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11% of Americans don’t use the internet

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

#81

Post by cbcoutinho »

nine_k wrote: post #61
cm2187 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thin…

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail

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

#82

Post by Retra »

pixelmonkey wrote: post #55

This is a shockingly small number. For comparison, Pew reports that 24% of Americans have not read a single book, in whole or in part, in 2017. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/03/23/who-doesnt-r...

How much of a book must one read to qualify as reading a book? Do we include online books that are unfinished, or not read start-to-finish?

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

#84

Post by pathartl »

pixelmonkey wrote: post #55

This is a shockingly small number. For comparison, Pew reports that 24% of Americans have not read a single book, in whole or in part, in 2017. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/03/23/who-doesnt-r...

That number doesn't surprise me. I personally did not read a book in whole or in part in 2017 or 2016. It's something I don't need to do for my career and is not a past time of mine. My reading primarily comes from the internet. When I do read it's maybe a handful of books in a year.

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

#85

Post by megaremote »

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.

> who understands concepts way more complicated than the IP protocol or a browser

Do you need to now IP protocol to use the internet?

Old people generally don't like change, they have things set up as they like them.

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

#86

Post by megaremote »

x0x0 wrote: post #50
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…

My parents were internet-free until they figured out that a smartphone could show them pictures of grandkids. My siblings with kids were printing and mailing them pictures, but out parents were cut out of the daily fb updates of their grandchildren.

It is funny, I think that is pretty standard stuff, getting instant photos. But it is actually a huge change compared to how things were 20 years ago.

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

#87

Post by pixelmonkey »

guildenstern wrote: post #71
pixelmonkey wrote: post #55

This is a shockingly small number. For comparison, Pew reports that 24% of Americans have not read a single book, in whole or in part, in 2017. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/03/23/who-doesnt-r...

What’s the connection between reading books and the internet, aside from literacy? They’re such different things, I’m not clear on the connection between reading and the internet.

> I’m not clear on the connection between reading and the internet.

Prior to the internet, books were the only way humans consumed large amounts of textual information. Now, we have web pages, which 89% of people use, whereas books, which have never been more accessible, still linger at 76% usage.

One assumes of the 89% of people who use the Internet, 100% of them use web browsers, web sites, and thus read lots of textual information. That's as close to 100% penetration for a technology as you're gonna get, in my view. I wonder what percentage of Americans use toothbrushes!

I suppose there might be some subset of Internet users who exclusively use YouTube/Netflix (children, maybe?) That would be the only wrinkle in the comparison, IMO.

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

#88

Post by novia »

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?

I'm not the OP, but having also watched a ten year old consume YouTube videos... they tend to stay far far away from anything remotely educational.

For example, this is the kind of thing that the particular kid I know watches: https://youtu.be/5O66ssNpg_A

22 million views. So basically nothing is gained from watching these sorts of videos. But what's lost? Maybe the opportunity to connect with family members?

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

#89

Post by xvector »

nine_k wrote: post #69
xvector wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 i…

Agreed. Elimination of material causes is the best we can do given our current lack of insight into the brain. The discussion becomes much more interesting when we do begin to gain that insight when coupled with the ability precisely and extensively modify it.

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

#90

Post by pixelmonkey »

Retra wrote: post #82
pixelmonkey wrote: post #55

This is a shockingly small number. For comparison, Pew reports that 24% of Americans have not read a single book, in whole or in part, in 2017. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/03/23/who-doesnt-r...

How much of a book must one read to qualify as reading a book? Do we include online books that are unfinished, or not read start-to-finish?

The cited study was a number for "in whole or in part". So, in other words, 24% of Americans "neither cracked open a print book nor sat down in front of a Kindle to start reading a digital one."
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