58 ms·

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

334 points by ipsocannibal 6y ago

hooande 6y ago
It's surprising how many people here equate "the Internet" with "social media". It's like having access to 1,000,000 x the Library of Alexandria every day and only being interested in keeping up with what people are talking about in the lobby
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- INTPenis 6y ago
  Exactly, that's how it is. The library has never been a happening spot. The happening kids, if forced to the library by an authority figure, would just spend the time whispering, gossiping, and playing around with their friends. I bet you were one of those nerds who actually USED the library. :D I was too.
- dalbasal 6y ago
  Well... I assume that most Alexandrians weren't to be found in the library, at any given moment in time. In any case, a smartphone with social media (fb even) was the entry point to personal computing for most people on earth. They entered through the lobby, I guess.
- fulafel 6y ago
  Yep, shifting the terms reframes the issues. Even library of alexandria sounds a bit biased toward the web and similar things. The fundamental thing is the decentralized packet switched network that lets any node talk to any other node where anyone can build new applications on it. (But sadly a lot of people aren't directly on the internet anymore, and have only indirect access via a IPv4 NAPT gateway).
  - shartshooter 6y ago
    "People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole"
- psyc 6y ago
  Heck, I bristle as it is when people equate the internet with the web!
- Dirlewanger 6y ago
  Because that's all the majority of the population knows. Their Internet is social media.
boring_twenties 6y ago
I've been using the Internet since 1992-3. Lately I'm feeling more and more like these 7% have the right idea.
- haltingproblem 6y ago
  I often think of what life would be without using the internet. Observing a electronics sabbath usually on sat, seems like a good idea. Not Jewish but feel that the Rabbis of old were on to something.
  - regextegrity 6y ago
    Why not just turn off your router? Lightbulbs and refrigerators are surprisingly useful
    - frosted-flakes 6y ago
      Lightbulbs and refrigerators don't contain electronics. I mean, modern LED lightbulbs contain some primitive electronics, but basic refrigerators do not. By "electronics", the GP means consumer electronic devices like computers, televisions, and smartphones.
      - Sebb767 6y ago
        > Lightbulbs and refrigerators don't contain electronics. > By "electronics", the GP means consumer electronic devices like computers, Have you looked at refrigerators lately? "Smart" ones are very common and even the cheapest ones basically all use electronics to control the temperature and the cooling cycle. Nothing sophisticated, yes, but if LEDs count, these definitely do, as well.
        frosted-flakes 6y ago
        That's why I said basic refrigerators, which still have compressors controlled by an analogue thermostat. Like the kind you find in a typical cheap rental apartment. Refrigerators are one of those appliances that really do not benefit much from "smart" technology. And LEDs don't count; that's my point.
nonameiguess 6y ago
My dad doesn't use the Internet. Not on principle or anything, but he grew up without it, has friends but meets them in person or talks on the phone, same as he has for the past 40 years. He's retired now, but never needed it working as a skilled tradesman with a county job. In retirement, he still builds stuff, but physical stuff. No need for Internet. My ex-wife's mom also didn't use the Internet, but she was a schizophrenic who believed the FBI was following her around her entire life and has spent much of the past 40 years institutionalized. So those are at least two very different types of people, and that's just people living in big cities. I'm sure there are still a fair number of rural people who couldn't make much use of the Internet even if they wanted to. Another ex of mine grew up on a farm in Amish country. Not Amish, but all the neighbors were. They didn't use Internet.
- axaxs 6y ago
  Same with mine. And I'll be damned, he seems to get by just fine with letters and phone calls, probably with even less hassle than I have using only the internet and avoiding phone calls.
- Forge36 6y ago
  My grandfather doesn't ”use the internet", my grandmother uses email (not sure what else). They do watch Netflix now via roku (they used to have a blockbuster subscription so they could go and pickup DVDs). Is that the internet?
  - auiya 6y ago
    If they're using an ISP for anything, yes. That's the Internet.
- coldcode 6y ago
  My mom grew up in Nazi Germany and never went to college. Yet for the last decade of her life she used email and web every day (iMac and then Mac mini) to explore the world (and sometimes actually go there). She didn't need the internet at all, but embraced it anyway. Age is not an obstacle to new things, but attitude is. My uncle and aunt had multiple devices for their entire 80-90 decade of life, until he passed away and she developed too many health issues. Yet my cousin(s) in a small town in Germany rarely use email or internet at all (which I think is not unusual there) as everything they need is available locally. I've spent my whole adult life using computers and writing software - I still routinely help people in younger generations explaining things that baffle them. People still have a limited understanding of how the internet works.
jasonjei 6y ago
Let’s suppose they call a customer service desk that uses Internet tools to help them—or they’ve paid for a transaction on Square. Have they technically indirectly been a beneficiary of the Internet? Does that count as using it?
- throwaway1777 6y ago
  I don’t think that counts. It’s like calling someone a driver when they’ve only been a passenger.
  - Sebb767 6y ago
    Yeah, but they have been using a car. Not as driver, but as a way to get from A to B
    - boring_twenties 6y ago
      A more apt comparison would be someone who doesn't use a car as a way to get from A to B, but still receives for instance mail delivery by motorized vehicle. Even if they wanted to opt out of that for some ideological reason, it's simply not an option.
    - hansvm 6y ago
      Yes, but the fact that both the driver and the passenger have used the car is a specific fact relating to that instance which doesn't generalize to all transitivity relations -- it's still possible for John to ask Karn to do something which uses the internet and for John to not have used the internet.
- Sebb767 6y ago
  Probably not, because if you count indirect uses, the rate goes to practically zero. The internet is deeply embedded in, for example, all of the infrastructure we use. Or your doctor will probably use the internet to look up symptoms and medications. So if they have any connection to society at all, you can say they indirectly benefited from the internet. Technically, the few isolated island tribes might count as not benefiting from the internet.
tgflynn 6y ago
I would have guessed the figure was closer to 20 %, which it was around 2010, so I guess I'm 10 years out of date. I wonder how the survey was conducted. Is it possible that people who don't use the internet are also difficult to reach in other ways ?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- kube-system 6y ago
  Going purely off of anecdotal data, anyone that I’ve known over the past 10 years who didn’t use the internet also had limited use of other forms of communication.
throwawayboise 6y ago
I can imagine not using it much after I retire. Honestly it doesn't offer a whole lot IMO. I'll likely keep email and use maps/navigation though, as they are useful.
- barbazoo 6y ago
  I'm not saying I could do it, but it's certainly a dream.
- noisy_boy 6y ago
  I imagine I'll use it just as much, if not more, after retirement. My wish is to work on open source/community projects then so I'll probably collaborate more, albeit in my own time/pace.
- hehetrthrthrjn 6y ago
  You assume you'll have a choice.
- peter303 6y ago
  Hades, my internet usage jumped to 250 GB a month since covid. (My Comcast account allows 1200 GB) I am a FIRE'd former college professor and now have endless access to academic zoominars and professional conferences. I'll be somewhat disappointed when much of that returns to lower capacity in-person in 2022.
  - nicbou 6y ago
