September 16, 2008
I see your interracial gangbang and raise you facebook
Social networking sites have overtaken porn sites in popularity on the internet.
Tancer, in his new book, “Click: What Millions of People are Doing Online and Why It Matters,” said analyzing web searches did not just reflect what was happening online but gave a wider picture of society and people’s behavior.
“There are some patterns to our Internet use that we tend to repeat very specifically and predictably, from diet searches, to prom dresses, to what we do around the holidays,” Tancer told Reuters in a telephone interview.
Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise, an Internet tracking company, said one of the major shifts in Internet use in the past decade had been the fall off in interest in pornography or adult entertainment sites.
He said surfing for porn had dropped to about 10 percent of searches from 20 percent a decade ago, and the hottest Internet searches now are for social networking sites.
“As social networking traffic has increased, visits to porn sites have decreased,” said Tancer, indicated that the 18-24 year old age group particularly was searching less for porn.
“My theory is that young users spend so much time on social networks that they don’t have time to look at adult sites.”
Additionally:
Tancer said the current obsession with celebrities was also reflected through web data, with celebrity websites garnering more attention than sites devoted to religion, politics, well-being and diets combined — and no sign that this is waning.
Which impacts politics:
This celebrity mentality had also overlapped into the November presidential election in the United States with surfers looking for images of Republican vice presidential candidate Sara Palin rather than looking for her policies.
“A lot of the focus around the candidates in general is image based. People want to know how tall Barack Obama is and also to search for their families,” he said.
“You have to get far down in the search terms to link the search for a candidate with any issue.”
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