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Loading ...Memo to StatsCan: Internet use blurs personal/business lines
“An Internet user is someone who used the Internet from any location for personal non-business reasons in the 12 months preceding the survey. A home user is someone who reported using the Internet from home, for the same reasons.”
The above is taken from a set of definitions by Statistics Canada that were used in a report released this week on Canadian Internet use habits based on data collected last year. Unless there is a lot more information to which the public doesn’t have access, it is the last time in the report the distinction is really made. It doesn’t specify, for example, whether more people used the Internet at home or somewhere else (which would have told us something about the appetite for mobile Web experiences). It doesn’t highlight any ways in which home users are more predisposed to blogging, posting pictures, or whether “external” Internet users preferred to listen to music or watch movies. On the basis of what StatsCan released, the two definitions are meaningless. But then, so is the idea of segregating non-business Internet use anyway.
StatsCan preferred to emphasize a much more familiar story in its report – that there is a digital divide in Canada that determines who is getting online. Get ready for it: those with high incomes and education in more connected provinces show higher use of the Internet! Not that the government shouldn’t be taking greater steps to improving access to broadband (something they perhaps can attend to once they’re done getting rich off the wireless spectrum auction), but there are other areas where StatsCan could have probed a little deeper.
The agency’s definition of an “Internet user” sounds like someone sitting in an Internet café, but more likely these are the people who are actually at work, and the usage they describe to StatsCan reflects the “breaks” they take in between answering client’s e-mails and entering information into a SharePoint portal. There is no good reason to ignore this, and every reason to factor it into the report’s findings.
Take one of the charts provided near the end of the report. It offers a laundry list of what Canadians are doing when they’re surfing, and some of it suggested a more Web-savvy population than you might have previously supposed. There was researching health information or planning for travel, but I was intrigued by one labelled “window shopping.” Sixty per cent of Canadians said they do this on the Internet. Another 45 per cent said they actually order goods and services. But although some categories did better than others (only 32 per cent go online to look for a job – sorry Workoplis et al), what came after e-mail in the No. 2 spot was “general browsing for fun and leisure,” at 76 per cent. All the other categories could fit into general browsing for fun and leisure, which suggests to me that people are multi-tasking online – no doubt because they are doing at least some of that browsing in the midst of business-related activities, even if they are at home.
Everyone in the IT industry should realize by now that the commercial and corporate use of the Internet is blurring, and so should Statistics Canada. If we want to really understand how Canadians are behaving when they surf, we can’t pretend that it all happens outside of the 9 to 5, or that home use doesn’t combine business and pleasure. The habits of Canadians, and pretty much Internet users everywhere, are much more tightly integrated than that.