    During COVID, my usage pattern is directly correlated to the weather. When it's raining, there are very few alternatives to sitting on the computer.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    For commercial conferences at least, there's a general belief that events will continue in a hybrid way. That said, I expect that conferences that just went free when they went virtual will start charging again; many have tacked on at least nominal fees already. (Some are even more.) While, I haven't been wild about online conferences in general, it has let me dip into events I couldn't normally justify attending.
samatman 6y ago
7% of Americans say they don't use the Internet when polled. Some unknown percentage of that is the Lizardman's Constant[0], some of them mean "not much", plenty of them use the map on their phone and don't think that's "using the Internet", probably a decent amount who use Facebook to look at pictures of their grandkids but figure they aren't using the Internet because they don't own a computer (if you told them a smartphone is a computer they would look at you funny). Some are religious plain folk and genuinely don't use the Internet, some are retirees who only have a land line (and genuinely don't use the Internet). [0]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...
- Sebb767 6y ago
  > 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).
  - gremlinsinc 6y ago
    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 most grids are internet connected.... Do they fly out use taxis? Seems nobody except maybe amish can claim 0 percent Internet use.
    - macintux 6y ago
      “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.
xkeysc0re 6y ago
Honestly, I wish I could stop using the internet. I make a lot of things and enjoy sharing them because other people might find them useful. It has often led to wonderful and inspiring conversations. Yet it's obvious there's something very very wrong happening with American culture that began around the time of social media platform consolidation. "Being online" entails a distinct mindset and attitude that is incompatible with in-person socialization, but the two spaces are nonetheless continually mashed together and propagated by various forces in government and media. You have to ask yourself why. I'm not sure of the answer but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
- after_care 6y ago
  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.
  - xkeysc0re 6y ago
    This is very true. However it is certainly the subset I find myself on the most, ha. I think also for a lot of people, social media is the internet and almost inextricably so. How often do we see on this very site people bemoaning only visiting the same N websites when there's more websites than ever? I think maybe perhaps for me a "read-only" internet would be useful, like a feature phone in a way. Might have to go and update my /etc/hosts now...
    - emodendroket 6y ago
      I stopped using Twitter for Lent a couple years ago. After the first few days I stopped thinking to look.
      - dominotw 6y ago
        same. added reddit, twitter and fb to me /ect/hosts on my laptop, stopped looking after a while. I never go to those sites on my new laptop even though i can.
seppin 6y ago
The poor, the old, the young. A lot of people that aren't adults have no use for the internet.
m3kw9 6y ago
Infants and toddlers make a big part
- gaius_baltar 6y ago
  And prisoners. USA has a lot of them.
  - xen2xen1 6y ago
    Who says prisoners don't have internet access? You'd be surprised how many jail pods have a couple of Ipads you pay by the minute to use.
- lepton 6y ago
  No, it's % of adults.
doe88 6y ago
Nowadays, at least in the country I live, if you don't have someone in your family able to complete some tasks for you on the internet i'm not sure it would be possible to not have a modicus of internet access. I also think this is even worse than that, I would add that it becomes very difficult to not have a kind of smartphone with a way to install current apps, more and more some services are available only through apps.
_rpd 6y ago
tl;dr: Internet non-adoption is linked to a number of demographic variables, but is strongly connected to age – with older Americans continuing to be one of the least likely groups to use the internet. Today, 25% of adults ages 65 and older report never going online.
- gremlinsinc 6y ago
  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....
  - JamesAdir 6y ago
    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.
    - erik_seaberg 6y ago
      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.
    - kube-system 6y ago
      Is it a coincidence that 25% is also in the same ballpark as the percent of people 65+ that don’t have a drivers license? But besides that, someone who got their license before 1972 would have spent almost 3/4 of their life driving without GPS.
  - kube-system 6y ago
    Don’t read “65+“ as “65”. The 65+ category also includes everyone 80+, for example. There’s plenty of old people still alive who have trouble with operating technology a lot more simple than a cell phone.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
tyingq 6y ago
They didn't mention religion. I would guess that's also a factor, at least for some of the older Mennonites, Amish, Hasidic Jews, etc.
zeb88 6y ago
I envy them.
throwawaysea 6y ago
They are probably the happiest Americans there are. It’s unfortunate that Gen Z and beyond won’t know a life before ubiquitous mobile Internet.
throwaway189262 6y ago
Very old people. There you go. Going to school or even having relationships with people under 40 is impossible without the internet.
hehetrthrthrjn 6y ago
Roughly speaking: it's the old, the poor, the uneducated, and the rural. That's not terribly surprising.
- TameAntelope 6y ago
  That's not true, urban and suburban are about half combined vs. rural. That's way less skewed rural than I would have expected.
- chii 6y ago
  Being poor has the highest chance of you not using the internet, compared to the other factors.
- drdeadringer 6y ago
  And the "in prison".
- protomyth 6y ago
  I'm betting a lot of rural folks have better internet than those in Silicon Valley. Given I live and work among the poor, rural, and forgotten and the internet (Facebook, Netflix) is being used all the time, I doubt the geography aspect. I do want to see this studies raw questions/ data gathering.
  - neallindsay 6y ago
    There are definitely rural areas that have excellent internet service available. I grew up in a small town that happened to be a test market for Time Warner cable internet (RoadRunner) when it came out in the 1990s. However, there's rural and there's rural. Some people live places where the cable company would have to run miles of copper just to service a single house. If you're living so far out and also poor, you probably can't afford to tether to your cell phone either.
    - protomyth 5y ago
      I think more states need to push the electric companies into getting into to internet. Rural electric cooperatives seem to love laying fiber.
anonytrary 6y ago
Vast majority of American children who grow up today are living with the internet. This "7%" number will continue to decrease over time until the population has churned the antinetters.
alecjaco 6y ago
The smart ppl
wxnx 6y ago
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 https://nces.ed.gov/datapoints/2019179.asp
- peter303 6y ago
  Trump voters
  - devmunchies 6y ago
    ha! you think illiterate people are voting?
    - orthoxerox 6y ago
      Given that literacy tests before voting are illegal and people fought against them, they are.
      - monsieurbanana 6y ago
        Literacy tests were used to keep people of color -- and, sometimes, poor whites -- from voting, and they were administered at the discretion of the officials in charge of voter registration. If the official wanted a person to pass, he could ask the easiest question on the test -- for example, "Who is the president of the United States?" The same official might require a black person to answer every single question correctly, in an unrealistic amount of time, in order to pass. -- From https://www.thirteen.org/wnet/jimcrow/voting_literacy.html https://www.thirteen.org/wnet/jimcrow/voting_literacy.html
    - anoonmoose 6y ago
      According to the first Google results for the two questions, 16% of Mississippi adults are functionally illiterate, and 60% of Mississippi adults voted in the 2020 elections. While it is possible that the 16% illiterate and the 40% non-voting populations overlap perfectly, I highly doubt it.
Johnny555 6y ago
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.
