Email Leaves Phones In Dust
About half of all computer users are more likely to send an email to someone who lives out of town than they are to make an old-fashioned phone call, a survey found.
And a third of the respondents were more likely to use email than to place a local phone call, the survey found.
The April telephone survey of 436 American adults with computers was sponsored by Yahoo! Internet Life magazine to determine email use. It was part of a monthly Ziff-Davis/Roper Starch InternetTrak project comparing Internet media with traditional media.
It found 55 percent of those surveyed use email more than they make long distance phone calls and 33 percent use email more than they make local calls.
"You can fire off an email to somebody and you're not going to get a busy signal or something like that," said Bill Bass, an analyst for Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass., which also studies Internet use.
The survey also found:
- 84 percent of home computer users used email in the past three months
- 83 percent of work users used email in the past three months
The respondents use email to communicate with:
- friends, 82 percent
- relatives, 59 percent
- co-workers, 56 percent
- business clients, 47 percent
- bosses, 39 percent
Half of those surveyed mail letters less often than they send email.
The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points to 4 percentage points.
Written by Chris Allbritton