Internet users and non-users as they are accounted for in the national population. Each year the project will conduct an extensive survey of these 2,000 households and then, using standard longitudinal methods for retention, watch as the non-users become users and as the users become more advanced and comfortable users. The study is based on the belief that the use of the Internet will continue to grow (though probably through wireless and television devices rather than through computers) until it reaches television-type levels of 98.3%.
This project will be able to determine why non-users do not participate and what their sense of the connected world is. Then we will learn what compels many of them to become users and how their already-established patterns of media use, child-rearing policies, economic and political behavior and other activities change. If penetration of the Internet into homes reaches 90%, the study will be able to determine who the 10% non-users are, why they remain non-users (economic or psychological issues) and how they do off-line what most of the nation is doing on-line. In short, this project will look at the hundreds of things that are likely to change and remain vigilant to examine the thousands of things that cannot be predicted to change. In addition to providing reliable information about who is on-line and how and why, the project will trace whether a situation of information haves and have-nots develops and the ways in which our social, political and economic lives are changing.
The relationship between households and business is changing and those changes will be an important part of the study. Are consumers willing to purchase goods on-line? When they do so, does computer shopping make them become more conservative shoppers purchasing only “what they came for” or do they spend more money? Can small retail stores compete with Internet business? What goods and services lend themselves to computer commerce (we know book sales do) and which goods and services will consumers be unlikely to buy on-line? What are the consequences of more and more shoppers purchasing on-line out of state where they do not presently (in most instances) pay sales tax? What are the implications of this information for the nation’s businesses and the economy?
Knowing that this spread of technology is not merely an American phenomenon, the project begins at its inception with partners in Singapore and Italy and plans to add approximately 20 countries for the second and third years. The objective is to coordinate a truly international effort over the long term to understand how both industrialized and non-industrialized countries are affected by the use of information technology.
The project is being undertaken by the UCLA Center for Communication Policy, which is based in the Anderson Graduate School of Management. The Center conducts and facilitates research, courses, seminars, working groups and conferences designed to have a major impact on policy at the local, national and international levels.