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20% of U.S. Population Has Never Used Email
Ezratrumpet writes "A recent PC World article notes that 20 percent of the U.S. population has never sent an email. Does this number over- or underestimate the actual number of people who know nothing of email? What are the implications of this statistic to our society? Or are these people just Luddites who mourned the demise of the telegraph and have also never used a telephone?"
It's 18% of all households, not 20% of the US population.
215,935,529 Internet users as of Dec/07, 71.7% of the population, according to Nielsen//NetRatings
Latest Population Estimate
301,139,947 population for 2007, according to the Census Bureau. If 28.3% of the population aren't internet users, why is it a surprise that 20% haven't sent an email?
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... by e-mail and technology.
On the other side, most people that doesn't know how to use e-mail ask techies they know for help.
I have already forgotten how many mails I have sent for my mom and aunts.
- Human knowledge belongs to the world
By learning the reasons email doesn't meet the communication needs of a significant portion of the population, you can either expand the capabilities of email, or design new systems to address those gaps.
Why does email need to meet the communication needs of the entire population? I'd be willing to bet that a significant fraction of the public does not use postal mail-should we also look at ways to expand snail mail to address those gaps? Cell phones? IRC?The parent's point is that all forms of communication, let alone all technologies, are not appropriate for all people. It's possible that some of the 20% of non-email users don't use email out of fear, ignorance or inability, but many of them are aware of the technology and simply don't see the need to use it.
Abnormal doesn't mean wrong, stupid, or anything else bad. It just means you're not doing the normal thing that the majority of people do.
...approximately 20% A government study showed that 21% to 23% of adult Americans were not "able to locate information in text", could not "make low-level inferences using printed materials", and were unable to "integrate easily identifiable pieces of information." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States)
And 50c in an internet cafe? Where? All the ones I've seen make you buy time in hourly chunks for about $10 or so.
The GP could have phrased things better but he is essentially correct. In the developing world and the "wealthy" but space constrained world people generally do not own computers, they go to the local cafes which are plentiful and inexpensive. Cafes in the US are expensive because they serve a different demographic. Perhaps too many teenagers who couldn't talk their dads out of buying a celeron with shared memory embedded graphics rather than a $3,000 gaming rig, and not enough who want basic information, email, etc. US demographics also play a role, with cafes in the US being more plentiful in wealthier areas. They neighborhood cafe charges what the neighborhood can afford. Willingness to pay, not expenses plus a small percentage, generally dictates pricing.
150w-300w? What sort of PCs are you using??? A modern Dell PC pulls 100w unless you are running heavy gaming on it. My personal PC pulls about 42w during most of my usage.
Isn't it very, very, very clear that e-mail uses by far the lesser amount of resources than regular mail?
How much did it cost me to send this message? (like email). Hell of a lot LESS than a postage stamp and a postage stamp tends to reflect amount of cost to *deliver* the said letter.
If the costs were similar, there would be no SPAM at all because even if the said costs were shared, it would cost you 5c or 10c to just send a single message.
If you just want to be anal about some stupid question like this and waste few millions on "research" if the plastic is from a dinosaur's ass in Indonesia or algae bloom during Pangaea's time, then that's your business.
'20% of America doesn't use e-mail because they don't have anything to say via e-mail.'
"And a good percentage of that cant afford Internet service in the first place."
Just from my personal experiences here, but Even At a Group home, (if you've ever been to a group home, people there are getting over serious mental issues, or recovering from serious addictions) there was a mac set up so people could e-mail, the younger patients used e-mail the older ones tended not to, I'm actually kind of surprised that they could even get to '80%' with all the old foggies out there, who are due to mental deterioration living in a different time from the rest of us.
BTW every public library i have been to, even one in a city the size of 1000, had in it Internet terminals (as of 2008) the computers were donated, of course, but they still had 4 Internet terminals in a library that literally had only 5 book shelves total!
even a 'drop in center' for people with mental illness now has 'public Internet' terminals, which were donated, the facility in question had Internet because the county has offices for their CSP program there as well...
the Internet is free just about everywhere you go these days, even if you can't afford it at home, and don't have a car, taking a bike ride to the nearest free computer terminal is probably good for your health even walking is possible in some places for some people.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html