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.'"
elderly are a large portion of it (Score:5, Insightful)
If you remove the single largest factor for non-adoption (age), the rates are generally pretty high, and the other factors mentioned make less difference. That's why I wish these surveys focused more on multi-factor analysis instead of these easy-to-do but less-useful analyses where you just pull out single factors. Sure, people with lower incomes are less likely to be online, and people with lower educational attainment are less likely to be online, but those two factors also correlate strongly, and matter differently for different age cohorts. Which factors have independent effects after controlling for the others? That's the kind of analysis that would be more helpful...
So yes, 22% of Americans don't use the internet. But a large proportion of those are over 65: in that age group, 69% of people don't use the internet. That's just generational change.
If we look at young people, age 18-29, a full 94% use the internet. There is probably some education/income effect in there, but a much weaker one: only 6% of total young people, even including the poorest and least educated in the statistics, don't use the internet.
Note also that educational attainment isn't separate from the age effect, because going to college used to be less common in my grandfather's generation than it is today, so there are some confounds baked into those numbers, too.
In short: Where are the goddamn crosstabs?!?
Re:What a surprise! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:50% of people... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, the definition is 50% are below median. The median doesn't necessarily have to equal the average, although for a typical bell curve like intelligence it usually is pretty close.
Its not terribly hard to find a distribution where median and mean are not the same. Stereotypical heartbeat rate in a morgue. Video game level/skill/score.
The almost blindingly obvious reason 1/5 of the population doesn't use the net is its almost impossible and fairly pointless if you're functionally illiterate. Which is probably a good description of about 1/5 the population. I had a former boss who "bragged" about not reading a book since high school... punchline was he had gray hair. Probably not a amazon/kindle customer, etc.
Re:What a surprise! (Score:1, Insightful)
People earning less manage beer, expensive rims for their donk, and plenty of other things according to their priorities.
"Poor" in the US isn't anything like "poor" in Afghanistan.
Re:What a surprise! (Score:5, Insightful)
BUT I agree with your point that it should be very close after satisfying those needs.
The problem is that a great many companies want to lock down what you can and can't learn on the Internet. They want you to be nice little servants and only learn those things that don't open the doors to you thinking about things other than those immediate survival things.
The more you educate people in how to think and what's available outside their front door the more free they become. The more free they become the less they wonder why they should pay heed to those in power.
And to those in power that's a dangerous thing. And until we fix the system (not likely any time soon) you will see them clamp down and clamp down hard on anything they consider a threat to their nice cushy positions.
Re:50% of people... (Score:5, Insightful)
That hypothesis doesn't explain why 94% of people age 18-29 use the internet, unless intelligence and/or literacy rates have massively increased.
A simpler hypothesis is that old people don't use the internet, and young people do, and other factors are minimal.
Re:What a surprise! (Score:3, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What a surprise! (Score:5, Insightful)
EVERY HOUSE should have the option for affordable or free internet, its that important.
Free internet service? How does that happen? Oh, you mean "paid for by someone else". Is it really that important?
Re:What a surprise! (Score:4, Insightful)
What complete bullcrap. There are still some 40% or so of people who file by mail. And as far as reference libraries, less than one percent of the Library of Congress is online.
Re:50% of people... (Score:4, Insightful)
That's not what the statistics in the linked report show; they show a much bigger age difference than an education or class difference. 41% of people 65+ are online, whereas 94% of people 18-29 are online, a difference that completely swamps the other factors.
Re:What a surprise! (Score:5, Insightful)
most things listed in the Bill of Rights don't help with survival either (except for the 2nd amendment... 200 years ago). Sheltered suburbanites need to stop saying "well they can SURVIVE without that."
The simple fact is that, when most people have access to the internet, it leaves those without access at a SEVERE disadvantage--and most don't have that access because they're already at a disadvantage to begin with. And before people go all libertarian and say "that's their problem", it's not just theirs: It's also their kids' problems. Nobody can seriously expect a kid growing up in a poor neighborhood--most likely with one parent working afternoon shifts to pay bills instead of staying home to raise them--to somehow compete with all the other kids who can just google any subject they're having trouble with.
A modern new bill of rights regarding the internet and computer science really is needed, and not just limited to giving everyone affordable internet access (which would require the prostitutes we call Congressmen to take back the telecommunications infrastructure they sold to Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon for a fraction of its cost in the 90s), but should also include guarantees such as net neutrality, privacy protection, and rights to any algorithms too basic to be patented.
Re:What a surprise! (Score:5, Insightful)
After heat, internet is #1 need in the modern age.
Spoken like someone who's never had to worry about having their fundamental survival needs met. You're assuming that every person in America already has the basics and that just isn't true.
Water, food, and shelter come way before internet. Also heating your shelter, preserving your food, and preparing your food. That'd usually be done with electricity but that requires more expenditures of greater priority than internet. Fridge, electric heater, electric stove. Still don't have hot water yet, tho. It wasn't very long ago that it was common to rent a "cold water flat" where you heated water on the stove. So your next splurge will be a water heater.
Those are the things poor people worry about. I can remember a time when my dad lived in a barn. If the internet had existed back then, getting a computer and going online would have been waaaaay down on the to-do list. It looked more like:
Get a room in a house with a floor.
And running water.
HOT running water.
And heat.
And a fridge.
Put food in fridge.
Get a phone. (Today's version of the internet, I suppose.)
Communication's way down the list of fundamentals.
Re:What a surprise! (Score:5, Insightful)
Water, food, and shelter come way before internet.
I know it's only one data point, but let me give you a counterexample. I live in Christchurch, New Zealand, and as you may know we had a little earthquake last year. For nearly a week, in my part of town, power, water and sewerage were down, the roads had huge potholes - but I had a Blackberry with battery power, and the cellphone towers were up. With the web browser on my Blackberry, I was *literally* able to locate drinkable water - the local city council had a truck handing out free water bottles, but its location changed every night. They posted the location on their website and I learned about it from reading the site on my Blackberry. In this case, Internet access GAVE ME water.
Second data point, is that we got electrical power back a week before we got tap water back, and when the tap water did come onstream, it had a boil notice (ie, it wasn't considered drinkable without boiling). You might not realise it, but electrical grid power has a HUGE survival advantage - unboiled water can make you sick, but boiled water is good. So in this case too, electricity preceded just "water" as a requirement: there was lots of "water" available, but converting it into "drinkable water" required electricity. (Or gas; so as well as a water cache, I've now stashed a disposable butane stove).
Third data point: power and water didn't fail equally across the city, and petrol stations remained accessible. So cars became very important, and driving to friends and relatives to charge cellphones, fill water bottles, and take hot showers, quickly became a thing. Not what we expected, but there you are.
What I've learned from the quake, and what I think isn't at all obvious to your average First World suburb-dweller (as I am), is that disaster scenarios (including economic collapse and poverty) are never a total all-or-nothing thing. You don't "go back to the Stone Age" in one hit, and you don't come back in straight line. Infrastructure tends to fail raggedly, in random order, and it doesn't recover in a strict linear Maslow hierarchy either. So it's very likely that you may have cellphone but no power, power but no drinkable water, Internet and TV but no phone... and so on.
So don't laugh at people who think the Internet is up there with drinkable water. Use whatever you've got access to and leverage it. And information on "what services are near you" is very very very important in any scenario.
Re:What a surprise! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What a surprise! (Score:4, Insightful)
You weren't poor. You were inconvenienced during an emergency. Like comparing apples and elephants.