It"s not exactly a shock to learn that a lot of young people go online just to pass the time away or to have fun. A new study from Pew Internet has apparently confirmed that assumption. In a survey of 2,260 adults, 81 percent of the people who were between the ages of 18 to 29 said that they have gone online on occasion just to have some fun or pass the time. Indeed, 53 percent of the people in that same age bracket said that at the time of the survey, they had gone online just to have fun the previous day.
The survey results show that the older a person gets, the less likely they are to just go online to pass the time away. 66 percent of people aged 30-49 admitted to spending time on the Internet at some point for no particular reason. 50 percent of people aged 50-64 said that they surfed the Internet in that way but only 23 percent of people aged 65 or above said they used the Internet for no specific reason.
Pew Internet claims that these results are higher than when they asked the same questions to a survey group in 2009 and much higher than the survey results taken in the middle of the last decade.
So what does all of this really mean? The research group says this rise of "fun" Internet use has coincided with the rise of faster broadband connections, the increase of social networking and the use of more video on the Internet.
It added, "All of those factors are strongly associated with people who use the internet for fun: If they have broadband, if they are online video consumers, if they use social media of any kind – especially social networking sites – they are much more likely than others to go online to pass the time."