Many studies have found an addictive quality to social media the cause teens to exhibit emotional withdrawal. As part of a well-publicized study, one teen who found himself separated from social media said that he “began to feel distress and despair.” Despair? Geez.

According to new information from the Pew Internet Project, young people are not the only ones who are finding the allure of social media too compelling to ignore.

Pew surveyed 2,277 adults over the course of one month and found that 65% of all adult internet users say they use a social networking site. Last year, that number was 61% in the same type of survey.

Social media usage among those aged 30 and younger didn’t really budge. One year ago, 60% said they are on a site like Facebook or Myspace. This year, 61% made the same claim. No, it wasn’t the young generation that made the move – it was the boomers.

Among users aged 50 to 64, social media use has grown from 20% to 32%. That’s a 60% increase over the last year. It looks like your father or your grandpa has found their way to The Twitter.

Although more of this older generation (I apologize for the title, they aren’t “old,” I guess) is logging on to social networking sites, that doesn’t necessarily mean they are checking them everyday like the younger generation does.

“The graying of social networking sites continues, but the oldest users are still far less likely to be making regular use of these tools,” said Mary Madden, Senior Research Specialist and co-author of the report. “While seniors are testing the waters, many Baby Boomers are beginning to make a trip to the social media pool part of their daily routine.”

Another interesting finding from the survey: Young women are truly the queens of social media. 89% of females aged 18 to 29 report that they use social media sites. 69% say they check them every day.

As part of the survey, Pew also asked respondents to say what they thought about social media. And as a result, this word cloud was born:

Interesting to see the prominence of the words “good” “fun” and “convenient” and the relative irrelevance of the sentiments “annoying,” “intrusive” and “confusing.”

We exchanged some dialog about the report, including some comparison in email usage, with a couple of their researchers.

“Social networking site use has been one of the fastest-growing services we’ve seen in ten years of surveys,” Kathryn Zickuhr, Research Specialist with Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, tells WebProNews. “On a typical day, email and search are the only two activities we ask about that are used more frequently than social networking services.

“Older internet users are much less likely than younger adults to use social networking services, with only 33% of internet users age 65 and older use these sites,” she says. “However, that 33% represents a 150% rate of growth since April 2009, when 13% of those 65 and older used these sites.”

“Social networking site ‘holdouts’ are largely older users, and while we do have some forthcoming data that speaks to why some people are motivated to use SNS and others are not, I unfortunately can’t discuss those new findings just yet,” Senior Research Specialist Mary Madden tells us. “However, our previous research has shown that Facebook users are more trusting than non-users and that those who don’t use SNS are also less trusting of the sites as a whole.”

“For instance, when asked how much of the time they thought they could trust social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn, 33% of non-users said they ‘never’ could, compared with 23% of those who use the sites,” she adds. “And of course since these are people who have never used the sites, there was also a significant portion of non-users (21%) who said they didn’t know whether or not the sites could be trusted.”

“Looking closer at specific online activities, we’ve found that email, along with search, is still part of the backbone of the internet—92% of online adults send and receive email, compared with the 65% of online adults who use social networking sites,” Zickuhr says. “However, when it comes to daily activities, the two are much closer in popularity: On a typical day, 61% of internet users access email and 43% use social networking sites.”

As a matter of fact, we looked at Pew’s research earlier this month, which appears to indicate that email is still King of the Internet.

Interestingly, Pew’s research found that the people using email most are the youngest demographic surveyed (18-29).

Social media is clearly growing, though that growth has slowed tremendously over the last couple years (see graph above). It’s still below buying products online, getting news online, and of course search and email.

“For the first time in our surveys, social networking use has reached 50% for all adults and 65% for adult internet users,” Senior Research Specialist Mary Madden tells WebProNews. “Among the Boomer-aged segment of internet users ages 50-64, SNS usage on a typical day grew a significant 60% (from 20% to 32%).”

On a typical day, 43% of online adults use social networking sites.

To be clear, Pew refers to social networking sites as those like MySpace, Facebook or LinkedIn.

When they first started looking at this data in 2005, only 8% of Internet users or 5% of all adults said they used social networking sites.

“The graying of social networking sites continues, but the oldest users are still far less likely to be making regular use of these tools,” said Madden. “While seniors are testing the waters, many Baby Boomers are beginning to make a trip to the social media pool part of their daily routine.”

