Pew study: Email outranks social media in terms of importance for employed, online adults; 46% say the Internet makes them feel more productive
Pew Internet :
Context & Ripple Effects
Pew's end-of-2014 survey captures a split that its own later tracking keeps confirming: employed, online adults treat email as the working layer of the internet — 46% say it makes them feel more productive — while social media sits elsewhere in their day. The distinction matters because the two layers were growing on different curves: 65% of US adults were on social networking sites within a year, yet the workday itself stayed anchored to the inbox.
The follow-on Pew numbers sharpen why this ranking persisted rather than flipped: by mid-2016 62% of US adults were getting news on social media, led by Facebook at 66% of its users, meaning platforms captured social attention largely through content consumption — a different job than the coordination and correspondence email handles at work. And by 2018, the share calling the internet good for society had slipped six points from 2014, with device-time complaints cited among skeptics.
First-order effects
- For Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and peers, the finding marks employed users as an audience to win rather than one already owned: the inbox, not any feed, was the default workplace channel in 2014.
- Employers and knowledge workers get a data point favoring email-based workflows — the tool workers themselves credit with productivity — over social-first internal communication.
Second-order effects
- Platforms responded along the lines their own usage data pointed: pushing news distribution (66% of Facebook users, per Pew's 2016 survey) to claim the non-work hours email doesn't touch, instead of displacing email at work.
- The productivity perception gap gave workplace-software vendors a framing advantage — selling tools measured against email's perceived output boost rather than social engagement metrics.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds across Pew's arc — rising social adoption and news use alongside a declining 'good for society' score — the structural read is a bifurcated internet: utility concentrated in email-style direct channels, ambivalence accumulating around feed-based ones.
- That split sets up the longer tension regulators and platform critics later picked up: growth in engagement coexisting with public doubt about what all that connected time yields.
The trend: Work communication stays anchored to email while social platforms grow into news and leisure consumption, splitting user attention between utility-driven and engagement-driven channels.