"Overall, Internet access rose to its highest level in the four years of the Digital Future Project.  About three-quarters of Americans go online.

The number of hours online continues to increase - rising to an average of 12.5 hours per week - the highest level in the study thus far.

Nearly two-thirds of Americans (65.1 percent) have Internet access at home, a substantial increase in only three years from the 46.9 percent of users who reported home Internet access in 2000, the first year of the Digital Future Project."

(Source: Jeffrey I. Cole, et al, "Ten Years, Ten Trends," The Digital Future Report Surveying the Digital Future: Year Four, USC Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future, September 2004, page 27; http://www.digitalcenter.org/downloads/DigitalFutureReport-Year4-2004.pdf .)

"The Internet today is at about the same level of development as the automobile was in 1920. In other words, we can expect to see important innovations that will move the Internet closer to the center of American life.

...It is easy to see that online technology will change how we communicate, buy goods, and search for information. It is clear that technology is creating a major transition in how political campaigns are waged and financed, in how crime occurs, and in the development of children raised with the Internet and e-mail. Less clear, but much more important, is technology's longer range impact on creativity, national and individual self-concepts, and the quality of personal relationships."

(Source: Jeffrey Cole, "Now Is the Time to Start Studying the Internet Age," Chronicle of Higher Education, April 2, 2004.)

Helping men keep their distance from the estimated 30,000 pornographic sites on the Internet is a major challenge, but three Michigan sociologists have discovered that men with strong ties to family, church, and conventional society are far less likely to be tempted by the sexual allures provided by the click of the computer mouse.

Using the General Social Survey for 2000, the researchers polled 531 respondents who reported having used the Internet, asking if they had looked at a sexually explicit website during the last 30 days. The strongest predictors of cyberporn use were gender (males being 6.43 times more likely to access pornographic websites than females), those who have engaged in sexual relations for pay (OR 3.7), and those ever having an extramarital affair (OR 3.18). In addition, persons living in the Pacific region, relative to other parts of the United States, were 2.44 times more likely to access Internet porn.

Other significant correlations (p<.05) were having a happy marriage, political conservatism, and church attendance, all of which were inversely related to use of Internet porn. In a multivariate analysis, the researchers found that significant predictors of that happy marriage included political liberalism (inverse association), having teenaged children, being white, and age.

Although drug use was not correlated with cyberporn use, the researchers believe that the robust findings of the study nevertheless suggest that social control theory-which stipulates that bonds or stakes in a community through marriage and work lower the incidences of deviance and crime-apply to "this new form of deviant behavior."