Teenagers Desert The Internet, Study Finds

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December 02, 1999 (10:39 AM EST)

By Madeleine Acey,

LONDON -- U.S. teenagers are deserting the Web in droves, according to research by London's Brunel University.

Sociology professor Steve Woolgar, who heads the university's virtual society program, told the Westminster Media Forum here on Wednesday that preliminary findings from a major Internet study by Brunel had "discovered a significant category of former users."

"There is a substantial drop off by particular sections of society," Woolgar said. "Teenagers seem no longer to be using the Internet as they did."

He said it is a surprise finding and is categorized by the researchers as "interesting if true" at this early stage in the analysis of the findings.

Because of the preliminary nature of the data, Woolgar declined to give figures, but said the number of ex-users outweighs the number of current users.

And the reason?

"It's boredom with this new faddishness," he said.

He quoted a colleague on the situation: "They came, they surfed, they went back to the beach."

He added he is awaiting the outcome of local British research before coming to any firm conclusions.

London-based Internet usage research house Fletcher Research said the Brunel findings went totally against the trends it was seeing.

"Our findings categorically disagree with Brunel," a spokesman said.

The company's latest U.K. Internet User Monitor survey of 50,000 users, completed in October, found that although the under-18s only made up 5 percent of the U.K. population, they represented 9 percent of Britain's Internet users. In the 18 to 24 year-old age group, the figures were 11 percent of the population and 16 percent of the users, respectively.

The Fletcher study specifically found that teenagers "far prefer to surf the Web (69 percent), whereas all age groups over 18 tend to go online to search for specific information -- the older they are, the more this is so."