Is the online world as important to internet users as the real world?

The University of Southern California's Center for the Digital Future certainly thinks so.

The findings of their 2007 Digital Future Project about online communities, and internet usage of 12-24 year olds in particular, showed that 43 percent of Internet users who are members of online communities say that they "feel as strongly" about their virtual community as they do about their real-world communities.

You can download the pdf press release that gives these and other highlights of the study at http://www.digitalcenter.org/pdf/2007-Digital-Future-Report-Press-Release-112906.pdf

Other eye-catching stats from 12-24 year olds that should have every communicator scratching their heads include:

* E-mail is for parents, they only use Instant Messenger
* Everything will move to mobile
* Want to move content freely from platform to platform with no restrictions
* Trust unknown peers more than experts
* Will never own a land-line phone
* Will not watch television on someone else's schedule much longer
* Have little interest in the source of information
* Will never read a newspaper but attracted to some magazines

Clearly, this has many implications for how messages can and will be disseminated in the future. And the channels favoured by communicators are unlikely to be those that resonate with those entering the workforce. Dr. Carole Kinsey Goman discusses the Generation Y implications for communicators in Melcrum's report 'Mastering Audience Segmentation'. You can download the free exec summary without logging in.

And lastly, perhaps for the first time, the percentage of women going online was higher than the number of men. So online communities can no longer be dismissed as the domain of geeks...

Robin Crumby.