Slashdot Mirror
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?"
People still RENT their phones...
http://www.clientleasingservices.com/
750,000 of them, according to usatoday...
http://www.usatoday.com/news/offbeat/2006-09-14-phone_x.htm
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
The argument could be made that if you aren't using e-mail, you're using the post, and as post goes by car or airplane it results in more carbon emissions. But as with all global warming issues, things are rarely so simple.
Why does everything come down to carbon emissions lately, and what does that have to do with the summary. But sure, I'll bite. You're using e-mail. The entire time you're writing it you're sitting at a computer using between 150W and 300W (typical). Probably half a dozen devices between your computer and the destination server are responsible for transmitting the packets over long distances (your modem, the various routers and mail servers). The NSA intercepts your e-mail, automatically runs AI on it in a massive data farm, which uses quite a lot of CPU time. Meanwhile a letter is read with zero power emissions at both ends, and it is transported with tens of thousands of other letters, the inefficient part of the transport being only near the local destination.
But honestly, I just pulled that out of my ass, and so did you, and probably so will anyone else who replies. But that will still be more interesting than the questions raised in the summary..
from wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States
Poverty in the United States is cyclical in nature with roughly 12% to 15% living below the federal poverty line at any given point in time, and roughly 40% falling below the poverty line at some time within a 10 year time span.
if you are living below the poverty line then a computer and the increasingly large amount of power it uses are a unavailable luxury.
According to http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats14.htm 71.4% of the entire US population uses the internet.
Assuming that the 6.8% of the population is under 5 years old and doesn't use the internet, and assuming that the 12.4% of the population is over 65 doesn't use the internet, leaves about 9.4% of the population unaccounted for.
Also, what about the 14 - 25 year old demographic who are using SMS rather than email?
So, I guess what I am saying here is that if only 71.4% of the US has access to the internet, how is it possible that 18% of all households don't use email?
According to this Newsweek article from 2002, in 2002 44M of the (then approx. 280M) US population were functionally illiterate.
http://www.shashitharoor.com/articles/newsweek/illiterate.php
From other sources about 11-12% of the US population is below the official poverty level, and I'll bet there's only partial overlap of that figure will the functionally illiterate group.
From that perspective 80% of households using e-mail seems remarkably high, especially for such a new technology with such a high barrier (computer ownership/literacy, internet access, intellectual curiosity) to entry.
Different things work for different people who work in different contexts. In my work, email is hopelessly slow and ineffective. I can't wait an hour or a day or a week to exchange information with someone. Very often, my entire workflow depends on getting the right piece of information - the answer to a question, a critical point of data, the name of a person who I need to get in touch with. If I rely solely on email, my workflow stops until I get a response. It would be a crazy, foolish mistake to do so.
So declarations that email is more efficient or effective than using the phone are only true within a very narrow work context. That context may be common among slashdotters - writing code in cubicle-land, for example - but in my experience the delays caused by email are VERY often workflow critical failure points. From a management and operations standpoint, CFPs are unacceptable; you do everything you can to eliminate them.
Lastly, the anonymity and temporal disjunction of email makes it a much easier way for many people to communicate with others than a real-time conversation. I don't fault people for being introverted, shy, uncomfortable, antisocial, or otherwise unable to communicate well with others in conversation, but having said that I think email has become a crutch for many folks who lack the ability to confidently and effectively communicate with others in a professional work environment. There simply is no replacement for a real conversation. If you can't have one with your co-workers, your boss, or your customers, then your career - and life - options are going to be severely limited.
A-Bomb
20% of America lives like the better-off portions of the 3rd world (it's not all the Congo and Burma).
If you didn't have an office job and half your family and friends weren't dispersed around the country or world, and you only used publicly provided internet like a library for essentials like taxes and job hunting, who would you email?
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!