- StanislavPetrov 6y ago
  I'd be willing to bet your brother is happier and more mentally stable than the vast majority of Americans.
  - mywittyname 6y ago
    I bet the opposite. He probably drives around listening to rage-inducing talk radio hosts all day. Then gets to jobs sites where he vents his rage with all the other guys. This stuff existed long before facebook.
    - Johnny555 6y ago
      You've got that spot on -- he's also a die-hard Trump supporter, and thinks the only reason Trump lost was because the mainstream media treated him so unfairly. Now that our parents passed away, he's the lone republican in the family, and keeps drifting farther to the right. Political discussions are off limits during family gatherings.
random5634 6y ago
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.
- saas_sam 6y ago
  This sounds like paradise. Maybe Starlink isn't such a good idea after all.
  - auiya 6y ago
    It's not the network that's the problem, it's what the web has turned into that's the problem.
- ramraj07 6y ago
  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.
  - random5634 6y ago
    I think instead of saying it's relaxed, I would describe it as very local? Folks work pretty hard in Caribbean, but when I was there (a fair while ago), I also worked dang hard. But you absolutely felt like you were in a bubble. You really could imagine that Israel and the Palestinians would have an intifada / war and no one would notice. You drank after work with the folks you worked with (in west this is a no no for many good reasons), you ate larger group meals, you spent a lot more time outside. I'm just spitballing some impressions. Some of this was efficiency, (group meals are more cost effective?) etc. There is also an attitude difference. There is a story (probably made up - please fill in correct details) that a group "conquered" one of the islands (maybe Saba?). They took over whatever building, raised whatever flag. And everyone just ignored them. They eventually left. One thing that's an adjustment is ignoring the rules if they are silly - no one thinks anything of it. And yes, in part because of corruption and rent seeking there are some silly rules so maybe you have to. Absolute downsides as well no question. But I wonder if the folks not on internet just don't care as much about what someone said to someone as the rest of us.
annoyingnoob 6y ago
My uncle-in-law. Basically a retired farmer. He has a cell phone but I think just uses it as a phone. He hand writes letters. AFAIK he has no use for the internet.
challengly 6y ago
The happiest Americans.
throwaway823882 6y ago
As soon as I can find myself a stable career that does not involve the internet, I'm throwing away my computer and smartphone.
chriszhang 6y ago
I 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.
- aimor 6y ago
  I often do work without direct internet access and it's painful at times. PDF documentation is wonderful, but when that's not available I sometimes save entire websites. Other useful things: dictionary, thesaurus, encyclopedia, world maps, reference books. It was surprisingly difficult to find a free dictionary file. Overall it's not very different, just inconvenient at times, and the lack of distractions is nice. I echo your wish for local-first programming.
  - GloriousKoji 6y ago
    At the beginning of lockdown last year I thought it would be a fun projects to build a doomsday-type local internet. Just a raspberry pi with it's own AP hosting various offline version of reference websites. I thought it would be pretty low effort: maybe a few scripts to crawl some websites and then a few scripts to spit out html. I never got passed acquiring all the references. Most of the available stuff is from over 10 years ago. Wikipedia's convenient snapshot are from 2008, the dictionary files I found seemed to be based on Merriam Webster from 2009 and I couldn't find a good reference for scientific unit conversions just to name a few. In the end I shelved it since it was going to be much more than quick project. But I must say that i'm impressed with Gutenberg project on how they provide an option to download all their books.
sequoia 6y ago
This sounds like a dream to be honest.
jedberg 6y ago
My first question is, did they explain that Netflix/Hulu/etc. are "using the Internet"? I looked through the methodology and wasn't sure. A lot of TVs have a Netflix button now. If someone else set it up for them, they may be completely unaware that they are using the Internet, possibly every day.
sonthonax 6y ago
I think a lot of people just don’t like the internet that much. My girlfriend certainly wouldn’t use the internet given the choice, she’s in her mid 20s, with a postgrad degree from a top uni, but really only checks her email once every two days. It’s not just exclusive to old people. There is a cadre of young people who think that the internet is just stupid noise. You obviously just don’t hear from them much. I’m not quite as extreme as her, but I don’t have any social media and I use the internet nearly only for work. Hacker news is the only thing I really comment on.
- selcuka 6y ago
  Internet is not only email or social media though. I am curious if she doesn't like using any online resources for her studies, or for personal curiosity either.
  - mywittyname 6y ago
    That probably is included as part of "given the choice." Like, given the choice, she'd probably go to a library or something to get study materials for her profession. But since that's (probably) impossible she makes due with the internet. Personal curiosity can still be fulfilled offline.
- incompatible 6y ago
  The Internet is just a network for connecting computers together. If somebody sees only stupid things on the Internet, maybe they should access different computers.
sandworm101 6y ago
Does this include the roughly 1% of the US who are in prison/jail? They generally do not have ready access to the internet. Then there is a unknown percentage of convicted felons who, while "free", are barred from internet use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_ra...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
thorin 6y ago
My mum had never used the internet by herself, she's 81. My dad occasionally uses email if I send him photos of the kids (maybe a couple of times a month). He might use a web page to book a hotel a few times a year. That's it. I'm pretty sure he isn't "missing out" as such. They are both active and fit and have hobbies and friends around the country that they visit normally.
syl_sau 6y ago
While I'd love to use the internet less, it has become clear to me, over the years, that it's an essential tool in pursuing relationship with people in their twenties. For better or worse, a lot of the social experience has been outsourced to the virtual networks: from organizing parties to sharing ideas to a friend to having fun together (nowadays done with online games), we seem to be less and less able to verbally formalize the things our ancestors were naturally good at (you'd call this "social intelligence"). It's not even that it's relevant to use it, it's just that people forget about you if you don't. Loneliness is a real huge problem among the youth -- without the internet it'd be unbearable.
- kjakm 6y ago
  >> Loneliness is a real huge problem among the youth -- without the internet it'd be unbearable. How much of that loneliness problem is caused by the internet we think is helping it? Take it away and people have to start interacting again. Without the endless streams of entertainment we have to sit in rooms together chatting or we'd go mad.
  - syl_sau 6y ago
    Oh I agree entirely, and that was my point: it's a vicious circle. The more we use tech, the more we rely on it for social interaction, the more we disengage from the "real" space, etc.
irrational 6y ago
Do all phone calls (even from a landline) go over the Internet at some point these days? If you make phone calls, can it be said that you do use the Internet?
- siltpotato 6y ago
  If you ride the bus, it’s not the answer people are looking for when they awkwardly phrase the question if you have a car as “do you use a vehicle?”
reedf1 6y ago
So rural, old and poor. Surely there is no surprise there, unless you have never met someone in all three of those categories.
dustinmoris 6y ago
> 7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they? The happy ones.
fulafel 6y ago
