People who spend the most time online are in fact the most educated claims a recent report from Eurostat.
The study, that covered households containing at least one person aged 16-74 across Europe, shows that nearly 90 % of the EU population with high formal education used the internet regularly, more than twice as much as the share of the population with low formal education.
The figures remained similar irrelevant of age group although the relatively uneducated 16-24′s did seem the most active online in comparison with their older and younger counterparts.
There are clearly a number of possibilities as to why this might be the case. The most immediate being the IT education you receive at school plays a significant role in your desire (and confidence) to explore computers and the web. Additionally, if you’ve had little or no formal education, it’s highly likely you aren’t in financially able to own a computer or subscribe to Internet access – and therefore access to any form of Internet connect is limited.
The web clearly playing an increasingly more significant role in our daily lives, and it seems the importance of education, at least by these findings, is as important as ever.
It is really difficult to find a causal relationship here… In other words, it is hard to know if the more educated are more active or the more active are the more educated. And this is not the same… One implies that education has an impact on being active online. The other implies that being active online has an impact on education. The truth is, that there might be a double effect. Measuring how big that impact is from each side is the difficult part. Just a boring comment, sorry…
写的很不错，支持…
“People who spend the most time online are in fact the most educated”
I think it would be better if you phrased it ‘the most educated people are in fact people who spend the most time online’
in the previous sentence, it implies that people who spend most of their time online are the most educated one. well, it isn’t necessarily true i think.
just my 2 cents.
Isn’t this a bit obvious and called the digital divide?
Hmm..maybe :)
It would be nice to see some statistics for North America, or even Asia.
An extremely brief article relating to education, yet the author can’t edit it at all “it’s highly likely you aren’t in financially able to own a computer,” really now?
This proves that I’m not wasting my time online reading and writing endless amounts of information. I’m becoming a more educated individual.
Does porn count?
this probably rings true, as you would expect — most of us web superusers are ‘nerds’/'geeks’ from way back, are we not?
but the study is flawed from the get-go — their definition of ‘education’ is clearly too broad, there’s a world of difference between a 1-2yr computer science or arts dimploma and a 6-10yr medicine/law/engineering degree/doctorate.
certainly the relevance of the study has a bearing on these specifics, as with the type of internet ‘use’ (communication/research/media/porn).
It would be interesting in a few hundred years, to compare a countries Internet usage to the number of people it’s killed in wars.
Interesting article and very encouraging! I love to get online and read. I learn so much. The web definitely makes the world a smaller place. I not only learn from people from my own country, but others across the globe!
Katrina
DigitalChalk
I think the underscoring nature of this is the fact that those humans that are oriented toward learning in the social/professional arena are natural born info junkies and will seek it out as a matter of course. Its my foundation and the foundation of many other intellectuals and social geeks I know.
I dunno, one might also argue that even outside of the “IT Education” you mentioned, higher education sparks an interest in people to learn new things. Where better to do that than online? Just my $0.02