What kind of ICT user are you?

I’ve always admired the work of the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Their research is usually excellent and made readily available to the public. Anyway, they have something new on their website — slightly silly — but still nevertheless interesting. It’s called the Typology of Information and Communications Technology Users, and the Pew Research Center have a test you can take to determine your own profile. Take the test here.

I turned out to be an ‘Omnivore’, probably free-range:

Members of this group use their extensive suite of technology tools to do an enormous range of things online, on the go, and with their cell phones. Omnivores are highly engaged with video online and digital content. Between blogging, maintaining their Web pages, remixing digital content, or posting their creations to their websites, they are creative participants in cyberspace.

They are young, ethnically diverse, and mostly male (70%). The median age is 28; just more than half of them are under age 30, versus one in five in the general population. Over half are white (64%) and 11% are black (compared to 12% in the general population). English-speaking Hispanics make up 18% of this group. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many (42% versus the 13% average) of Omnivores are students.

Well, I am young, ethnically diverse and mostly male, so I think the test is really really accurate. According to the Pew Research Center, the eleven nine other types of ICT users are: Connectors; Lackluster Veterans; Sexual Predators; Productivity Enhancers; Mobile Centrics; Connected but Hassled; Inexperienced Experimenters; Light but Satisfied; Indifferents; Starbucks Baristas; and Off the Network.

All of these would make great band names.