Slashdot Mirror
The Digital Differences In Americans
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.'"
People earning less cash can afford less things! Who'da thought it?
If that's true, then who's misspelling the captions on all those cat pictures?
How do these people get their pornography? Surely, they don't enjoy the librarians tutting at them when they use the free library computers to consume media of naked people.
Yay, botnet hosts who can't get the botnet clients because they're not using the means to do so. Need more people like them :)
...are by definition below average intelligence.
Why would we think that 100% of people would be able to use the internet on their own? Or get a higher education for that matter?
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?!?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I've got family that live out in the country, and their dial-up service was so slow and noisy that they could only reach 14.4Kbps for 5 minutes at a time. Naturally they dropped service and haven't tried it since.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
TV is for poorer, less educated people. The internet is for richer, higher educated people. Thought everyone knew that.
I get all the gossip I need from my neighbors, bartenders, and hair stylist
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
TV is for poorer, less educated people.
But then how are less educated people supposed to become more educated? NBC, ABC, CBS/CW, and My/Fox haven't been doing a lot of good in that respect IMO.
I know a few people who make under 30k a year. They all pay $100/mo for cable TV and complain they cannot afford paying for the Internet.
Priorities.
Perhaps they should just ask God and Jesus for internet access.?
Or maybe instead of spending all that time in church and reading the bible, they could be trying to get an education instead of studying about the Great Flood and first rainbow.
The poor in the USA, especially the south are the most uneducated bunch of religious, shit-kickers I've ever known. They truly believe the logical fallacy: "He's poor therefore wise." Yet insist in shoving money at TV preachers.
If you don't believe me, just check the demographics for Mississippi.
Given that most of the people who are "permanently offline" are people aged 65 or over, who are simply too old the learn the ins & outs of the often times complex & confounding interwebs, maybe there should be a project to create a kind of "Eldernet" for older people? This would be an alternative, simplified internet with bigger text & images, text-to-speech functionality (for those who are vision impaired), much simpler navigation & search (maybe voice-commands like "how much does a lawnchair cost at the local Walmart" or "take me to the Bank of America customer services page"). Also, crucially, no advertising, pop-up windows, and other things that can clutter up the screen and make for mental confusion would be allowed. In short: A sort of easy-to-use Fisher-Price version of the Internet & browser (& maybe OS too), for those too old to deal with the complexity and nagging problems of, say, a Windows 8 Laptop running IE or Firefox. Another nice idea would be to offer free internet-access to people past retirement age, paired with elderly-user-friendly "Eldernet" functionality. It might make the world a more civilized place for all involved...
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
The noun 'Internet' is capitalized. It appears in this article both with a lower case 'i' and a capital, so I guess the author wasn't sure....
first world problem.
Facts take all of the premium out of arm waving - T. Reynolds
Were they included? Most everyone i know in ALL economic segments have one.. and those are "online".
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Just head to any major city and start looking for the homeless camps. It does exist.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Only 44% of the residences which can get cable TV actually buy it. In comparison, 68% of US households have broadband access. (3% are still on dialup.) That's impressive reach for an industry that barely existed a decade ago.
Bear in mind that a significant fraction of the US population barely reads. 14% of the US adult population has "below basic literacy skills." They are not likely to find a computer very useful. Another 15% of Internet penetration and everyone who can read will be connected.
Measured by a different study, the most connected major countries are at 80%, +- 2%. The US and Japan are at 78%, Germany is at 80%, Korea is at 81%, and the UK is at 82%.
Poor people are more likely to be idiots (why else would they remain poor and not figure out how to make money).
Idiots tend not to want to use the Internet as much (who wants to sit at a computer for fun? that's nerd stuff)
Case closed.
The sky is blue, the moon is the major driving force behind the tides, and Slashdot makes car analogies.
I not no how to uze internets, but me has gun and can drive the car to beer store.
What was once true, is no longer so
All the state/federal check recipeints that I know have internet if they want it and haven't worked a day in their lives, hell they are even getting free cell phones
$698 is what someone on SSI (NOT SSDI) receives in one month. When 50 dollars is 7% of monthly income, those prices are out there.
In the US, most households earn between $30,000 and $75,000 and most people have degrees between high school diploma and phd thesis.
All the statistics given in the summary about irrelevant minorities.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Dumbest-Generation-n/dp/B001JQ383K/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1334530582&sr=8-2
>> 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.'"
Curious, in that you can make the same statement regarding genitalia and birth control.
Free Internet service providers like Netzero exist (though you do need to pay for a phone line to access them and it assumes they have a dial up access number in your area so that you can avoid long distance charges). Sure they are slow but they're better than nothing.
Having said that, I do agree that every home should have access to a basic, affordable internet connection with reasonable (though not necessarily high) speed. While I'm generally against government intervention this is one area where I don't mind the government intervening and either requiring ISP's to freely provide it to homes or for the government to provide it themselves. At the very least, the government should abolish it's government established communication infrastructure monopolies.
Internet access has a monthly fee. Internet access at throughput capable of video has a higher monthly fee. The "farmer five" OTA channels in the United States have no such fee. The assumption that I detect is that poor people are more likely to consider broadband a droppable luxury service when trying to make ends meet.