Pew Internet Project Study on Internet Non-Users

cheezitmike writes "The Pew Internet and American Life Project released a new study on the digital divide and the declining growth of the Internet: "Pew Internet Project tracking data show a flattening of the overall growth of the Internet population since late 2001. Internet penetration rates have hovered between 57% and 61% since October 2001, rather than pursuing the steady climb that they had showed in prior years." You can also just read their short summary of findings or stories about the study in The Washington Post and The New York Times (free reg.)."

Comments

Now with 100% less registration!

[KillboyPHD]

For no reg, move every sed!

sed -e "s/www/archive/"

http://archive.nytimes.com/2003/04/17/technology /c ircuits/17shun.html

Re:Now with 100% less registration!

[DeadSea]

The moderators who marked this "informative" didn't actually try it. It doesn't work (even after you remove the space). Here is the link to prove it.

RTFA

[robbyjo]

The study shows:

• Net Evaders: 20% (non-Internet users live with someone who uses the Internet from home).
• Net Dropouts: 17% of non-Internet users were once users. (Most of them are dropouts because of technical problems)
• Truly Disconnected: Some 24% of Americans are truly offline
• Most non-users live physically and socially close to the Internet
• 60% of non-users know of a place in their community where Internet access is publicly available, while 76% of Internet users know of public access site.
• Younger Americans are much more wired than older Americans. Well-to-do Americans are more wired that less well-off Americans, and the employed are far more wired than the unemployed.
• Some 56% of non-Internet users do not think they will ever go online. These people are generally the poorer, older segment of the not-online population, and are more likely to be white, female, retired and living in rural areas.
• And so forth...

Not the bubble burst per se. Apparently, lots of social factors come into play, which I think were not into the equation on the prediction years ago.

Re:57%...

[SoftCoreHonesty]

Anecdotal evidence means nothing. Your grandmother aside, there is a huge tech gap between those over 50 and those under 50. 71% of the people who said they would never go online are over 50. Only 6% of 18-29 year olds said they will never go online.

I would also point out that 99.999% of the elderly did not invent the computer, television, modern radio, etc. The 0.001% that did I am pretty sure are either dead or online.

Less than 1%

[Anonymous Coward]

Guess again. American literacy rates are very high, and are comparable with those of other western, industrialized countries. There are many "scare statistics" which claim as high as 25% of Americans are unable to read. These are explained by this study as:

Many factors help to explain why so many adults demonstrated English literacy skills in the lowest proficiency level defined (Level 1). Twenty-five percent of the respondents who performed in this level were immigrants who may have been just learning to speak English. Nearly two-thirds of those in Level 1 (62 percent) had terminated their education before completing high school. A third were age 65 or older, and 26 percent had physical, mental, or health conditions that kept them from participating fully in work, school, housework, or other activities. Nineteen percent of the respondents in Level 1 reported having visual difficulties that affect their ability to read print.

It's interesting to note that these people were literate, but classified in the lowest ranking on the scale.

Get the facts:

Illiteracy rates. By 1979, it was down to .6%

US 4th Graders outscore most other countries.

Executive summary of the 1995 National Adult Literacy Survey (the most recent one; also linked to above).
Does this mean there's no room for improvement? Of course not. But does it mean we should publish false statistics, proclaim ourselves as failures, and give a poor impression of ourselves to the rest of the world? The US is not in as bad a shape as so many seem to believe, and things are improving, not worsening (see the illiteracy trends page above).