11% of Americans don’t use the internet • Hacker News Board

Re: 11% of Americans don’t use the internet

#61

Post by nine_k » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 10:53 PM UTC

cm2187 wrote: post #53

simmons wrote: post #12

My Dad is in his early 70's and has never used the Internet. In fact, he never even had a cellphone until this year when I bought him a flip-phone and convinced him to accept it. I think he's plenty capable of learning such technology, he just doesn't see any compelling reason. And I think that's a perfectly reasonable choice -- I'm certainly not going to tell a senior citizen what they need to be happy. He is starti…

What is interesting is that it seems to have more to do with age than intellectual capacity. I know very smart 60yo+ doctors with a lifetime of scientific achievements, who understands concepts way more complicated than the IP protocol or a browser, and who just refuse to learn it. They might learn just how to use it but have no curiosity on how it works.

If you spent your life becoming very efficient in a particular environment, there's an incentive to keep this environment from changing, and not to expend any effort to learn a new environment. That learning capacity can be more efficiently spent elsewhere.

(An IT illustration: there are still places running RHEL6 in production and not seeing an effort to migrate from it worth the while. They have more important things to do.)

Re: 11% of Americans don’t use the internet

#62

Post by holygrail111 » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 10:53 PM UTC

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #16

thatswrong0 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like this is the same thing they said about tv, before that radio, before that..

I don't remember it ever being said about radio. TV certainly, but mainly it became a common theme after the arrival of Sky in UK. Now the kids had 13 channels of shit on the TV to choose from, and even dedicated channels for effortless excess consumption. For the early part of our kid's lives there was only an hour or two of kids TV a day - between end of school and around 5:30pm in time for the evening news. Limiti…

Nice pink floyd reference, see my above post about the mexicans and the africans, too.

Re: 11% of Americans don’t use the internet

#63

Post by Senderman » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 10:53 PM UTC

89% of Americans use the internet.

Re: 11% of Americans don’t use the internet

#64

Post by KamiCrit » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 10:54 PM UTC

At home I'm very proud of my triple monitor setup and second iteration of my hand assembled computer. The setup is built with ease of use in mind. To lazily chat with friends, unwind, and keep up with bleeding edge news.

When I leave my little tech temple, my mobile computer of choice is a flip phone. A substitute calculator and unit converter.

With no GPS it's great reading the land and people in it. Very occasionally I'll cheat and bum around in front of a cafe and use the tablet to find a spot but most plans are made at home on a printed map.

As stated in other articles here, it's great not having a slab fight for your attention with bleeps and red notifications while out on adventure.

TL;DR / Long story short: Be the friend at the restaurant conversing, not on the glass slab.

Re: 11% of Americans don’t use the internet

#65

Post by astura » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 10:57 PM UTC

kxrm wrote: post #37

simmons wrote: post #12

My Dad is in his early 70's and has never used the Internet. In fact, he never even had a cellphone until this year when I bought him a flip-phone and convinced him to accept it. I think he's plenty capable of learning such technology, he just doesn't see any compelling reason. And I think that's a perfectly reasonable choice -- I'm certainly not going to tell a senior citizen what they need to be happy. He is starti…

Side note: he should be able to get those forms at the post office.

The IRS will also mail them plus the directions if you call and ask.

Also, the library has internet access, so the librarian should be able to print them.

Re: 11% of Americans don’t use the internet

#66

Post by ralusek » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 10:58 PM UTC

KamiCrit wrote: post #64

At home I'm very proud of my triple monitor setup and second iteration of my hand assembled computer. The setup is built with ease of use in mind. To lazily chat with friends, unwind, and keep up with bleeding edge news. When I leave my little tech temple, my mobile computer of choice is a flip phone. A substitute calculator and unit converter. With no GPS it's great reading the land and people in it. Very occasional…

You're one very impressive 14 year old, clearly born in the wrong generation.

Re: 11% of Americans don’t use the internet

#67

Post by LaikaF » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 10:59 PM UTC

My Grandfather is one of those 11%. However I suspect he's a bit different from the others. Up until the late 90s he was programming Fortran and COBOL. He started during the Korean War or just after I believe. Towards the end he was mostly doing contract work as one of the few people who could still work on them. But after he retired technology stopped for him. The latest innovation he'll use is a DVD player. The only reason he doesn't have a tube TV is it died five years ago and we got him a flat screen.

To be fair he may never have gotten used to using a GUI on a PC or the internet at large. But still, it's my grandmother who runs their email account and shared cellphone.

Re: 11% of Americans don’t use the internet

#68

Post by getoffmyLAN » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 11:01 PM UTC

walrus01 wrote: post #38

Makes me wonder if when we are 80 years old, we'll be organizing retro LAN parties to play Unreal Tournament (1999 release) in our retirement homes.

I stopped LAN'ing way before that; and I'm from the early 80s. (80's of christ not of age.) Let's play something older. I stopped playing way before Unreal.

Re: 11% of Americans don’t use the internet

#69

Post by nine_k » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 11:01 PM UTC

xvector wrote: post #60

SamUK96 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even as a ~20-30 year old, libraries and them acting as community "hubs" seems so foreign already. Part of me worries about the growing individualist and transactional nature of our social lives that the internet is causing [citation needed, I know]. Part of me thinks that the easy way now where we can do IRS forms (and everything) online and to our door of our houses, will make us weak. There is some old Roman bit a…

> part of me worries about the growing individualist and transactional nature of our social lives that the internet is causing And yet we are growing closer together every day because of the internet. Technologies like Skype, Hangouts, and FaceTime enable human interaction like never before. As VR becomes mainstream, along with eye and face tracking, we can expect interaction over the internet to feel 99% as authenti…

> suffering and "hard times" are eliminated

There's an ancient intellectual tradition of Buddhism, very much concerned with elimination of suffering. What they came up with is that to stop suffering, one has to stop existing ("break the circle of re-incarnation").

What we can realistically hope for using engineering is to eliminate gross material causes of suffering, like famines, or large-scale warfare, or various illnesses. We can hope to eliminate hardships, but not tragedies, which are endogenous.

Just saying.

Re: 11% of Americans don’t use the internet

#70

Post by gurkendoktor » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 11:01 PM UTC

jMyles wrote: post #51

simmons wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if people or specifically children were happier in the 80s/90s, but after spending a couple of weeks with my 10-year-old niece, I'm completely floored at how she tries to fill every waking minute passively consuming content such as YouTube. It wouldn't be so bad if children were using the Internet to do something constructive or educational. Of course, plenty of people from my generation spent their chil…

> I'm completely floored at how she tries to fill every waking minute passively consuming content such as YouTube. ...is that so bad? She has an incredible world of content at her fingertips; what's the virtue in refraining from involving herself in it?

There are studies about the benefits of boredom:

https://www.melbournechildpsychology.com.au/blog/the-benefit...

I think there's plenty of "cultural evidence" for this too: the subreddit for wacky revelations is called /r/showerthoughts, and the shower is the last place where we have no screens or books around us.