CYBERSPACE — Bill Tancer has spent years analyzing how Americans use the internet. He recently published his conclusions in Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why it Matters (Hyperion, September 2008). Among his findings: Men and women use the internet differently, but a significant number of both genders visit porn sites.According to Tancer, “on any given week about 10- or 11-percent of all internet visits are going to porn sites.”
While that volume continues to make adult entertainment the No. 1 online destination, not all internet porn traffic is equal, he noted.
“When we look at the female component, we find that it’s a much different usage pattern than males,” Tancer told ABC News. “They’re looking at sites where people are creating — creating texts, creating stories, erotic stories.”
Men, as might be expected, look at the pictures.
Tancer didn’t stop with gender inequalities, though. He also examined differences in the way Republicans and Democrats search for porn.
“[In s]ome of the blue [Democratic] states, the interest was more about directories of adult entertainers,” he told ABC News. “Like sites that listed directories of call girls or escorts.”
Republican red states, on the other hand, are rife with surfers curious about or actively seeking wife-swapping and X-rated matchmaking.
Celebrity sex tapes are of interest to almost all groups, Tancer said. Whenever rumors begin circulating that another celebrity’s indiscretion — any celebrity’s indiscretion — has been immortalized on film, people go running to their computers to find out more.
“Again, it kind of appeals to the prurient interest…,” Tancer told ABC News. “If there is even a rumor of a tape existing, even if it doesn’t exist, we’ll see a massive spike in searches.”
Americans also seem inordinately attracted to online gambling, despite U.S. laws prohibiting the practice.
“When it’s not a peak sporting season, rather than somebody just laying off gambling and doing something else, we see an increase on poker gambling,” Tancer told ABC News. “We’re spending [money] on whatever gambling activity fits that time of year.”
Tancer also said he has observed a tendency among connected folk to have a more intimate relationship with their computers than with any living being, at least in some ways.
“For whatever reason, when we sit down in front of a computer we feel very open to typing in perhaps a question we might be too embarrassed to ask even our own doctors or our spouses, or anyone else,” he told ABC News.