An interesting numeber would be the percentage of people who are stuck behind a NAT and can't host their own minecraft servers, remote desktop, or whatnot without having the technical expertise to configure manual port forwarding and such. The Redecentralize movement I think tries to shift the use of the Internet to a healthier direction both socially and technically.
dalbasal 6y ago
Investigating the "last holdouts" for anything is usually interesting. "The last 7%" is a heterodox group by definition. That said, I don't think the way this data is presented tells us much about who they are. It just tells us how many they are (spoiler: few) within each demographic group. Besides being backwards, I'd also posture that sampling and surveying a "last 7%" would be very hard. Things get quirky at the tail.
throwawgler87 6y ago
Nitpick: In the table where they break it down by category, it seems implied what percentage of each demographic says they don't use the internet (e.g. 25% of people 65+), with no mention of what fraction of non-internet-users are 65+. Both numbers would be interesting!
oytis 6y ago
Would be pretty interesting to learn more about that tiny fraction that are urban, educated, young, and well paid.
Roritharr 6y ago
A friend of mine, working for an ISP mapping the regions where there is still only dial-up access, is referring to these people jokingly now as "the lucky ones with intact brains".
bloak 6y ago
I don't know what definition of "use the internet" Pew Research used, but I suggest that a useful thing to ask would be whether people can easily access a typical web site, or at least one that has been designed to be accessible. That's probably what the authorities are most interested in: it tells them roughly how many people can pay their taxes, fill in the census or book a vaccine appointment online, and it tells them how many people can buy things online. If you define "use the internet" in that way then there are indeed millions of people who use Facebook but do not "use the internet".
- simias 6y ago
  Do you think it's really that common? I'd expect most Facebookers to at least be able to find third party websites through Google search.
  - bloak 6y ago
    I've heard it's common in India for people to get a mobile phone contract that gives them the Facebook app and Wikipedia but not universal web access. I would guess that there are a lot of people in the UK who use Facebook from a smartphone but for various reasons (old phone, poor eyesight, dementia, ...) can't in practice access a web site. OK, I admit the article is about "Americans", but some of the comments refer to other countries! Anyway, it would be good to know more precisely what Internet services people can and do use, rather than just "use the internet" with no definition given. For example, how many people use e-mail? How many people have an Android or iOS phone? (How many of those are able to install an app? Some can't because the phone belongs to an employer ...)
williesleg 6y ago
The smartest Americans. Not hacked. Not facebooked. Not twittered or Instagrammed. Just smart happy people.
m80N 6y ago
https://www.google.com https://www.google.com
m80N 6y ago
https://www.baidu.com https://www.baidu.com
m80N 6y ago
OA
m80N 6y ago
jIwaXJPDSnIG
LoLFactor 6y ago
It's funny how so many people came here to complain about the state of the internet... on the internet. Maybe it's just me and I don't get it, but if you don't want to be on the internet anymore, just yank the ethernet cable out of your computer and cancel your plan. One less bill to pay, right? Coming here to complain and not seeing the ridiculousness in it makes me think some of the people in this thread need to take a long look at themselves and ponder if they might, in fact, be part of a certain cohort that actually makes the internet a worse place to be. Just my two cents. Feel free to downvote.
- re-actor 6y ago
  For most people here, getting rid of the internet would also mean changing careers to one of the few remaining things you can do professionally without using the internet. "You criticize thing yet you also use it, how curious" is such a banal take it's literally a meme.
  - LoLFactor 6y ago
    My apologies for the banality. The completely obvious truth that internet is a necessity in 2021 somehow escaped me... Or maybe it didn't and that was the whole point. Given that these people are here, they are obviously engaging in internet usage that IS NOT part of their job (I've yet to see a job posting where reading HN is a requirement). Nobody is pushing anybody to use certain parts of the internet. Don't like some parts? Don't use them. Don't like any parts of it? Then yeah, yank the cable out and enjoy... or endure, whatever the case may be. Be it career or anything else that's stopping you from yanking the cable, well then... it might be that the internet isn't that bad. Not as bad as losing your job, anyway, so WHY COMPLAIN? Using the internet strictly for utilitarian purposes is possible. Do that and then use the rest of your time to go out with your buddies. Don't have any? That might just be because (and this was my second point) you're a negative and possibly toxic person. The kind people don't want to be around and that MAKE THE INTERNET A LESS APPEALING PLACE. Did I adequately rephrase my take to be less banal?
    - re-actor 6y ago
User23 6y ago
I bet an online poll asking “do you use the Internet?” would probably also get on the order of 7% negative responses.
- auiya 6y ago
  Mostly because people are quite confused about what "the Internet" actually entails, and how it touches their lives in ways they don't realize.
- karaterobot 6y ago
  If Lizardman's Constant is really 4%, that would be the safe minimum safe bet. https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...
zulban 6y ago
I wonder how clearly the survey defined "internet" for respondents. I can see a lot of people thinking they don't use it, but they do. Like the many worthless AOL subscriptions that still haven't been cancelled.
splithalf 6y ago
People rationalize with “I don’t look at the bad parts” and “I can quit anytime I choose, I just choose not to right now.” People don’t see that they’re addicted to something that is destroying all that is good. Using Facebook or Twitter on a regular basis is bad, in some cases it turns lethal. Even worse is functional addiction, where it warps you slowly over the years, too gradually to notice. We regulate big pharma, we should do the same with big tech companies that are built around manipulating human minds (google, Facebook, Twitter). They used to put cocaine in Coca Cola. We are at that point with tech products. Coca Cola business model seems far more ethical, and they cause diabetes.
- Smithalicious 6y ago
  This sounds suspiciously like "websites I use good, websites I don't use bad" Disclaimer: never did get into Twitter and Facebook though I periodically give Twitter another try every half year or so
  - splithalf 6y ago
    No I think when you get into the business of doing even very innocent things like ab testing you are doing human subject research and should be bound by the same standards as have been the tradition in the social sciences. We don’t allow pharma companies to try out fun new addictive pills that serve no purpose beyond profit. That’s unethical. Why do we exclude the brain from our realm of health concern? Why do we care more about our bodies than our brains? Dollarinos.
- rhino369 6y ago
  Absolutely many people are addicted to social media. But many more people aren't. I'm able to use facebook and twitter moderately, but regularly (less than 10 minutes a day on average, never any more than 20 minutes in one day). That said, I think its possible to create social media that works 100% for me without being so addiction forming in other people.
creyes12345 6y ago
My mom does not use the internet. She is 87. We’ve tried to teach her to use email. Once you explain the process at her level of technology, you realize how complicated to use it really is.
LatteLazy 6y ago
16% cannot drive 8% cannot speak English (8% of over 5s). I'd say 93% is 100% in this case...
major505 6y ago
they are happy. This is what they are.
misiti3780 6y ago
I am currently staying with my parents in upstate NY, and we do not have high speed internet. I am able to tether on my phone, but we obviously cannot stream netflix etc. It really is a weird world not being hooked up to the grid.
slumdev 6y ago
I dream of not using the internet one day.
kodah 6y ago
My parents live in a very rural place. Not only is internet ungodly expensive there but people don't think of the internet as part of their way of life. I imagine this number is much bigger than 7%, though that alone is a lot of people.
canadianfella 6y ago
Amish

