As soon as I can find myself a stable career that does not involve the internet, I'm throwing away my computer and smartphone.
7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?
81–90 of 405 posts
Re: 7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've lost a few very good friends due to this. In-person and online interactions with the same person would vary wildly in tone and emotional intensity, like speaking to two entirely different people. The online interactions always pushed us apart, and the in-person interactions never failed to mend things, but of course those stopped happening over the previous year. I have to assume it's the same way with me toward…
There is a shocking amount of "non-human" activity. I think there are definitely bots, but also people that are paid to promote one narrative or another (paid with money or social validation). I've trolled through many a twitter/reddit account when I sniff something off about a post. They are often hyper focused on a single topic, pushing a specific point of view. Rarely is this mentioned. Its "hail corporate" vibes…
But people are, too! You only need to talk to my grandmother for 5 minutes and I swear you'll get to hear how bad the CDU is as a party.
If I ran a bot, sprinkling in a few off-topic comments is a very easy way to both get reputation/karma and look less suspicious. Humans with an agenda are far less concerned about that.
Re: 7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
“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 b…
“Internet adoption” is the phrase that recurs in the linked article.
Re: 7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?
#84I wish I could limit the use of Internet to 1 hour per day. Like the olden days in the early days of internet.
Internet was given in our university for only 1 hour per day. It was possible to live in this manner even when I used to do programming. All programming documentation was available as PDFs or downloadable copies. I remember the MSDN documentation for C++ could be kept on the local machine. For Python I used to keep a PDF copy of the tutorial and reference i think.
These days I don't know anymore if that style of working will still work. Software has become so complex and error messages have become so many and so complex that I think we need access to internet all the time while programming. To see resolution to strange errors in Stack Overflow or on GitHub issues.
I wish all software developers did not assume that I am connected to the Internet all the time. It will be good if we can have a world where local-first internet-optional style of programming is still there.
Re: 7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?
#85I 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 th…
This sounds like paradise. Maybe Starlink isn't such a good idea after all.
Re: 7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?
#86I 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 th…
People always bring up how people in Fiji or the Carribean are so happy and not stressed, and I’m not sure what the message is. Of course if you just want to relax and not worry too much about what you want to accomplish in life then yeah go to some corner of the world and live happily? However for a lot of people that’s not what they want out of their lives; they want it to mean something in their own way. Of course the vast majority get lost in the rat race and forget what it is that made them choose to work their ass of to begin with, but it’s not because their ultimate goal (at least in the beginning) was to chill at the beach.
Re: 7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being on social media is only a subset of being online. Plenty of people are not on social media but still watch tv, bank, and get gps directions online.
Watching TV via the internet is not really "using" the internet IMO. I mean it is, but it's just the protocol on the wire. Otherwise it's not really different from when your TV was connected to an antenna or cable.
Is scrolling on Twitter/Facebook using the Internet, then? Sure, it uses the Internet, but it's not much different from the reade letters section of the newspaper.
Re: 7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, it got me thinking about this blog post I read a long time ago. https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/netslum/
That was amusing, but the linked "25,000 word screed sketching the transformation of the Internet from an open network of peers to a locked-down medium for delivering commercial content to passive consumers" [1] was even more interesting. From 2003, no less! [1] https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/
Yeah, I remember reading this back in high school too! Interesting that he got the concept (loss of anonymity and micropayment) right, but the mechanism wrong. Instead it was all done by selling your data to 3rd parties. IMO much worse even than what the author proposed.
Re: 7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do they have a smart phone and realize that every app is online? That face time is online? This study seems flawed if it didn't get very specific because there's not a small number of tech illiterate ppl who don't even realize they're online when they are....
This was also my thought. I find it hard to believe that 65+ years old don't use navigation on their phone when driving, or googling even basic information.
Mom has seen GPS nav on my phone, but she’s too frugal to let me get her one. She has a feature phone that’s only on when she leaves home.
I got her a cheap laptop and she does have cable internet (and knows the difference between being online and having an outage), so she’s pretty much where I was in 2005 when 3G was almost unusable. I can imagine her getting by without them, just like they did in 1990.
Re: 7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?
#90I 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 th…
Part of what you’re describing can be attributed to lack of internet. But other part is just being an outsider that doesn’t really care that much (and I mean that in totally non offensive way - it’s just a benefit of being an outsider).
Outrage existed long before internet. Daily tv news, newspapers, gossips at work, coworker with totally opposite world view, etc, were all great sources of outrage. At smaller scale, true, but living without internet doesn’t create perfect world.