"Of those online holdouts, over a third said....
... that they felt the internet was "not relevant" to them"
Porn is relevant to everyone, almost without exception.
HTH
Steven 'ducking to avoid the downvotes' R
The latest data from the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project has found that there is still a sizable percentage of Americans who really don't get this internet thing, with 15 per cent never going online and another 9 per cent only doing so at work. US internet use data from Pew 47 million people still …
But I don't blame most of them.
Viruses, bot nets, recto-cranial-inverted website designers, tracking, unreliable connections, unreliable operating system, non-intuitive everything, superfluous crap that slows downs connections, pop-ups, phishing, fake alerts, log ins for everything+dog, moved links, browser updates every month that change the interface, discontinued services without notice, spam, spam and more spam, etc.
I'm sure I'm leaving out a couple of hundred other inconvenience and annoyance and a few nasty surprises as well.
Are you starting to see the trend here?
The 15% figure seems fairly representative. Some of the people I work with have parents or even (really old) grandparents who don't even own a computer. Add in the terribly poor and those who live in places where even satellite Internet service isn't available and they're probably pretty close.
I can generally find major flaws in representative samplings but this actually sounds right.
The only thing I would wonder about is of part of that non-using population actually does use the Interet via mobile phone but don't realize that's what they're doing. I know people who can barely read but who have Galaxy S III's. It wouldn't surprise me to learn they didn't know they were on the Internet sometimes...
Its not everyone's first reflex.
At my parent's office, I was having a disagreement about facts with my step mother; when I suggested that we check on the internet for the actual numbers she got this odd look in her eye.
They mostly use the internet connection for email and a bit of shopping; using it as an encyclopedia was a new idea.
My Mum falls into the 'using it by proxy, but not actually using it' category. We've tried to get her online, but why would she? She's already living in the future. She has a completely voice controlled operating system that will print emails, show her facebook, buy tickets for shows, in fact it'll do almost anything computer related without her ever having to actually sit in front of one. He's called my Dad.
... won't use it because it's the Spawn of Satan and a Sign of the Coming of the Anti-Christ and a Symbol of the Corruption and Decadence which their Once Great Nation has fallen prey to with all those Commie Left Wing Fags controlling all the News Media (apart from that Last Bastion of the Truth, Fox News) and Goddamn Pinko Democrats especially the one who sits in the White House...
There is enough content available offline, that you could spend your entire life reading/watching/listening to it, and never have to repeat anything.
It's not self-evident that the content available online is qualitatively any better than offline. There's "more" of it, certainly, and if you believe you've got some way of filtering or searching it for "high quality" work then it makes sense to try; but I, for one, have lost faith in such mechanisms. Basically, our best chance is "a publisher with consistent quality standards", and how many of those are left?
So I don't blame anyone who wants to stay out of it. Good for them, I wish them every happiness.
"While 15 per cent might sound like a lot (over 47 million people, according to the latest census data) the rate of online luddism is falling steadily – back in 2004 over a third of US citizens were offline."
File this under "D'uh! (For Obvious)". As the stats show, the younger you are the more likely it is that you've made some sort of connection to the internet. Given that 44% of the non-connected are the elderly, it's rather obvious that that percentage would be dropping over time BECAUSE THEY'RE DIEING OFF!
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I am a volunteer teacher of computing stuff for the over 50s (I'm retired). These statistics for older people are probably about right. Older people's use of Internet can often be constrained by financial circumstances and physical frailties.
We group our pupils in several ways, and can predict fairly reliably how successful "The Internet" will be for them:-
It might actually be worth trying them with an easier version of linux, esp the ones with the ancient windows boxes. Once the system is up and running, and you've shown them the process of installing from the package manager, it should last longer before needing a service. That said, you will have to pick a version for them, and install it, and check it works with all the hardware so they aren't faced with a non-operational wifi card (or similar) from the outset.
@monkeyfish
As in the post above, we use DSL and demonstrate Puppy. We also use Ubuntu and Debian (both too hard for most pupils).
After spending too much of my working life writing (DOS and Windows) software; in retirement I run a small Debian server, an IMac and a MkI iPad. My wife is waiting for the Mk5 iPad before she buys herself one.
If I have to help my successors, I fire Windows up in a VM. Other than as a volunteer, I don't do Windows stuff. Hypocritically, Windows was great when I was getting paid quite a lot of money to work with it - Bill's IT job creation project - But not so good when you have to support it for yourself. The *NIX stuff I learnt 30+ years ago is a comfortable place to be in both Linux and OS X. I play with a Raspberry Pii.
For some of the older people that I know computing is now a tablet and WiFi.
"For some of the older people that I know computing is now a tablet and WiFi."
Same for most of the teenagers I teach, except $tablet includes $phone.
Times change. One adult student wanted to access a flash based teaching site. She has an iPad. IT support provided instructions for downloading an RDP app and accessing her College Windows 7 desktop from which she can access the Flash based Web site...
"Of those online holdouts, over a third said that they felt the internet was "not relevant" to them, and 32 per cent said that using it was either too hard or that they were concerned about the threat of viruses and identity theft. This latter figure has nearly doubled since Pew's 2010 survey. and shows that the rising tide of online crime is a significant deterrent effect to use."
NO. Back to maths class, guys. What has "nearly doubled" is a percentage of a percentage. Without the previous numbers, it's meaningless.
Depending on which figure you take off that graph as "2010", the number of holdouts back then could have been as high as 26%; now it's only 15%. And assume for the sake of argument that the percentage concerned about viruses then was 17% (so that 32% is "nearly double" the old figure). Then we're talking about 32% of 15% (4.8%) of Americans now, versus 17% of 26% ((4.4%) of Americans back in 2010. No great change, and probably well within the margins of statistical error. But that doesn't make as good a story.