334 points by ipsocannibal 6y ago

It's surprising how many people here equate "the Internet" with "social media". It's like having access to 1,000,000 x the Library of Alexandria every day and only being interested in keeping up with what people are talking about in the lobby

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
INTPenis 6y ago
Exactly, that's how it is. The library has never been a happening spot. The happening kids, if forced to the library by an authority figure, would just spend the time whispering, gossiping, and playing around with their friends. I bet you were one of those nerds who actually USED the library. :D I was too.
dalbasal 6y ago
Well... I assume that most Alexandrians weren't to be found in the library, at any given moment in time. In any case, a smartphone with social media (fb even) was the entry point to personal computing for most people on earth. They entered through the lobby, I guess.
fulafel 6y ago
Yep, shifting the terms reframes the issues. Even library of alexandria sounds a bit biased toward the web and similar things. The fundamental thing is the decentralized packet switched network that lets any node talk to any other node where anyone can build new applications on it. (But sadly a lot of people aren't directly on the internet anymore, and have only indirect access via a IPv4 NAPT gateway).
- shartshooter 6y ago
  "People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole"
psyc 6y ago
Heck, I bristle as it is when people equate the internet with the web!
Dirlewanger 6y ago
Because that's all the majority of the population knows. Their Internet is social media.

boring_twenties 6y ago

I've been using the Internet since 1992-3. Lately I'm feeling more and more like these 7% have the right idea.

haltingproblem 6y ago
I often think of what life would be without using the internet. Observing a electronics sabbath usually on sat, seems like a good idea. Not Jewish but feel that the Rabbis of old were on to something.
- regextegrity 6y ago
  Why not just turn off your router? Lightbulbs and refrigerators are surprisingly useful
  - frosted-flakes 6y ago
    Lightbulbs and refrigerators don't contain electronics. I mean, modern LED lightbulbs contain some primitive electronics, but basic refrigerators do not. By "electronics", the GP means consumer electronic devices like computers, televisions, and smartphones.
    - Sebb767 6y ago
      > Lightbulbs and refrigerators don't contain electronics. > By "electronics", the GP means consumer electronic devices like computers, Have you looked at refrigerators lately? "Smart" ones are very common and even the cheapest ones basically all use electronics to control the temperature and the cooling cycle. Nothing sophisticated, yes, but if LEDs count, these definitely do, as well.
      - frosted-flakes 6y ago
        That's why I said basic refrigerators, which still have compressors controlled by an analogue thermostat. Like the kind you find in a typical cheap rental apartment. Refrigerators are one of those appliances that really do not benefit much from "smart" technology. And LEDs don't count; that's my point.

nonameiguess 6y ago

My dad doesn't use the Internet. Not on principle or anything, but he grew up without it, has friends but meets them in person or talks on the phone, same as he has for the past 40 years. He's retired now, but never needed it working as a skilled tradesman with a county job. In retirement, he still builds stuff, but physical stuff. No need for Internet. My ex-wife's mom also didn't use the Internet, but she was a schizophrenic who believed the FBI was following her around her entire life and has spent much of the past 40 years institutionalized. So those are at least two very different types of people, and that's just people living in big cities. I'm sure there are still a fair number of rural people who couldn't make much use of the Internet even if they wanted to. Another ex of mine grew up on a farm in Amish country. Not Amish, but all the neighbors were. They didn't use Internet.

axaxs 6y ago
Same with mine. And I'll be damned, he seems to get by just fine with letters and phone calls, probably with even less hassle than I have using only the internet and avoiding phone calls.
Forge36 6y ago
My grandfather doesn't ”use the internet", my grandmother uses email (not sure what else). They do watch Netflix now via roku (they used to have a blockbuster subscription so they could go and pickup DVDs). Is that the internet?
- auiya 6y ago
  If they're using an ISP for anything, yes. That's the Internet.
coldcode 6y ago
My mom grew up in Nazi Germany and never went to college. Yet for the last decade of her life she used email and web every day (iMac and then Mac mini) to explore the world (and sometimes actually go there). She didn't need the internet at all, but embraced it anyway. Age is not an obstacle to new things, but attitude is. My uncle and aunt had multiple devices for their entire 80-90 decade of life, until he passed away and she developed too many health issues. Yet my cousin(s) in a small town in Germany rarely use email or internet at all (which I think is not unusual there) as everything they need is available locally. I've spent my whole adult life using computers and writing software - I still routinely help people in younger generations explaining things that baffle them. People still have a limited understanding of how the internet works.

jasonjei 6y ago

Let’s suppose they call a customer service desk that uses Internet tools to help them—or they’ve paid for a transaction on Square. Have they technically indirectly been a beneficiary of the Internet? Does that count as using it?

