Latin American Internet Activities

Cybermannia, Internet Center, Guatemala City, Guatemala (photo credit: N. Thomas)

The Internet is a means by which people can gain access to a bundle of services: the World Wide Web, e-mail, IRC, news groups, list groups, file transfers, gopher, etc.  Within each of these services, there are different products.  Thus, within the World Wide Web, there are millions of web sites offering all types of contents.  Since an Internet user does not have the time to access all these services and content, they must necessarily make choices.  Their decisions reflect their personal preferences and needs.

The purpose of this note is to examine some survey data about Internet usage patterns.  The data come from the Los Medios y Mercados de Latinoamérica 1998 study, which is a survey of over 6,500 respondents in 18 Latin American countries.  In this study, the Internet users were shown a list of 10 Internet activities and asked which ones they have done in the past 30 days.  Of course, this short list is not exhaustive by any means.  The incidences are shown among persons who have accessed the Internet in the last 30 days in the following table:

Internet Activities Made by Persons 12-64 Who Accessed the Internet in Last 30 Days

(source: Los Medios y Mercados de Latinoamérica 1998)

As we stated, our purpose here is to detect patterns of usage.  We took the Internet usage data for all those people who accessed the Internet in the last 30 days and we applied a segmentation method called K-means clustering.  This allows us to detect certain patterns whereby some groups of people consistently choose some subsets of activities.  The number of clusters must be determined on the basis of interpretability of the results.  For this data set, we created four different segments (or clusters).  These are mutually exclusive and exhaustive subgroups of persons who accessed the Internet in the last 30 days.  In the following table, we show the activities made separately by people in these clusters.  The separation of the groups should be clear from this table (for example, Cluster 4 is much more likely than the others to visit news/chat groups).

Internet Activities in Last 30 Days by Four Internet Usage Segments

(source: Los Medios y Mercados de Latinoamérica 1998)

Who are these people?  In the next table, we show the age, sex, education and socio-economic characteristics for the people in these clusters.

Demographic Characteristics of Internet Usage Segments

(source: Los Medios y Mercados de Latinoamérica 1998)

More important that demographic characteristics, we are interested in what type of Internet users they are.  In the following table, we show where and how often they access the Internet.  Please note that a person can access the Internet from more than one place.

Internet Usage Characteristics of Internet Usage Segments

(source: Los Medios y Mercados de Latinoamérica 1998)

We can now provide a summary of these Internet usage segments:

• Cluster 1: These are infrequent users who access the Internet for informational purposes.
• Cluster 2: These are the heavy business users who access the Internet from their offices for business-related information.
• Cluster 3: These are the affluent home users who visit the Internet for information and entertainment.  They are the heaviest users of the Internet and they are the most likely shoppers.
• Cluster 4: More than half of this group are affluent teenage students, who visit news/chat groups from their homes.

PRINT REFERENCES

• Jayne Gackenbach (eds.)  (1999).  Psychology and the Internet: Intrapersonal, Interpersonal, and Transpersonal Implications.  Academic Press: New York.
• Sherry Turkle (1997)  Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet.  Touchstone Books: New York.
• Patricia Wallace (1999)  The Psychology of the Internet.  Cambridge University Press: New York.

(posted by Roland Soong on 12/18/99)

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