As of May, 83% of Internet users ages 18-29 use social networking sites. For 30-49 year-olds, it’s 70%. For 50-64 year-olds, it’s 51%. For 65 and older, it’s 33%.

“Social networking sites continue to cement their place as a significant part of mainstream online life,” said Kathryn Zickuhr, a Research Specialist and co-author of the report. “Even as some users find their experiences with social networking sites frustrating or overwhelming, most seem to view the services positively on the whole.”

It’s hard not to envision even more people getting sucked into the social media-sphere, as Facebook continues to deeply integrated with many sites around the web and Google continues to make a bigger impact, integrating Google+ into its spectrum of products in more ways. Then there’s Twitter and its growing popularity among young people and continues to be deeply integrated into journalism.

“Since the Pew Internet Project began measuring adults’ online activities in the last decade, these two behaviors have consistently ranked as the most popular,” says Kristen Purcell for Pew Internet. “Even as early as 2002, more than eight in ten online adults were using search engines, and more than nine in ten online adults were emailing.”

“Email and search form the core of online communication and online information gathering, respectively,” says Purcell. “And they have done so for nearly a decade, even as new platforms, broadband and mobile devices continue to reshape the way Americans use the internet and web. Perhaps the most significant change over that time is that both activities have become more habitual. Today, roughly six in ten online adults engage in each of these activities on a typical day; in 2002, 49% of online adults used email each day, while just 29% used a search engine daily. ”

One very interesting aspect of Pew’s email data is that the people using email most are the youngest demographic surveyed (18-29). This is all the more interesting, considering claims once made by Facebook that email is “probably going away” because of younger generations gravitating more towards texting and social media. Of course that was before Facebook itself began offering email addresses.

“Email is similar to search (and many other online activities) in that the youngest online adults, the college-educated, and those in the highest income categories are more likely than others to engage in the activity,” says Purcell. “These demographic differences are considerably more pronounced when one looks at email use on a typical day. Moreover, while overall email use is comparable across white, African-American and Hispanic online adults, internet use on any given day is not. White online adults are significantly more likely than both African-American and Hispanic online adults to be email users on a typical day (63% v. 48% v. 53%, respectively).”

Social media is certainly growing as an online activity, though that growth has slowed tremendously over the last couple years, as you can see from the top graph. It’s still below buying products online, getting news online, and of course search and email.

However, the lines are getting blurrier among some of these things. People are, for example, getting more of their news through social network sites. Facebook is combining email and social media messaging into one “social inbox”.

It will also be interesting to see the impact Google+ has on Internet culture. While still in its very early days, it has been growing rather quickly, and the more people that use it, the more people will have access to Gmail, by simply having a Google account. How much they use it in relation to Google+ circles and streams remains to be seen.

For now, however, it looks like email is still king of the hill when it comes to online communication. That says a lot about the value of effective email marketing.

The Pew study looked at the way Facebook and other social network (SNS) users compare to non-SNS users when it comes to friends and relationships. What they found was that SNS participants, especially Facebook users, tend to have more close friends, more overall relationship ties and tend to be more trusting of other human beings.

First of all, the typical assumption that people have hundreds and hundreds of random friends on Facebook – ones that they just friend online and have never actually met – is a myth. According to the Pew study, only 7% of an average person’s Facebook friends are total strangers. A whopping 89% of Facebook friends are people who the user has met more than once.

The average Facebooker has around 229 friends. This ends up being about 48% of their real life social network. And the truly interesting thing is that Facebook users not only have more friends than non-Facebook users, but they tend to have more close friends, or “discussion partners,” as Pew calls them.

Discussion partners are the closest of the close according to Pew. The people who you really talk to about stuff. Basically, when it hits the fan, these are the people you’re going to call. Non-internet users only report an average of 1.75 people who fit this bill. Internet users as a whole report 2.27 people. Facebook users report an even higher amount, at 2.45 people.

And who are people’s friends on Facebook? Overwhelmingly high school buddies, followed by college buddies.

The study also found that internet users and especially Facebook users are more trusting, responding positively to the statement “most people can be trusted.” This year 41% of people overall said that most people can be trusted. That is up from 32% back in 2009.

