The differing perceptions of personal internet abilities

By Leah Roach

Recently I helped in research for a project for the government. It involved my colleague and I going to people’s houses and interviewing them about their internet usage. There was one question in particular which stuck out for me whenever we interviewed a participant, and that was “How do you rate your own internet ability?”- with the responses ranging from novice to advanced. The reason for my interest in this question lies with people’s perception of their own internet ability. Some participants thought they were much more advanced than I thought they really were. Others were modest, especially when they had children to compare themselves to. It appeared that some thought that by being able to send an email and navigate through websites, this was the sign of an advanced internet user.

On one occasion we interviewed a man who relied on the internet for everything to do with his business. He used email, online banking, postal websites and more, yet he did not know how to navigate back to his homepage other than by closing the page and reopening a new one. He rated himself as fairly advanced. There was also a housewife who appeared to be quite adept at using the internet but thought she was not advanced because she had the internet capabilities of her children to compare herself to. Yet she appeared to know more about the internet than the man who relied on it for his business.

This raised the thought that without a set of guidelines to follow and learn from, most adult’s knowledge of the internet is disorderly. Their muddled views of how to use the internet and their limited understanding of its vast alcoves and all it has to offer, leads to generations of people that have a confused perception of their own internet abilities. In general people are left at their own free reign on the internet, and it are only children in IT classes and internet legible people that have some notion of how advanced a person may be. For most people their use of the computer and the internet is self taught, and as they say, ‘the more you know, the more you realise you don’t know’.