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 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
No, the definition is 50% are below median. The median doesn't necessarily have to equal the average, although for a typical bell curve like intelligence it usually is pretty close.
Its not terribly hard to find a distribution where median and mean are not the same. Stereotypical heartbeat rate in a morgue. Video game level/skill/score.
The almost blindingly obvious reason 1/5 of the population doesn't use the net is its almost impossible and fairly pointless if you're functionally illiterate. Which is probably a good description of about 1/5 the population. I had a former boss who "bragged" about not reading a book since high school... punchline was he had gray hair. Probably not a amazon/kindle customer, etc.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
No, but I wonder why dumb people so many words.
That hypothesis doesn't explain why 94% of people age 18-29 use the internet, unless intelligence and/or literacy rates have massively increased.
A simpler hypothesis is that old people don't use the internet, and young people do, and other factors are minimal.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I agree. I think that the huge influx of laypersons onto the Internet has been both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, having more people of all social, economic and education backgrounds has encouraged a more rounded environment. It has allowed websites to flourish which otherwise may have been little more than a niche sites back when it was mostly university geeks and researchers. But on the other, we have a subset of people who are more open to scams, who place a larger burden on support resources and who are unable to deal with issues such as compromised computers infected with Trojan horses.
But the bigger and darker issue is that the Internet is much more about user feedback than at any time before. It is a place where every voice and opinion can receive an equal audience. What happens when you have millions of uneducated riff-raff joining in the conversation, especially when the topic is political in nature? It often drags the quality of the conversation down. You end up with people parroting their worldviews rather than thinking about the subject at hand. Unless that environment is heavily moderated, it will end up sullied.
As to the groups of people who are underrepresented on the Internet, I'm relieved that is the case. While some of them may begin to change their worldviews from being exposed to more ideas, I think the benefit to society would be greatly outweighed by the damage such people would cause. But the genie is already out of the bottle. Costs will continue to drop and more services will simply require Internet access in order to procure them. Internet penetration will continue to climb. I think that it is inevitable that everyone will have access, and we as a society will just have to adapt to it, for better or worse.
I prefer Miss South Carolina's explaination of why 20% of Americans aren't on the internet:
“I personally believe, that U.S. Americans, are unable to do so, because uh, some, people out there, in our nation don’t have computers. and uh...I believe that our education like such as in South Africa, and the Iraq, everywhere like such as...and, I believe they should uh, our education over here, in the U.S. should help the U.S. or should help South Africa, and should help the Iraq and Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future, for us.”