By Nigel Thorpe
Chief of the English Copy Desk
Albawaba.com - Amman
The question “What’s the use of the Internet?” has joined the ranks of Christmas cracker riddles. Surprising answers to this deceptively simple Internet riddle emerged from a month-long survey over the Christmas shopping season of nearly three and a half thousand adult Americans conducted by the Washington-based research organization the “Pew Internet and American Life Project”. The survey suggests that the Internet is a place to lose, rather than buy your shirt. The Internet also emerges as the ‘in place’ to browse, talk and send greetings on line.
In the pre-NASDAQ crash days, Internet investors flocked in droves to the virtual El Dorado that floated tantalizingly somewhere out there in cyberspace. At the time, CNN commercial gurus confidently predictioned that the volume of American e-commerce would double every year. Sales figures for Christmas 2000 have, sadly, proved otherwise. Although, as vividly expressed by John Schwartz in his recent internet article, “estimates of Internet sales are often barely more precise than the ancient method of forecasting sales by analyzing goat entrails,” the consumer research company BizRate.com estimated that sales rose more than 55 percent over the previous year's holiday season - far below the doubling of sales that many online merchants were counting on.” The interesting question to ask is why the growth of online shopping by “the expanding population of Internet users” has been so slow?
John Horrigan, the main author of The Pew Internet Survey, provides “twelve basic insights into holiday buying experience on line.” The survey, for example, discovered that 85% of the people believe that the virtual Internet world denied them the chance to see, smell and feel the product ‘first hand’. Concerns about the security of sending credit card and other personal information over the Internet were cited by 79 percent of the Internet users surveyed. Fifty percent of the uses sampled also feared that, based on previous reports and experience, presents they purchased online would not arrive in time for Christmas. An ominous omen for the dot-coms, is that 22 percent of Internet users said they had shopped online last year during the holidays but did not do so this year. The Pew researchers found that the majority of these "click-offs" were among the Net's most well-heeled, well-educated users. Over half of the users also believed that they could find better prices and choices in the real, non-virtual world.
The practicalities of e-commerce were not, however, the only factors inhibiting potential online shoppers. The researchers concluded that "while most analysts and commentators anxiously charted the daily ups and downs of the online retail sector during this season, the bigger story about the Internet during the holidays was a social one." The report suggests that one important reason why people reject e-commerce is that it lacks social contact. In the words of Joseph G. Turow, professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication, "the real element that's missing from shopping online is the social interaction and the fun. Malls sell a social activity."
The reports final depressing conclusion was that only 24 percent of Internet users actually bought gifts online. 45 percent, however, said they looked for gift ideas online while 32 percent used the Web to compare prices during the holiday period.
The only silver lining to the black dot.com clouds proved to be the “noncommercial areas” of e-communications and e-information. The report found that obtaining holiday information, researching ideas for celebrations and sending e-mails (53 percent) and e-greetings (32 percent) to friends drowned the commercial hype of internet sales. The e-greeting cards were particularly popular with both the young, and the Hispanic Internet users.
Perhaps, as suggested by Harrison M. Rainie, director of the Pew project, the findings simplify reflect something that we already know about life. “Yes,” he says,” buying things is a relatively small proportion of what's going on online. But it's a small proportion of what's going on in real life, too. Communication always takes place with greater frequency than transactions." More people certainly read riddles than buy the crackers or cookies in which they tantalizingly lurk .
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
