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

7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?

pewresearch.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 405 posts

Re: 7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?

#71

Post by macintux »

gremlinsinc wrote: post #59
Sebb767 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> some are retirees who only have a land line (and genuinely don't use the Internet). A lot of phone lines use VoIP nowadays, so if they actually use the landline to call someone, there's a good chance they are using the internet anyway (even if their actual endpoint is still analog, which, in itself, is already becoming rare).

This was my thought... Do none of these people have credit or debit cards and only use cash and check? Because plastic uses the internet. Even when they go to the bank to get cash out, they're vicariously using the internet through the service reps terminal to look up their account etc... If they ever call customer support I wonder the percentage of voip ivr systems use.... Are they on the power grid? Pretty sure mos…

“I’m in a world that relies on the Internet thus I use the Internet” isn’t the most useful way to find out who uses the Internet.

Re: 7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?

#73

Post by wxnx »

A significant portion of the US is illiterate [1]. One might assume that being illiterate affects internet usage. Not quite as romantic as neo-Luddism, or even making a conscious choice not to expose oneself to potentially problematic patterns of communication.

[1] https://nces.ed.gov/datapoints/2019179.asp

Re: 7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?

#74

Post by TameAntelope »

hehetrthrthrjn wrote: post #66

Roughly speaking: it's the old, the poor, the uneducated, and the rural. That's not terribly surprising.

That's not true, urban and suburban are about half combined vs. rural. That's way less skewed rural than I would have expected.

Re: 7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?

#75

Post by Johnny555 »

My brother is one of them -- hard core blue collar worker, eschews a lot of modern technology, still carries a flip phone, and doesn't even use SMS. If I want to talk to him, I need to make a voice call, like a caveman. He doesn't have his cell phone turned on most of the time so his landline is the best way to reach him -- he even has a home answering machine. Not voicemail from his carrier, but an actual answering machine (though it's digital, not cassette tape).

His wife's view of the internet is pretty much only Facebook.

His kids are typical young adults, they have iPhones and are regulars on Instagram, Tiktok and other places that oldtimers like me don't usually visit -- they've moved on from Facebook... once their mom started using Facebook, they stopped using it.

Re: 7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?

#76

Post by random5634 »

I used to work in the Caribbean when internet there was ridiculously expensive.

Local social life was fantastic - I missed nothing about the internet. Also - I missed nothing about not keeping up to date on latest news - locals just didn't care what was going on for the most part - the latest "outrages" were 100% irrelevant. If you went to bar at night, and IF they had a TV on, it was sports.

So you'd come back to the states - and you'd have to catchup on everyone who had said terrible things.

Re: 7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?

#79

Post by Sebb767 »

macintux wrote: post #71
gremlinsinc wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was my thought... Do none of these people have credit or debit cards and only use cash and check? Because plastic uses the internet. Even when they go to the bank to get cash out, they're vicariously using the internet through the service reps terminal to look up their account etc... If they ever call customer support I wonder the percentage of voip ivr systems use.... Are they on the power grid? Pretty sure mos…

“I’m in a world that relies on the Internet thus I use the Internet” isn’t the most useful way to find out who uses the Internet.

Sure. But you need to clearly define this. Is looking at Facebook really that different from a EC payment? Both are just instructing some electronic device to send packets over the internet. Having a call via VoIP can be abstracted to the same thing.

I agree that the sledgehammer approach of saying 'everyone does' is not helpful, but neither is an unclear and inconsistent definition of use.

An actual solution might be to ask who directly pays for internet access or who knowingly uses it; the latter of which is probably what the study found.

Post reply on HN