2 ms·
These two lines: >The majority of households in four rural counties - Perry, Monroe, Conecuh and Greene - don’t have any sort of internet access > Mississippi
by astura 7y ago
These two lines:
>The majority of households in four rural counties - Perry, Monroe, Conecuh and Greene - don’t have any sort of internet access
> Mississippi has the worst mark in the country. Thirty percent of households there don’t have any access to the World Wide Web.
make it clear they are talking about "ability to access the internet from their house by any means" not just a dedicated broadband connection at home. So that would also include people who don't own smartphones and/or tablets and people who have no cell phone service at home.
- sokoloff 7y agoThat’s the clear implication of the words in the article. I’m not convinced it’s accurate, given that over 81% of adult Americans (not households) own a smartphone and if they had data which included they were considering smartphones as excluded, I’d expect them to specify that for clarity. I find many instances where a journalist reads a finding of “no internet” and interprets it for readers to say “no access to World Wide Web” and in the process making it wrong. In a Census survey format, people who don’t have wired internet but do have a smartphone are very much liable to answer that they “don’t have internet at home”. I’m 95% sure my quite well educated parents would answer that way in that circumstance. A possible control question on the survey would be “how many smartphones are owned by your household?” The finding is based on data from 2017 and reported on (in headline form at least) as “news”. I’m not disputing what the text says. If it’s 100% accurate, that’s appalling, of course.