Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

11% of Americans don’t use the internet

thehustle.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 295 posts

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

#171

Post by IIAOPSW »

It blew my mind when I visited my grandmother recently.

There's a computer in the household. My grandfather used it avidly since the days of dialup. He didn't give up the dialup connection until well into the 2010s. I'm not sure if he still uses it. My grandmother was never interested in it.

My grandmother still certainly has her wits about her. She does NOT fit the mold of someone un-skeptical or easily swayed due to senility. Yet like many older people she voted for Trump despite voting Democrat in the past and living in a very blue area. This of course is very curious to me.

Eventually my conversation with my grandmother went to the topic of news media. I had mentioned that I do not like the way news reports anecdotes and not data and paints a misleading picture. I mentioned a few of my favorite sources which eschew this trend (fivethirtyeight, the economist etc).

My grandmother replies that she knows full well the news is garbage. The thing is to my grandmother the news is whatever she can buy at the corner news stand. Her options are the New York Post or the Daily News. She has considered maybe spending the extra money to buy the New York Times.

Coming from a world where news comes in an infinite stream from infinite sources straight into my pocket 24/7, it completely blew my mind that news for her comes from 2 sources and only once a day and both are owned by Murdoch. I am used to a world where debates can abruptly end with "lets look it up". In the world of my grandmother, remembering a few stories from the papers and friends is the only reasonable basis to form an opinion on anything.

Maybe we've overvalued the importance of fake news on the internet.

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

#172

Post by mjevans »

pmiller2 wrote: post #150
EGreg wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If literacy involves writing, then most kids are illiterate. Remember the three R’s? Now it’s down to two. Well, maybe one (American kids have long been using calculators). But a deeper question is, what do we actually lose if people can’t write by hand or do arithmetic?

Writing typically refers to composition, not penmanship. I’m not actually sure penmanship has suffered much from ubiquitous computing. It would be interesting to do a study on it.

Depends what you want out of kids. I can tell you how to NOT do it.

Don't start with block lettering for all of pre and grade school, then switch to ONLY cursive for 3 years... now I can't write anything nicely. It's still readable, more so to me.

As for actual composition, don't force kids in to a rigid structure all the time. Maybe they've changed that too. It took me years to write in a more free form.

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

#173

Post by amake »

reaperducer wrote: post #137
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.

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. I know a woman who until recently worked as a secretary to one of the presidents of a large regional bank. The first thing she did each morning was to print out the president's e-mails, and bring them to him on paper. He would the…

> - She dressed the part; coming to work in a proper business suit and briefcase each day, not carrying a backpack like a sixth-grader.

> - She didn't mind making coffee for the boss. It's a hate crime to even ask these days, but she did it happily.

This seems like very strange editorializing to me. Do backpacks bother you so much? Who is complaining about making coffee if that's in the job description?

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

#174

Post by oh_sigh »

IIAOPSW wrote: post #171

It blew my mind when I visited my grandmother recently. There's a computer in the household. My grandfather used it avidly since the days of dialup. He didn't give up the dialup connection until well into the 2010s. I'm not sure if he still uses it. My grandmother was never interested in it. My grandmother still certainly has her wits about her. She does NOT fit the mold of someone un-skeptical or easily swayed due t…

Presumably your grandmother has had the same news options for the past... many years, and was subject to the same pressures. Are you just thinking about this now because she voted against your wishes?

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

#175

Post by flukus »

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…

> (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.)

We're currently re-building all our systems to target RHEL6 because that's what the execs decided, if we're lucky the project will be done before it's end of lifed. They also decided that we'd be using modern c++, more modern than the GCC that ships with RHEL6. Thanks to these largely incompatible requirements the team responsible has practically built their own distro on top of RHEL6, with a newer gcc and a rebuild of all the libraries we use complete with it's own package management system. I think it's customized enough that a highly doubt redhat could off us any support anyway.

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

#176

Post by aacook »

I left a comment about this on HN the other day (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17562306) - 8 months ago, I launched a product to serve the older population, blending old and new, called NanaGram (https://nanagram.co). We let you send printed photos to a loved one in the mail with just a text message.

Older people like my late grandfather are some of the happiest I've ever met. I think one of their secrets is growing up in a more disconnected world. I've honed my ability to stay off the internet for long periods of time but this skill is just the default state for many older people and isn't a challenge they face. I didn't always struggle with internet addiction and remember life before and after the internet. Some of my most joyful moments in the past year have been visiting loved ones just after spending 2 or 3 days completely disconnected.

There's a great book called Happiness is a Choice You Make about the "oldest old", people over the age of 85. I touched on in the book in this blog entry and expanded on some of the lessons I learned hanging out with my 94-year-old grandfather as often as possible over the last couple years: https://nanagram.co/blog/on-happiness-from-tirrell-cook.

My grandfather never learned how to internet but we did have a hilarious unboxing moment with the Amazon Echo this past December. He made it to a viral TV show and tried to negotiate for bitcoin as compensation. While it was very promising, we never truly got his Echo habit to stick as he and my grandmother kept pressing the wrong buttons. https://nanagram.co/blog/echo-show-unboxing

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

#177

Post by aacook »

LaikaF wrote: post #67

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 onl…

That's incredible. Have you interviewed him with audio or video yet?

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

#179

Post by aacook »

ezequiel-garzon wrote: post #45

It’s reasonable to assume that 11% of the adult US population is still illiterate [1]. I know this is not unique to the US, and that these people may very well be as happy as anyone else. Still, if we sometimes point out that HN is a bit of a bubble, well there’s a big bubble I can’t wrap my mind around well into the 21st century! I would certainly be surprised if an illiterate person made heavy use of the Internet (…

Maybe they make up some part of the 11% but I imagine age is a big factor. The old folks I know who don't use the Internet are some of the most well-read, whip-smart people I've met.

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

#180

Post by IIAOPSW »

oh_sigh wrote: post #174
IIAOPSW wrote: post #171

It blew my mind when I visited my grandmother recently. There's a computer in the household. My grandfather used it avidly since the days of dialup. He didn't give up the dialup connection until well into the 2010s. I'm not sure if he still uses it. My grandmother was never interested in it. My grandmother still certainly has her wits about her. She does NOT fit the mold of someone un-skeptical or easily swayed due t…

Presumably your grandmother has had the same news options for the past... many years, and was subject to the same pressures. Are you just thinking about this now because she voted against your wishes?

My grandmothers news options didn't manifest in any unexpected way in the past. Nothing to do with my wishes.
Post reply on HN