The Digital Differences In Americans 214
antdude writes "When the Pew Internet Project first studied the role of the internet in American life, there were big differences between those who were using the internet and those who weren't. Today, differences in internet access still exist, especially when it comes to access to high-speed broadband at home. From the article: 'Virtually every U.S. household with an annual income over $75,000 is online, but that’s only true for 63% of adults who live in a household with an annual income under $30,000. The numbers look quite similar for different education levels: 94% of adults with post-graduate degrees are online, but 57% of those without high school diplomas remain offline.
Beside the obvious economic barriers to entry, though, the Pew poll also found that half of those who don’t go online do so because they just don’t think “the Internet is relevant to them.” One in five of those who are not online today think that they just don’t know enough about technology to use the Internet on their own.'"
Hope they mentioned population density... (Score:4, Informative)
I've got family that live out in the country, and their dial-up service was so slow and noisy that they could only reach 14.4Kbps for 5 minutes at a time. Naturally they dropped service and haven't tried it since.
Re:What a surprise! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What a surprise! (Score:5, Informative)
I'm sorry this display of ignorant prejudice got modded up as "insightful". I know there are unthinking people on slashdot like anywhere else, but I would expect the more thoughtful community members to down-mod such an offensive stereotype that has no basis in reality. If 13 percent of Americans are poor [wikipedia.org] then, based on your idiotic generalization, there should be base-thumping rim-spinning Lexus cars all over the freakin' place.
I accidentally bought a house in a poor neighborhood in Northeastern North Carolina because I naively didn't know segregation still existed in the South. The people who lived on my street owned old beat-up cars and a few lived without electricity, heating their homes with wood stoves. Yes, there were a few kids whose hobby was working on old Cadillacs to bling them out or whatever, but they were the exception and not the rule.
When I got to know these families, I was constantly challenging them as to why they didn't get rid of their cable-TV service (shared between households) and not go in on a community internet connection with wifi? The answer, it took me forever to finally understand, is that the entire family can share watching a single cheap television, while a computer is something only one person can use and interact with at a time. When you have five kids, you can't get a computer for each and every one of them.
Finally, I sold some stock and used it to buy every kid on my street a used laptop at $200 a head. I gave the kids the laptops on the condition that they take a series of classes from me about computing, which I blogged about [ideonexus.com], and everything seemed great. I opened our internet connection and put signal-boosters in some of the houses so everyone could enjoy it. I thought I was doing a good thing in this world.
One year later, not a single one of those laptops was still functioning. One by one they succumbed to being stolen by neighborhood gang members or simply broke from the abuse they took at home (if you've ever been in a poor family's damp, cockroach-infested, ancient crumbling home, you'll understand this last statement completely). On the bright side, after the kids got on the internet for a little while, they craved more and I get to keep in touch with most of them on Facebook today as they will walk to the library to get online or have pooled their money together on a family computer.
So when I read comments like those of the parent, it fills me with rage at their ignorance, and when I see people the statement up as "insightful" it breaks my heart.
Re:What a surprise! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What a surprise! (Score:5, Informative)
Much of your post is just wrong.
Regarding #1: DSL and cable aren't $100/mo -- I have comcast at home, which is expensive but my only choice, and it's $60/mo. I don't get cable TV or voip, just internet, but it is wrong to say that internet is $100/mo.
#2: Clear used to be a better bargain, but I have a Clear for my boat and it's currently $50/mo, not $100. Netflix streams just fine with the basic account.
#3: I have an unlimited unthrottled data plan with TMobile (which sadly they don't offer anymore), $70/mo and I could add tethering for $15/mo. As soon as I get around to it, I'll ditch Clearwire and do that, but for the most part, cell phone data plans do suck, so I'll give you this one.
#4: Not sure where you live, but in my particular smallish-80k-person-town in the Pacific Northwest, you'd be hard pressed to find anyplace downtown where free wifi was NOT available. Every coffee shop and many restaurants offer so much overlapping coverage, there's never an issue with access. Granted, this may not be true everywhere, but in this region, free wifi is as expected as a free glass of water.
#5: never had any trouble with saturated connections.
#6: while plenty of homeless people do use the library computers, there's usually space available and if you have your own laptop, it doesn't matter due to the free wifi.
You make it sound like getting on the net is hard or expensive -- in many places it isn't if a person can find $200 for a used laptop. Certainly my experiences will not be true for every place in the country, but you should realize that your experiences are also not ubiquitous.
Re:What a surprise! (Score:5, Informative)
"If 13 percent of Americans are poor then, based on your idiotic generalization, there should be base-thumping rim-spinning Lexus cars all over the freakin' place."
I certainly didn't say "Lexus". I have lived in South Carolina for decades, and I'm a mechanic who has PLENTY of intimate exposure to what the poor drive while working on those vehicles at my buds car lot.
There are blinged out junkers "all over the place", and it's common to see people piss away money decorating their dangerous, poorly maintained vehicles when they could be doing something much more beneficial to themselves.
Like it or not, many of the poor cherish self-destructive behaviours. Meth doesn't buy itself, nor crack, nor booze and nicotine for that matter.
Of course the TV is a babysitter. You don't have to interact with it.
OTOH, while we have the frequently-degenerate local poor (many of whom wouldn't be poor if the females used birth control) there are many poor Mexican and Latin American immigrants who rapidly move out of poverty by working their butts off.
They are refreshing to hang out with, and I must conclude the GOP bashes them out of envy. They choose not to be wretched. They hustle. Unlike many White folks who are bemoaning the "lack of opportunity", many Latinos (I'm not one, BTW) are out there creating it. I know of one brickyard owner who only hires (legal) Mexicans because they are so productive.