Internet users create content

According to a study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, “44% of Internet users have created content for the online world through building or posting to Web sites, creating blogs, and sharing files.”

This is pretty exciting news, showing that to a certain extent the Internet is thriving as a citizen’s publishing medium. Digerati have been worried ever since the web became popularized in the early 90s that it would follow the trends shown by other media–such as radio–and degenerate into a strictly push medium, where the vast majority consume what a small cadre of professionals generate.

Page 8 of the report has a graph breaking down online content creation by demographic. The chart looks a lot like you might expect, but the breakdown is flatter than at least I thought. For instance, here’s the race/ethnicity breakdown: Whites, 45%; Blacks: 44%; Hispanics, 39%.

Interesting and hopeful that 44% of users are pushing content back on the Internet. It would seem likely that with the ever-accelerating growth of easy to use tools for content creation, this number should increase rather than decrease.