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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?"
So there are 20% of Americans who wonder why in the world Hormel would be sending canned ham to people, and still complain about the amount of junk mail they receive via the USPS.
Amazing.
It's 18% of all households, not 20% of the US population.
From TFA: "Many people just don't see a reason to use computers and do not associate technology with the needs and demands of their daily lives," Barrett said. Shocker.
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
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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Just about 100% of all young, single females have never sent email to me!
The article says that it was a phone survey. This means: 1: The people are obviously not "Luddites who mourned the demise of the telegraph and have also never used a telephone", since they used a phone to answer the survey questions. 2: Most of the tech-savvy people I know don't even have land lines. They use cell phones or things like Skype, which are difficult to survey for various reasons. The people who go those routes have generally used email. Therefore, the sample population was already skewed toward people who wouldn't have used email anyway.
To put this into some form of perspective, strange here on Slashdot I know, but in reality for most people internet became a potential reality around 1998 (AOL going onto the internet from its walled garden) or at best 1996. So maybe another way to look at this study would be
From zero to 80% in 10/12/15 years, how the US has embraced email
Sure lots of the people here on Slashdot might have had an email account in the 80s, but that is an insignificant minority. I actually think that it is pretty impressive at 80% penetration given some of the literacy issues in the US education system.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
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.
Why are people who see no need to have a computer being called Luddites? I don't know that any of these people are opposed to progress, they simply don't have access to email equipment or don't use email even if they have access.
My mom and dad are definitely not Luddites, my mom used to be a Cobol programmer and my dad taught me electronics when I was small; they simply don't see any need for a computer in their home. They have cell phones, a 5.1 channel sound system, and DirectTV; but no computer.
When people see no need for televisions in their homes, should they also be called Luddites?
The summary, even leaving aside its tone, is flawed in that it seems to presuppose this is by choice.
I think people underestimate the amount of poverty - even in the US, where the official definition of poor still most often includes obesity, a car, 2 televisions, airconditioning, and other things seen as luxuries across most of the world.
If you have a family of 4, and are making a combined income of ~$30k/year, and have payments to make for housing/car/food/medical, you might be stretching to pay the PHONE bill much less have luxury money to spend on frivolities like a web connection. And yes, they are frivolities: if all of your friends are in similar financial circumstances, you have even less incentive because they aren't going to be online EITHER. Finally, even the web is squeezing these folks out - browsing by modem SUCKS, and it seems that more and more sites are building fancy flash front-ends that take minutes to d/l at modem speeds.
-Styopa
...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)
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.