Only 27% of non-internet users agree with that statement. 46% on internet users do. Apparently Facebook makes you a more trusting individual, but not Twitter, LinkedIn or Myspace -

Also, when we control for demographic factors and types of technology use, we find that there is a significant relationship between the use of SNS and trust, but only for those who use Facebook – not other SNS platforms. A Facebook user who uses the service multiple times per day is 43% more likely than other internet users, or three times (3.07x) more likely than a non-internet user, to feel that “most people can be trusted.”

Social networking isn’t killing our relationships, on the contrary is looks like it is helping them. The “likelihood of an American experiencing a deficit in social support” or “being disengaged from their community” is “unlikely to be a result of how they use technology” according to the study. So if you’re looking to blame the decline of American social culture on Facebook, you’re barking up the wrong tree.

The report digs into who exactly is using Twitter, demographic wise:

Pew does say that Twitter use is spreading to a wider range of ages, adding that those between the ages of 25 and 44 experienced notable adoption growth since late 2010.

The above chart would appear to indicate that Twitter is largely for the young. We have to wonder what the number look like when it goes younger than 18. Twitter does seem to be popular among the high school kids these days.

The report says that among Twitter users who own a cell phone, just over half (54%) have used their phone to access the service.

The report gets into race, finding that non-whites (and African-Americans in particular) “continue to be at the forefront of Twitter adoption.” One quarter of online African-Americans use Twitter, with one in ten doing so on a typical day, Pew says. Clearly there are some races/ethnicities missing from the chart.

Twitter is doing a lot things now to get more people in general using the service, and more importantly continuing to use it. Rumor has it that they’re about to launch their own photo service, and they recently acquired the popular third-party client TweetDeck, which offers a multi-pane view, making for a richer Twitter experience than Twitter itself currently offers. They’re also doing more to get users to find accounts to follow, giving them a reason to keep using Twitter. Just yesterday, they launched a new follow button for sites.

Note that the past tense definitely applies here; Pew’s question included the phrase "if you have ever paid," so it’s hard to draw conclusions about future or even current spending patterns.

One other major point: Pew made clear in its report, "Of those internet users who have purchased online content, nearly half (46%) have purchased only one or two of the types of content covered in our survey."

Still, Pew contacted 755 Internet users in the course of this survey, so the data is hard to ignore.  And you can have a look at Pew’s findings for yourself below.

-33% of internet users have paid for digital music online
-33% have paid for software
-21% have paid for apps for their cell phones or tablet computers
-19% have paid for digital games
-18% have paid for digital newspaper, magazine, or journal articles or reports
-16% have paid for videos, movies, or TV shows
-15% have paid for ringtones
-12% have paid for digital photos
-11% have paid for members-only premium content from a website that has other free material on it
-10% have paid for e-books
-7% have paid for podcasts
-5% have paid for tools or materials to use in video or computer games
-5% have paid for "cheats or codes" to help them in video games
-5% have paid to access particular websites such as online dating sites or services
-2% have paid for adult content

Pew also reported, "The average expense for those who have paid for content was approximately $47 per month for material they have downloaded or accessed, including both subscription (an average of $12 per month) and individual file access (an average of $22 per month).  However, some extremely high-end users pull the average higher, with most purchasers spending about $10 per month."

For instance, 8% of adult Americans that use the Internet use Twitter. 2% use it on a typical day. The report says that 74% of American adults are Internet users, with Twitterers making up 6% of the entire adult population in the country.

The report indicates that young adults (Internet users ages 18-29) are significantly more likely to use Twitter than older adults, African-American and Latino internet users are more than twice as likely to use Twitter as white internet users, and urban residents are about twice as likely to use Twitter as rural residents. Women and the college-educated are also slightly more likely than average to use the Twitter.

"The message service Twitter launched on July 15, 2006 and now claims tens of millions of users worldwide," Pew Internet says. "It is one of the most popular online activities among tech enthusiasts and has become a widely used tool among analysts to study the conversations and interests of users, buzz about news, products or services, and announcements by commercial, non-profit, and government organizations. For instance, it is an important component of the analytical work by our colleagues at the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism in its New Media Index, which assesses the most prominent topics discussed in social media every week."

Twitter’s usefulness for news has been well documented. The company just began sharing a great deal more geographical data with developers this week, and we can expect Twitter to get a lot more useful for location-specific content pretty soon. 

