Searching for information is the most important factor to be connected

The need to stay informed about what is happening in the world is at the top of the scale of Brazilian interests.

Encouraged by Datafolha to say which factors they considered more or less important to connect to the internet, getting information appeared in first place, with 87% of very important attribution, ahead of activities such as working (72%), relating to the family and friends (56%) or seeking entertainment (55%).

This assessment varies little and remains higher than the others, even when stratified by sex or age group, segments in which differences of opinion can be large. In the group that is usually more refractory to new technologies, aged 60 and over, it adds up to 82% of responses of very important and 14% of a little important.

About the time spent on the net, the numbers confirm what common sense already knows or intuits. Nobody spends as much time on the internet as young people between 16 and 24 years old: 20% said they spend all their time connected to the internet; 28%, most of the day, and another 26%, at least half of the time available.

That is, together, 74% of respondents in this age group spend a good part of the day online, whether on cell phones (mostly) or on devices such as video games, computers, notebooks or tablets.

The older the age, the shorter the time spent in the network, decreasing to 65% between 25 and 34 years old, 52% for those between 35 and 44 years old, 41% aged between 45 and 59 years old and 22% for those over 60 years old. years old.

Virtual classes are a reason often cited by youngsters. “Time on the internet has increased not only in the period of the strongest pandemic, but also in the current moment”, says Ágatha Mendes Cardoso, 18. More than once this year, face-to-face classes were suspended in her classroom after a student received a positive test for Covid-19, he says.

But certainly other factors come into play. It was on the internet that Ágatha found people who share with her the taste for videos that relate philosophy and series. And meeting and communicating with people who think and like the same things is an attraction for all ages, according to 65% of respondents in general and 68% of young people between 16 and 24 years old.

In her final year of high school, Luana Uehara, 17, is also connected most of the time, mainly to study, talk to friends and get information – something that has become more frequent during the pandemic. Luana says that she learned to research the news and, when she suspects something, she tries to check it. “I prefer journalistic sites that I know, but I do the search initially through Google.”

She used her experience during the pandemic to guide her 63-year-old father, who received fake news in WhatsApp groups and shared it. “I started teaching him to look at sites he could check before he went out and sent people.”

Less used to technology, the elderly are even the most vulnerable to consume and disseminate content without filtering or verification. It is the age group of the so-called digital immigrants, a term that encompasses those born before the invention of the internet. Raised in an analog world, older people find it more difficult to understand a technology with so many new terms, many of them foreign.

The difficulty explains a good part of the lack of interest in using the internet, expressed by 36% of disconnected people aged 60 and over. Other reasons cited were the difficulty to use (“it’s complicated”), financial impossibility and low education.

“We identified that this group is the one that spreads fake news the most”, says Kamila Rios Rodrigues, a professor at the Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science at USP in São Carlos, who since 2019 has coordinated a program of practical courses on the use of smartphones and tablets to the third age.

This perception led the teacher to create, last August, a free online course on the internet and social networks, in which she taught how to use instant communication applications, such as WhatsApp and Telegram, and how to search on platforms such as Google.

UNDERSTAND THE DATAFOLHA RESEARCH

• ​The survey that gives rise to the materials in this special section was carried out by Datafolha and had two modules, with two different surveys, one on Brazilians’ favorite brands for services involving the internet and another on their online behavior.
• The brand survey reflects 1,500 interviews conducted between March 21 and 28, 2022, with Brazilians aged 16 and over, from all social classes and regions in Brazil, who access the internet every day. The survey’s margin of error is three percentage points, and its reliability is 95% – this means that if 100 surveys like this were done, in 95 the results would be within the margin of error.
• The survey on Brazilian online behavior reflects 2,064 interviews conducted between March 16 and 24 with Brazilians aged 16 and over, from all social classes and regions of the country. The margin of error is two percentage points, considering a confidence level also of 95%

Students learned not only to use tools to check the veracity of what they read, but to create fake news — “to see how easy it is”, says the teacher. “Still, there was always that situation: it was my son who passed [a informação], came from Dr. So-and-so, and then they have a very strong belief in these people and end up passing it on.”

There are channels that help check data, including Agência Lupa, which has content published by Folha, or Projeta Comprova, financed by Google and Meta (controller of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp), which brings together 42 vehicles, including this newspaper. .