Evil Shoppers

More than 1-in-5 respondents in a national survey say they shopped in a store on Thanksgiving Day.

No turkey for you, heathens.

Fourteen percent said they shopped online on the holiday.  Two-thirds reported having a clue and doing no shopping that day.

Why am I going on about this?  First, because I just stumbled across the survey, which was conducted from Nov. 29 - Dec. 3.  Second, because I need to grade but I really don't want to -- thus this post.

Sixty-three percent say they did not use a mobile device while shopping.  The other numbers were:

• 14 percent said they used mobile devices to research products found in-store.
• 16 percent said they used them to compare prices
• 11 percent took pics or notes with their mobile device about products
• 19 percent used the phone as an actual phone (clearly not teenagers) and called people to ask about products they saw
• 7 percent were unsure. Not sure about what.

Comfort with Technology

Playing with technological toys to learn stuff apparently helps people become more engaged in public life, according to a new study, but one's comfort with technology makes all the difference.  Or as the report states:

Notably, individuals who report higher levels of comfort with mobile telephony and use it for information exchange tend to be more civically and politically engaged than those who report less comfort with the technology. 

Never mind the creative spelling of "civically" above (I can't think of another way to spell it, so I'd do what I always do when challenged like this -- write around the problem).  The point is, competence matters.  As the Journal of Communication research article uses a multiple regression to control for factors often associated with civic engagement.  The ultimate point?  Mobile media matter, but those mostly for those comfortable with the technology, which raises the question of a competence-based digital divide.


abstract | full study

MyFaceTube Politics

Perhaps I blogged about this study before, but it deserves mention again as we see new orgs move more and more to integrating Facebook and other social networking sites into their content.

This study (abstract here, pdf here) is based on a survey of 3,500 young adults (ages 18 to 24) and finds little or no influence by social networking sites on political knowledge (see especially Table 4).  Now this controls for a bunch of other media exposure items, so I'm not terribly surprised there was little variance left for social networking to explain.  Still, it tells us a little something about what social networking does not do.

I also found the factor analysis interesting.  For the uninitiated, a factor analysis lumps together similar responses to a variety of survey questions.  Here, the two social media items fall together nicely and are distinctly separate from other media (see Table 2), from late-night comedy shows to traditional news shows, sites, and publications.  And, separate from mobile media like smart phones.  

Oh yeah, and it's a great study because it cites me.

The Mobile Web

Lots of folks have cell phones, but relatively few use them to access the web, according to a new study reported on here (but see also here).

Of cellphone owners, the majority (66%) send or receive text messages, and more than half send or receive photos. But only 28% currently access Web pages, and 20% download apps to their cellphones. (Time frame: Oct.-Nov. 2009.)

No surprise: It's a generational thing. Of cellphone owners ages 18-29, 48% use the mobile Web and 94% use text messages. Of those 50-64, just 15% use the mobile Web and 51% use text messages.

Lots of room for growth, which in terms of media expansion and potential to inform and entertain people, that's where it'll be happening for the next several years.