Over one in three adults now have joined a social network on the Internet during the past four years. These findings were revealed by the Pew Foundation following research by its Internet and Amrican Life project that showed eight percent of adults who have joined in to a social network had exploded to a 25 percent share by 2009.

The news was reported by the Poynter Institute in its E-Media Tidbits blod written by Amy Garhan. You can read the original story here.

Social networks are the kinds of things — like MySpace and Facebook —  that students have gravitated to for many years for their promise of an interactive electronic community. Other social sites like LinkedIn (think Facebook for the business crowd) have appeal to internet users outside of the demographic realm of the “youth” segment.

With traditional publishing houses reeling from loss of market share, more that ever the future appears to be anchored online.

For example, the Facebook experiment with CNN during the inauguration, that interactively connected Facebooks users, their friends and CNN’s feed of the inaugural ceremony, glimpsed, perhaps, the new frontier of interactive journalism on the cutting edge.