Pew Internet explains the methodology behind the study here. 

Are you a Twitter user?
 

Research released from Pew Internet, however, seems to contradict the notion that Twitter is just for the old. In fact, according to Pew, three groups of Internet users are mainly responsible for driving the growth of tweeting and status updating. These are social network users, those who connect to the Internet via mobile devices, and younger Internet users (under 44).

Of course, what kids consider to be old, may often be well below 44, so they may still have a point. Pew does say that the more devices someone owns, the more likely they are to use Twitter, and adults are far more likely to own more devices than kids who haven’t entered the workforce yet.

Going by median age, Twitter looks a little younger than Facebook, but not by much. The median age of a Twitter user is 31, while the median age for Facebook is 33 (In May 0f2008 it was 26). So young Facebook users may start worrying (if they’re not already) that the old folks are crashing their "in" party.

The median age for MySpace, according to Pew, is 26, and for LinkedIn it is 39.

"It will probably become more difficult to track status updating as an independent activity as social network updates feed into Twitter and vice versa," says Pew. "For now, it is clear that a ‘social segment’ of internet users is flocking to both social network sites and status update services. This segment is likely to grow as ever more internet users adopt mobile devices as a primary means of going online."

One thing’s for sure. No matter what age you are, if you are using sites like Twitter and Facebook, you better be careful of what you are posting publicly even more so now. Updates are going to start appearing in major search engines.

Well, scratch that last one. According to a Pew Internet and American Life study (PDF), it looks like Internet-and-technology-savvy families—or at least the heads of them—have learned to prioritize. While face time at dinner is markedly less, even nearly nonexistent, and while parents work more, the survey suggests that leisure activities, hobbies, and TV viewing are being sacrificed instead of family time.

Instead of wirelessly pulling families apart, the survey showed that married-with-children households were more likely to have a couple of networked computers in the house in addition to multiple cell phones among parents and kids, and that these families put that technology to work. They check in with each other more often and have more shared experiences—what Pew calls “Hey, look at this!” experiences.

Despite that, because of the Internet, parents are working longer hours and the family is less likely to eat dinner at the same time, a quarter of respondents said they felt their families were closer than their pre-Internet families, thanks to interconnectivity the Internet and mobile phones allow. About 60 percent said there has been no affect on closeness while 11 percent reported feeling less close.

What they’re sacrificing instead appears to be leisure time. While 49 percent of employed adults are very satisfied with the amount of time they spend with their families, only a third are very satisfied with time available for hobbies, clubs, relaxing, or other free time activities. They’re also watching less TV; about 25 percent of Internet-connected families say the Internet has decreased the amount of time they watch TV.

You can bet the amount of TV watched will continue to decline. While 89 percent of those over 65 watch TV almost every day, only 58 percent of those 18-29 do so. Just 12 percent of senior citizens attribute less TV watching to the Internet, compared to 29 percent of their younger counterparts.

A lot of that may ring true for you, if you’re in a married-with-children situation like me. More often than not, my wife pings me via Gmail chat requesting I stop by the store to pick something up; the teenager disappears to his room for hours at a time but eventually plops down at the home office computer to share his latest online discovery (usually a game or some monster he’s created). TV? Well, “watching” is a flexible word. Let’s just say the set is usually on.

We still manage to eat dinner together, though.

Some more statistics from Pew’s study on how the Internet affects families:

• 58% of those living in married-with-children households own two or more desktop or laptop computers.
• Nearly two-thirds of those living in multiple-computer households (63%) link those computers in a home network.
• Both spouses use the internet in 76% of married-with-children households, as do 84% of their children aged 7-17.
• 65% of married-with-children households with a child between the ages of 7-17 contain a husband, wife, and child who all use the internet.
• 89% of married-with-children households own multiple cell phones, and nearly half (47%) own three or more mobile devices. Children in these households are somewhat less likely to own a cell phone than they are to go online: 57% of these children (aged 7-17) have their own cell phone.
• 64% of couples who both own a cell phone contact each other at least once a day to coordinate their schedules
• 47% of couples who have one or no cell phones do this at least once a day
• 42% of parents contact their child/children daily using a cell phone, and 35% do so using a landline telephone