throwaway1777 6y ago
I don’t think that counts. It’s like calling someone a driver when they’ve only been a passenger.
- Sebb767 6y ago
  Yeah, but they have been using a car. Not as driver, but as a way to get from A to B
  - boring_twenties 6y ago
    A more apt comparison would be someone who doesn't use a car as a way to get from A to B, but still receives for instance mail delivery by motorized vehicle. Even if they wanted to opt out of that for some ideological reason, it's simply not an option.
  - hansvm 6y ago
    Yes, but the fact that both the driver and the passenger have used the car is a specific fact relating to that instance which doesn't generalize to all transitivity relations -- it's still possible for John to ask Karn to do something which uses the internet and for John to not have used the internet.
Sebb767 6y ago
Probably not, because if you count indirect uses, the rate goes to practically zero. The internet is deeply embedded in, for example, all of the infrastructure we use. Or your doctor will probably use the internet to look up symptoms and medications. So if they have any connection to society at all, you can say they indirectly benefited from the internet. Technically, the few isolated island tribes might count as not benefiting from the internet.

tgflynn 6y ago

I would have guessed the figure was closer to 20 %, which it was around 2010, so I guess I'm 10 years out of date. I wonder how the survey was conducted. Is it possible that people who don't use the internet are also difficult to reach in other ways ?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
kube-system 6y ago
Going purely off of anecdotal data, anyone that I’ve known over the past 10 years who didn’t use the internet also had limited use of other forms of communication.

throwawayboise 6y ago

I can imagine not using it much after I retire. Honestly it doesn't offer a whole lot IMO. I'll likely keep email and use maps/navigation though, as they are useful.

barbazoo 6y ago
I'm not saying I could do it, but it's certainly a dream.
noisy_boy 6y ago
I imagine I'll use it just as much, if not more, after retirement. My wish is to work on open source/community projects then so I'll probably collaborate more, albeit in my own time/pace.
hehetrthrthrjn 6y ago
You assume you'll have a choice.
peter303 6y ago
Hades, my internet usage jumped to 250 GB a month since covid. (My Comcast account allows 1200 GB) I am a FIRE'd former college professor and now have endless access to academic zoominars and professional conferences. I'll be somewhat disappointed when much of that returns to lower capacity in-person in 2022.
- nicbou 6y ago
  During COVID, my usage pattern is directly correlated to the weather. When it's raining, there are very few alternatives to sitting on the computer.
- ghaff 6y ago
  For commercial conferences at least, there's a general belief that events will continue in a hybrid way. That said, I expect that conferences that just went free when they went virtual will start charging again; many have tacked on at least nominal fees already. (Some are even more.) While, I haven't been wild about online conferences in general, it has let me dip into events I couldn't normally justify attending.

samatman 6y ago

7% of Americans say they don't use the Internet when polled. Some unknown percentage of that is the Lizardman's Constant[0], some of them mean "not much", plenty of them use the map on their phone and don't think that's "using the Internet", probably a decent amount who use Facebook to look at pictures of their grandkids but figure they aren't using the Internet because they don't own a computer (if you told them a smartphone is a computer they would look at you funny). Some are religious plain folk and genuinely don't use the Internet, some are retirees who only have a land line (and genuinely don't use the Internet). [0]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...

Sebb767 6y ago
> 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).
- gremlinsinc 6y ago
  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 most grids are internet connected.... Do they fly out use taxis? Seems nobody except maybe amish can claim 0 percent Internet use.
  - macintux 6y ago
    “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.

xkeysc0re 6y ago

Honestly, I wish I could stop using the internet. I make a lot of things and enjoy sharing them because other people might find them useful. It has often led to wonderful and inspiring conversations. Yet it's obvious there's something very very wrong happening with American culture that began around the time of social media platform consolidation. "Being online" entails a distinct mindset and attitude that is incompatible with in-person socialization, but the two spaces are nonetheless continually mashed together and propagated by various forces in government and media. You have to ask yourself why. I'm not sure of the answer but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

after_care 6y ago
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.
- xkeysc0re 6y ago
  This is very true. However it is certainly the subset I find myself on the most, ha. I think also for a lot of people, social media is the internet and almost inextricably so. How often do we see on this very site people bemoaning only visiting the same N websites when there's more websites than ever? I think maybe perhaps for me a "read-only" internet would be useful, like a feature phone in a way. Might have to go and update my /etc/hosts now...
  - emodendroket 6y ago
    I stopped using Twitter for Lent a couple years ago. After the first few days I stopped thinking to look.
    - dominotw 6y ago
      same. added reddit, twitter and fb to me /ect/hosts on my laptop, stopped looking after a while. I never go to those sites on my new laptop even though i can.

seppin 6y ago

The poor, the old, the young. A lot of people that aren't adults have no use for the internet.

m3kw9 6y ago

Infants and toddlers make a big part

gaius_baltar 6y ago
And prisoners. USA has a lot of them.
- xen2xen1 6y ago
  Who says prisoners don't have internet access? You'd be surprised how many jail pods have a couple of Ipads you pay by the minute to use.
lepton 6y ago
No, it's % of adults.

doe88 6y ago

Nowadays, at least in the country I live, if you don't have someone in your family able to complete some tasks for you on the internet i'm not sure it would be possible to not have a modicus of internet access. I also think this is even worse than that, I would add that it becomes very difficult to not have a kind of smartphone with a way to install current apps, more and more some services are available only through apps.

_rpd 6y ago

tl;dr: Internet non-adoption is linked to a number of demographic variables, but is strongly connected to age – with older Americans continuing to be one of the least likely groups to use the internet. Today, 25% of adults ages 65 and older report never going online.

gremlinsinc 6y ago
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....
- JamesAdir 6y ago
  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.
  - erik_seaberg 6y ago
    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.
  - kube-system 6y ago
    Is it a coincidence that 25% is also in the same ballpark as the percent of people 65+ that don’t have a drivers license? But besides that, someone who got their license before 1972 would have spent almost 3/4 of their life driving without GPS.
- kube-system 6y ago
  Don’t read “65+“ as “65”. The 65+ category also includes everyone 80+, for example. There’s plenty of old people still alive who have trouble with operating technology a lot more simple than a cell phone.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

tyingq 6y ago

They didn't mention religion. I would guess that's also a factor, at least for some of the older Mennonites, Amish, Hasidic Jews, etc.

zeb88 6y ago

I envy them.

throwawaysea 6y ago

They are probably the happiest Americans there are. It’s unfortunate that Gen Z and beyond won’t know a life before ubiquitous mobile Internet.

throwaway189262 6y ago

Very old people. There you go. Going to school or even having relationships with people under 40 is impossible without the internet.

