Book research help: rate of tech adoption
It’s a long shot on a holiday weekend here in the U.S., but I’m trying to find good sources for the following:
- Comparative rates of adoption for radios, televisions, PCs, Internet and cell phones from 1950-present.
- U.S. Data as well as world or by-country data on #1
I’ve found a few sources here and there, but about 80% of the magazine and web material that mentions this data fails to provide any source references, which kind of sucks.
All pointers welcome (Web, book, journals, whatever). Cheers.
Call a library. An academic or large public library reference desk can help you with this.
Scott,
Here are a couple I found from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_introduction_of_television_in_countries
http://www.tvhistory.tv/index.html
Hope it’s helpful.
The 1998 Emerging digital economy report has a few small graphs. Not quite what I want (I’d liked to see telephones vs. TVs vs PCs vs Internet from 1900-2000), but it’s on the right track.
The UK Office of National Statistics is pretty good for ths sort of thing (for the UK) — bizarrely Internet access comes under consumer durables — see eg http://www.statistics.gov.uk/CCI/nugget.asp?ID=823&Pos=5&ColRank=2&Rank=704 for starters
I’ve done what jexample has suggested for different queries and generally been satisfied. If you want to contract the queries out, then perhaps Google may have the answers for you.
http://answers.google.com/answers/
I’ve never used the service, but it may be appropriate for you in this case. (If nothing else, it would likely provide fodder for a blog piece .) And, even though it’s July 4th, Google never closes!
To state the obvious: the rates of adoption for a specific country shouldn’t be too difficult to reliably source; but the comparative stuff may be challenging because of the different axes of data presentation.
Trends on Internet usage only:
http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/c/2/topics.asp
I don’t have statistics for the others, but I would recommend checking in with one or the other of the Annenberg Schools for Communication (USC or Penn). The library at Annenberg/Penn is here:
http://www.library.upenn.edu/annenberg/
Not open until tomorrow, though. Good luck!
-Emily