Oh, I wasn't conceding that the Internet is passive at all. Sorry, I sometimes forget that people who don't know me personally (hi mom!) read this. I was sort of trying to be nice about the comment that was made to me. I was being chastised (not by someone in my library, just an observer) for my eagerness to put more participatory components on my library's website.

What I meant by that "so what?" is that even *if* I concede (and your post is a good reminder not to) the point that most of our users aren't in the percentages of people actively creating online content, that doesn't mean we shouldn't be trying to stay somewhere on the curve, instead of behind it.

All of this goes to a difficult issue in public libraries. When you spend all day helping Internet neophytes, it can be really hard to get excited about adding new and dynamic content to your web presence. I think of a lot of my job as being a tech cheerleader and facilitator. I try really hard to make the nuts and bolts part as easy as possible so that the rest of the staff doesn't have to think about that at all. In fact, I was sort of put out that I had to even try and argue about how active the web is, because we're all really excited about some of our planned projects and I don't want to draw attention to the fact that they will likely go unappreciated by many of the patrons we interact with daily.

I wish Pew had included more comprehensive stats. I think some of the longer reports do. Information about who answers no to all categories would be illuminating. Ultimately, I don't think "do our patrons produce online content?" is an adequate litmus test for "should the library produce online content?"

Thanks for reminding me to keep being stubborn in the face of naysayers!

"So, most Internet users are still just consumers of online content. So what?"

I wouldn't concede that point too readily. Is the average person on the internet partiularly passive? As a baseline, virtually everyone online uses email. So it is at least less passive than book reading. And there are how many million myspace profiles, amazon reviewers, flickr uploads, etc.? Or usenet posters, for that matter?

I think your Pew numbers could also be interpreted in opposition to claim "most are passive consumers". 8% bloggers, 26% content posters, 34% pix uploaders, 27% filesharers, 14% w/ a personal webpage, etc. These are not perfect subsets, so there are pix uploaders who don't blog, bloggers who don't share art, etc. If you are trying to determine whether a majority of internet users are actively producing online content, then any of these should be sufficient to qualify.

Another way of phrasing it is "How many answered NO to ALL categories?" We can't tell from the report, but I doubt it was more than half. The list of "active online content" activities is neither exhaustive, nor particularly fresh (2005 data, in some cases). How many are online gamers, or chat users? A newer or more comprehensive survey would reflect even more active users.

But even if most users do consume rather than produce online content, I don't think "media consumption" on the internet looks very passive anyway! This comes back to McLuhanesque hot/cold media territory, where the internet is supercool. The nearest "media consumption" comparisons are to watching TV and reading periodicals, but that only underscores how much more open-ended, unstructured, and essentially D.I.Y. the net is.