hehetrthrthrjn 6y ago

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

TameAntelope 6y ago
That's not true, urban and suburban are about half combined vs. rural. That's way less skewed rural than I would have expected.
chii 6y ago
Being poor has the highest chance of you not using the internet, compared to the other factors.
drdeadringer 6y ago
And the "in prison".
protomyth 6y ago
I'm betting a lot of rural folks have better internet than those in Silicon Valley. Given I live and work among the poor, rural, and forgotten and the internet (Facebook, Netflix) is being used all the time, I doubt the geography aspect. I do want to see this studies raw questions/ data gathering.
- neallindsay 6y ago
  There are definitely rural areas that have excellent internet service available. I grew up in a small town that happened to be a test market for Time Warner cable internet (RoadRunner) when it came out in the 1990s. However, there's rural and there's rural. Some people live places where the cable company would have to run miles of copper just to service a single house. If you're living so far out and also poor, you probably can't afford to tether to your cell phone either.
  - protomyth 5y ago
    I think more states need to push the electric companies into getting into to internet. Rural electric cooperatives seem to love laying fiber.

anonytrary 6y ago

Vast majority of American children who grow up today are living with the internet. This "7%" number will continue to decrease over time until the population has churned the antinetters.

alecjaco 6y ago

The smart ppl

wxnx 6y ago

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 https://nces.ed.gov/datapoints/2019179.asp

peter303 6y ago
Trump voters
- devmunchies 6y ago
  ha! you think illiterate people are voting?
  - orthoxerox 6y ago
    Given that literacy tests before voting are illegal and people fought against them, they are.
    - monsieurbanana 6y ago
      Literacy tests were used to keep people of color -- and, sometimes, poor whites -- from voting, and they were administered at the discretion of the officials in charge of voter registration. If the official wanted a person to pass, he could ask the easiest question on the test -- for example, "Who is the president of the United States?" The same official might require a black person to answer every single question correctly, in an unrealistic amount of time, in order to pass. -- From https://www.thirteen.org/wnet/jimcrow/voting_literacy.html https://www.thirteen.org/wnet/jimcrow/voting_literacy.html
  - anoonmoose 6y ago
    According to the first Google results for the two questions, 16% of Mississippi adults are functionally illiterate, and 60% of Mississippi adults voted in the 2020 elections. While it is possible that the 16% illiterate and the 40% non-voting populations overlap perfectly, I highly doubt it.

Johnny555 6y ago

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.

StanislavPetrov 6y ago
I'd be willing to bet your brother is happier and more mentally stable than the vast majority of Americans.
- mywittyname 6y ago
  I bet the opposite. He probably drives around listening to rage-inducing talk radio hosts all day. Then gets to jobs sites where he vents his rage with all the other guys. This stuff existed long before facebook.
  - Johnny555 6y ago
    You've got that spot on -- he's also a die-hard Trump supporter, and thinks the only reason Trump lost was because the mainstream media treated him so unfairly. Now that our parents passed away, he's the lone republican in the family, and keeps drifting farther to the right. Political discussions are off limits during family gatherings.

random5634 6y ago

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.

saas_sam 6y ago
This sounds like paradise. Maybe Starlink isn't such a good idea after all.
- auiya 6y ago
  It's not the network that's the problem, it's what the web has turned into that's the problem.
ramraj07 6y ago
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.
- random5634 6y ago
  I think instead of saying it's relaxed, I would describe it as very local? Folks work pretty hard in Caribbean, but when I was there (a fair while ago), I also worked dang hard. But you absolutely felt like you were in a bubble. You really could imagine that Israel and the Palestinians would have an intifada / war and no one would notice. You drank after work with the folks you worked with (in west this is a no no for many good reasons), you ate larger group meals, you spent a lot more time outside. I'm just spitballing some impressions. Some of this was efficiency, (group meals are more cost effective?) etc. There is also an attitude difference. There is a story (probably made up - please fill in correct details) that a group "conquered" one of the islands (maybe Saba?). They took over whatever building, raised whatever flag. And everyone just ignored them. They eventually left. One thing that's an adjustment is ignoring the rules if they are silly - no one thinks anything of it. And yes, in part because of corruption and rent seeking there are some silly rules so maybe you have to. Absolute downsides as well no question. But I wonder if the folks not on internet just don't care as much about what someone said to someone as the rest of us.

annoyingnoob 6y ago

My uncle-in-law. Basically a retired farmer. He has a cell phone but I think just uses it as a phone. He hand writes letters. AFAIK he has no use for the internet.

challengly 6y ago

The happiest Americans.

throwaway823882 6y ago

As soon as I can find myself a stable career that does not involve the internet, I'm throwing away my computer and smartphone.

chriszhang 6y ago

I 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.

aimor 6y ago
I often do work without direct internet access and it's painful at times. PDF documentation is wonderful, but when that's not available I sometimes save entire websites. Other useful things: dictionary, thesaurus, encyclopedia, world maps, reference books. It was surprisingly difficult to find a free dictionary file. Overall it's not very different, just inconvenient at times, and the lack of distractions is nice. I echo your wish for local-first programming.
- GloriousKoji 6y ago
  At the beginning of lockdown last year I thought it would be a fun projects to build a doomsday-type local internet. Just a raspberry pi with it's own AP hosting various offline version of reference websites. I thought it would be pretty low effort: maybe a few scripts to crawl some websites and then a few scripts to spit out html. I never got passed acquiring all the references. Most of the available stuff is from over 10 years ago. Wikipedia's convenient snapshot are from 2008, the dictionary files I found seemed to be based on Merriam Webster from 2009 and I couldn't find a good reference for scientific unit conversions just to name a few. In the end I shelved it since it was going to be much more than quick project. But I must say that i'm impressed with Gutenberg project on how they provide an option to download all their books.

sequoia 6y ago

This sounds like a dream to be honest.

jedberg 6y ago

My first question is, did they explain that Netflix/Hulu/etc. are "using the Internet"? I looked through the methodology and wasn't sure. A lot of TVs have a Netflix button now. If someone else set it up for them, they may be completely unaware that they are using the Internet, possibly every day.

sonthonax 6y ago

I think a lot of people just don’t like the internet that much. My girlfriend certainly wouldn’t use the internet given the choice, she’s in her mid 20s, with a postgrad degree from a top uni, but really only checks her email once every two days. It’s not just exclusive to old people. There is a cadre of young people who think that the internet is just stupid noise. You obviously just don’t hear from them much. I’m not quite as extreme as her, but I don’t have any social media and I use the internet nearly only for work. Hacker news is the only thing I really comment on.

selcuka 6y ago
Internet is not only email or social media though. I am curious if she doesn't like using any online resources for her studies, or for personal curiosity either.
- mywittyname 6y ago
  That probably is included as part of "given the choice." Like, given the choice, she'd probably go to a library or something to get study materials for her profession. But since that's (probably) impossible she makes due with the internet. Personal curiosity can still be fulfilled offline.
incompatible 6y ago
The Internet is just a network for connecting computers together. If somebody sees only stupid things on the Internet, maybe they should access different computers.

