While internet users in the 15 to 35 age range still dominate most online activity, their older counterparts are quickly catching pace with a shot at social networking, online video, and Internet classifieds sites, according to a Phew Internet and American Life project study released on Thursday, December 16.
However, the younger folks, known as millennials, are more likely than older internet users to engage in social networking, instant messaging, online games, online music streaming, online classifieds, online virtual worlds, and reading blogs, while older users are not so far behind, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
Some online activities are evenly popular across all age groups, such as e-mail, search engine use, searching for health information online, e-commerce, downloading podcasts, making donations, and getting news.
The 34 to 45 age range, also dubbed Generation X, are more likely than millennials to do things like visit government Web sites and get financial information online.
But while millennials are in charge of social-networking activity, the fastest growth on these sites has come from those 74 and older; from 4 percent in 2008 to 16 percent in 2010.
Very few activities have declined except blogging. The number of teenagers who write on a blog has dropped by half since 2006, which Pew linked to the growing popularity of social-networking sites.
“At the same time, however, the popularity of blogging has risen among most older generations, and as a result the rate of blogging for all online adults rose slightly in overall from 11 percent in late 2008 to 14 percent in 2010,” Pew said. “Yet while the act formally known as blogging seems to have peaked, Internet users are doing blog-like things in other online spaces as they post updates about their lives, musings about the world, jokes, and links on social networking sites and micro-blogging sites such as Twitter.”
