A study released yesterday by the US National Science Foundation (PDF available here) cites data from the Pew Research Center and other leading academic centers and universities, as indicating that Americans' interest in news about science and technology topics is perhaps 35% lower today than at the advent of the Web.

Most notably, a Pew Research survey of an average of 3,615 respondents per year, in an ongoing study dating back to 1977, shows a precipitous decline in the number of Americans who say they "closely follow" science and technology stories, from 1996 to 2008. While 20% of respondents admitted to closely following tech news prior to the Web's deployment on the Internet, only 13% admitted so in 2008. (Data for 2009 has yet to be assimilated.)

Amazingly, the trend is not limited to technology news; according to the study, along with other corroborative research to back it up, Americans' intense interest in several other general topics has declined by similar amounts. Health news, for instance, generated 42% less intense interest over the 12-year span, with only 20% of respondents saying they follow that category regularly. Crime as a category is less interesting to 32% of respondents. Entertainment news interest has declined by 33%, to just 10% of respondents; and sports is less interesting to 30% of those surveyed, with just 20% expressing regularly intense interest. Though Pew now lists a greater number of categories than in its original survey, science and technology (S&T) ranked #13 in 2008's list of 18 categories.


What's interesting? Politics and financial news, both of which have seen slight gains. Religious news remains steadily of interest of 17% of respondents.

"Relative to interest in other topics, however, interest in S&T in the GSS was not particularly high," states the NSF report. "Interest in 'new scientific discoveries' and 'use of new inventions and technologies' ranked in the middle among the 10 areas most frequently listed in the surveys: above space exploration, agriculture and farming, and international and foreign policy; below new medical discoveries, environmental pollution, economic issues and business conditions, and about the same as military and defense policy and local schools. Of course, a more inclusive concept of S&T might treat several of the topics in this list, such as space exploration and new medical discoveries, as part of the S&T category; furthermore, other topics often include substantial S&T content."

In other words, certain news stories with a technology bent may have captured the nation's attention for a time, but that attention failed to spur interest in science or technology categorically. A sharp increase in tech-related stories was noted for the middle part of the last decade, due perhaps in large part to the repair of the Hubble Space Telescope. While Americans showed interest in Hubble, for some reason, they failed to maintain their interest in space.

One possible reason for Americans' disinterest in the NSF's key bailiwick, the study's authors believe, has to do with something called the "evening news." Citing a multi-year study by the Tyndall Report of the relative coverage of topics of interest by entities referred to as "the three major broadcast networks," the collective amount of time devoted to S&T stories declined from about 750 minutes per year at the height of Hubble's travails, to about 200 minutes by the end of 2010.

What is this thing called "television?" According to the Pew study, it's the place where 47% of respondents in 2008 claim they get their principal news, with 22% claiming the Internet and 20% newspapers. Although Pew cites a sharp rise in the apparent popularity of this Internet thing we've been seeing (perhaps in the paper or on the news), survey respondents who do cite the Internet as a source say it's as a supplement to what they receive through the Web.