Email and internet use or searching tower over social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter as the most valuable digital “tools” used by workers, according to a sweeping new study by the Pew Research Center.
The report of online use at work also found a tremendous spike in the number of companies that block sites and online postings and revealed that landline phones outrank cellular phone use on the job.
The study is the latest from Pew’s year-long effort to chart internet use at the 25th anniversary of the World Wide Web.
According to Pew, some 94 percent of job holders use the internet and 35 percent say that it has helped to increase the number of hours they work; 39 percent say the web has given them more workplace flexibility; and 46 percent feel they are more productive.
The big news, though, is while the general view may be that workers are flipping through tweets and Facebook for help, the opposite is true. Email dominates web use, with 61 percent of workers online saying mail is their most important tool. That is followed by internet searching at 54 percent, landline use at 35 percent, cellular phone use at 24 percent and social networking sites at a tiny 4 percent.
“Email is to the digital age what stone-sharpening tools were in the prehistoric age,” said Lee Rainie, director of internet, science, and technology research at the Pew Research Center.
“Email has proven its worth on the job as the foundational ‘social media’ day by day even as rival technologies arise. It was the killer app 45 years ago for the early ARPANET and it continues to rule workplaces despite threats like spam and phishing and competitors like social networking and texting,” he added.
With having computers at work comes an effort by employers to police what people see, have access to, and what they can post said Pew. In 2006, just 20 percent of companies had rules on what workers could do online. That has more than doubled to 46 percent.
Naturally, workers in offices are more inclined to use the internet. Pew found that office-base workers are twice as likely to call the internet “very important” than those not online at work.
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected].
