Taking a looking at the demographic of nations with higher on line populations. Seeing who is on line at the level of nations. Graphs made with gapminder.org graphing software. Not many surprises but still worth reflecting. It seems that people on line are rich, educated, old, single, happy and fat. But there are nations which are educated, single, fat and happy that don't have high on line participation. But no nations that are rich or old are not highly online. So its wealth and life expectancy which are the strongest predictors of participation on the Internet.
Rich. Nations with high Internet users tend to be richer, in fact wealth is the clearest predictor of Internet participation, far more so than social freedoms or democracy. |
Conclusion: not surprisingly Internet users are from richer nations. They marry later in life and date more when they are young, they live longer, are literate and are more prone than the global average to have issue with weight but less likely to be suicidal and therefore less depressed than most people in the world. The Internet seems to be a key part of the good things of life.
The data is pretty clear, people who have the Internet are better off than people who don't have it. In the first years of the Internet the media was full of stories of the dangers of the Internet, but likely the benefits for people are pretty strong.