Study: Teens shape the netscape

"[Teenagers] no longer care about 15 minutes of fame, but rather 15 megabytes of fame," said Jeffrey Cole, Director of the Annenberg School of Communication’s Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California.

In honor of USC’s 125th birthday weekend, Cole gave a speech entitled "The Impact of the Internet on Our Social, Political and Economic Fabric."

Cole shared his recently completed research study "Ten Years, Ten Trends," which monitored the Internet usage of 2,000 people over a period of five years. Cole said his findings suggest that the only major factor affecting Internet use is the user’s age.

The impact of the Internet comes mostly from teenagers, he said. Cole's study shows that 98 percent of teenagers go online and will continue to use the Internet for the rest of their lives.

"This generation of teenagers does not read newspapers and never will. They go online instead," he said.

His study also concluded that poverty is no longer a major factor in people not using the Internet and that 74 percent of Americans now have the Internet.

"Cost barriers have effectively disappeared as the Internet has become more affordable and accessible than ever before," Cole said. "The majority of the people not going online do not want to go online. These people simply see no use for it in their lives," he explained.

Cole said he sees the Internet as enabling users to scrutinize stories in the media closer than ever before. People no longer have to take stories at face value; they now have the resources to look deeper into issues and get a more complete picture of stories than newspapers and broadcast news previously allowed, he said.

Cole plans to speak at the Google Zeitgeist '05 in late October and at the Cyberspace 2005 conference at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic in November.