Statistics show when the rot really started

By SHELLEY HOWELLS

It's possible, thanks to the Ministry of Economic Development's information paper on IT Statistics in New Zealand, to pinpoint the moment when it all started to go wrong.

If you took a look at Figure 2.1.2: Household Amenities (Percentage of Households) you would see that, some time early in 1998, the pink line (percentage of households with a PC) overtook the blue line (percentage of households with a dishwasher).

Surely a clear indication of a country whose priorities had gone fatally awry.

Alarm-bells should have been rung.

Instead, before we knew it, we were a nation which preferred a PC to a dishwasher.

With that in mind, it should have been no surprise if there were jumps in figures for violent crime/truancy/nail biting since early '98.

Any such moves could easily have been attributed to a lack of dishwashers and/or an excess of PCs in homes.

Sure, we may take some comfort in knowing that the figures reveal that, as of June 2001, 97.2 per cent of us had washing machines at home (alas, a drop from 1998s' heady 97.7 per cent).

And there was, admittedly, an increase in dishwasher ownership, from 33.3 per cent of households to 38.9 per cent.

But those figures fade into insignificance when faced with the fact that, as of June last year, 46.6 per cent of households had a computer.

And we are using those computers to get online: 70 per cent had access to the internet, 48 per cent had access to the internet from home, 53 per cent had used the net in the last four weeks of 2001.

According to Nielsen Media Research Netwatch Report's audience profile figures for June this year, New Zealanders spent an average of nearly six hours a month online in their homes.

So who was washing the dishes?

Not the 18- to 20-year-olds. They spent the most time online (around seven hours average a month). It must have fallen to the 2- to 11-year-olds who managed only to squeeze in about three-and-a-half hours online in June.

Or, looking at home net surfers by occupation, it becomes clear that technical and service workers spent way too much time online (around 10 1/2, and 9 1/2 hours a month each, respectively) to attend to household chores.

Educators (a mere 3 hours 50 minutes a month) and clerical/administration people (3 1/2 hours) appear to be the only ones with some free time. We can only hope that all these carefully counted hours online were being spent fruitfully. Nielsen's figures reveal that that may not have been the case.

They took a look at online "activities done in the last four weeks" in the first quarter of this year.

The most popular activities were e-mailing and "general surfing".

While there is room for argument that e-mails have the potential to be useful and productive things, anyone who has received the latest "funny clock", "dripping tap", "you know you are bored at work when" e-mails could argue otherwise.

And, we all know that "general surfing" is another way of saying "killing time at work, avoiding loved ones or getting out of washing the dishes."

Ministry of Economic Development