The impact of the recession has been widespread and many Americans are worried about the future. That would give them some incentive to use online resources to stay on top of economic events and interact with others to share news and tips. Indeed, the majority of Americans are using the internet at least modestly for those purposes. Asked a series of questions about whether they have used the internet to get news, information, or advice about the recession, 69% of Americans say they have used the internet for these reasons. This cohort of “online economic users” amounts to 88% of the online population.

A profile of online economic users shows that Americans in these groups are less likely to be in the online economic user population: women, blacks, those over age 65 (and the retired), those with less education, those who live in households with less than $30,000 income, and those in rural areas.

One respondent to our qualitative online survey described her reaction to the news that began to break during the summer of 2008: “I am having more alerts sent to me via email or SMS.  I have a very secure position with the State of Maryland, and am not monitoring my own situation more, but I am monitoring my spending more closely than previously.   I will probably delay my retirement by a few years because my 401(k) supplemental plan has lost a lot of value.  I am old enough to remember my parent's reaction/response to the 1974 recession, when I was fresh out of college, and see parallels between now and then.”

Overall, internet users are not intensely monitoring breaking economic news, market conditions, or soliciting advice for coping with economic challenges. Some 18% of internet users have gone online for recession-related material at least once a day and for the rest of “online economic users” the frequency of online activity is episodic. Here is the breakdown of how frequently internet users go online for information, news, or advice:

• 6% of online Americans use the internet several times a day to get recession-related material.
• 12% use the internet about once a day.
• 18% use it every few days.
• 14% use it once a week.
• 22% use it less often than that (the figures do not add up to 88% because this question is only one component of our definition of an online economic user).

Interestingly, there is no distinct pattern of online activity by those who have been hard hit by the recession. The internet users who have suffered serious setbacks in their jobs and investments are no more likely to be frequent searchers than those who have skirted trouble. Similarly, the online Americans who have a dour sense of the national economy are no more or less likely to do recession-related online activities than those who are relatively sanguine. However, the internet users who describe their own financial situation as good are somewhat more likely to do recession-related searches daily than those who describe their situation as troubled (23% vs. 14%).

In overall terms, people’s frequency of online use for economic searches is quite similar to the patterns Pew Internet has seen in other research about online Americans’ use of the internet for general news and political news. Online men are more likely than wired women to be daily users (22% vs. 13%); well-educated internet users are more likely than those with high school diplomas to be daily users (28% vs. 13%); and well-off internet users are more likely than those who are less well off to be daily users (27% of those living in households earning more than $75,000 vs. 13% of those in households earning less than $50,000). Suburban and urban internet users are online more frequently getting recession news than wired rural residents. And internet users who are employed are a bit more vigilant than those out of the workforce.

Despite the familiarity of the pattern, though, for some online economic users, the recession has spurred them into greater vigilance and more wide-ranging searches. Lynda Armbruster, a business teacher at Santiago Canyon College in Orange, California is emblematic. She says she has started subscriptions to several sources of economic information this year, set up alerts to monitor developments in the real estate and credit industries, and bookmarked a number of new sites that contain information on general financial news, economic trends at various levels (local, national and international). “I have paid much more attention to financial and economic news since the crisis began because I'm nearing retirement age and we have less time to recover from mistakes or downturns,” she wrote in our non-representative online survey. “Since the US started talking about bailouts, I've increased my focus on these topics, doing research into historic economic fluctuations (online, of course) and trying to understand all of the complex issues we're facing in these uncertain times.”

She noted that most of her friends or acquaintances have an interest in these topics, so “perhaps because we are all affected by them so deeply so we communicate via email, phone and in some cases, in person. Some friends are ‘far away’ so our entire conversation on the topics is conducted via email.”