sandworm101 6y ago

Does this include the roughly 1% of the US who are in prison/jail? They generally do not have ready access to the internet. Then there is a unknown percentage of convicted felons who, while "free", are barred from internet use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_ra...

deleted 6y ago

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thorin 6y ago

My mum had never used the internet by herself, she's 81. My dad occasionally uses email if I send him photos of the kids (maybe a couple of times a month). He might use a web page to book a hotel a few times a year. That's it. I'm pretty sure he isn't "missing out" as such. They are both active and fit and have hobbies and friends around the country that they visit normally.

syl_sau 6y ago

While I'd love to use the internet less, it has become clear to me, over the years, that it's an essential tool in pursuing relationship with people in their twenties. For better or worse, a lot of the social experience has been outsourced to the virtual networks: from organizing parties to sharing ideas to a friend to having fun together (nowadays done with online games), we seem to be less and less able to verbally formalize the things our ancestors were naturally good at (you'd call this "social intelligence"). It's not even that it's relevant to use it, it's just that people forget about you if you don't. Loneliness is a real huge problem among the youth -- without the internet it'd be unbearable.

kjakm 6y ago
>> Loneliness is a real huge problem among the youth -- without the internet it'd be unbearable. How much of that loneliness problem is caused by the internet we think is helping it? Take it away and people have to start interacting again. Without the endless streams of entertainment we have to sit in rooms together chatting or we'd go mad.
- syl_sau 6y ago
  Oh I agree entirely, and that was my point: it's a vicious circle. The more we use tech, the more we rely on it for social interaction, the more we disengage from the "real" space, etc.

irrational 6y ago

Do all phone calls (even from a landline) go over the Internet at some point these days? If you make phone calls, can it be said that you do use the Internet?

siltpotato 6y ago
If you ride the bus, it’s not the answer people are looking for when they awkwardly phrase the question if you have a car as “do you use a vehicle?”

reedf1 6y ago

So rural, old and poor. Surely there is no surprise there, unless you have never met someone in all three of those categories.

dustinmoris 6y ago

> 7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they? The happy ones.

fulafel 6y ago

An interesting numeber would be the percentage of people who are stuck behind a NAT and can't host their own minecraft servers, remote desktop, or whatnot without having the technical expertise to configure manual port forwarding and such. The Redecentralize movement I think tries to shift the use of the Internet to a healthier direction both socially and technically.

dalbasal 6y ago

Investigating the "last holdouts" for anything is usually interesting. "The last 7%" is a heterodox group by definition. That said, I don't think the way this data is presented tells us much about who they are. It just tells us how many they are (spoiler: few) within each demographic group. Besides being backwards, I'd also posture that sampling and surveying a "last 7%" would be very hard. Things get quirky at the tail.

throwawgler87 6y ago

Nitpick: In the table where they break it down by category, it seems implied what percentage of each demographic says they don't use the internet (e.g. 25% of people 65+), with no mention of what fraction of non-internet-users are 65+. Both numbers would be interesting!

oytis 6y ago

Would be pretty interesting to learn more about that tiny fraction that are urban, educated, young, and well paid.

Roritharr 6y ago

A friend of mine, working for an ISP mapping the regions where there is still only dial-up access, is referring to these people jokingly now as "the lucky ones with intact brains".

bloak 6y ago

I don't know what definition of "use the internet" Pew Research used, but I suggest that a useful thing to ask would be whether people can easily access a typical web site, or at least one that has been designed to be accessible. That's probably what the authorities are most interested in: it tells them roughly how many people can pay their taxes, fill in the census or book a vaccine appointment online, and it tells them how many people can buy things online. If you define "use the internet" in that way then there are indeed millions of people who use Facebook but do not "use the internet".

simias 6y ago
Do you think it's really that common? I'd expect most Facebookers to at least be able to find third party websites through Google search.
- bloak 6y ago
  I've heard it's common in India for people to get a mobile phone contract that gives them the Facebook app and Wikipedia but not universal web access. I would guess that there are a lot of people in the UK who use Facebook from a smartphone but for various reasons (old phone, poor eyesight, dementia, ...) can't in practice access a web site. OK, I admit the article is about "Americans", but some of the comments refer to other countries! Anyway, it would be good to know more precisely what Internet services people can and do use, rather than just "use the internet" with no definition given. For example, how many people use e-mail? How many people have an Android or iOS phone? (How many of those are able to install an app? Some can't because the phone belongs to an employer ...)

williesleg 6y ago

The smartest Americans. Not hacked. Not facebooked. Not twittered or Instagrammed. Just smart happy people.

m80N 6y ago

https://www.google.com https://www.google.com

m80N 6y ago

https://www.baidu.com https://www.baidu.com

m80N 6y ago

jIwaXJPDSnIG

LoLFactor 6y ago

It's funny how so many people came here to complain about the state of the internet... on the internet. Maybe it's just me and I don't get it, but if you don't want to be on the internet anymore, just yank the ethernet cable out of your computer and cancel your plan. One less bill to pay, right? Coming here to complain and not seeing the ridiculousness in it makes me think some of the people in this thread need to take a long look at themselves and ponder if they might, in fact, be part of a certain cohort that actually makes the internet a worse place to be. Just my two cents. Feel free to downvote.

re-actor 6y ago
For most people here, getting rid of the internet would also mean changing careers to one of the few remaining things you can do professionally without using the internet. "You criticize thing yet you also use it, how curious" is such a banal take it's literally a meme.
- LoLFactor 6y ago
  My apologies for the banality. The completely obvious truth that internet is a necessity in 2021 somehow escaped me... Or maybe it didn't and that was the whole point. Given that these people are here, they are obviously engaging in internet usage that IS NOT part of their job (I've yet to see a job posting where reading HN is a requirement). Nobody is pushing anybody to use certain parts of the internet. Don't like some parts? Don't use them. Don't like any parts of it? Then yeah, yank the cable out and enjoy... or endure, whatever the case may be. Be it career or anything else that's stopping you from yanking the cable, well then... it might be that the internet isn't that bad. Not as bad as losing your job, anyway, so WHY COMPLAIN? Using the internet strictly for utilitarian purposes is possible. Do that and then use the rest of your time to go out with your buddies. Don't have any? That might just be because (and this was my second point) you're a negative and possibly toxic person. The kind people don't want to be around and that MAKE THE INTERNET A LESS APPEALING PLACE. Did I adequately rephrase my take to be less banal?
  - re-actor 6y ago

User23 6y ago

I bet an online poll asking “do you use the Internet?” would probably also get on the order of 7% negative responses.

auiya 6y ago
Mostly because people are quite confused about what "the Internet" actually entails, and how it touches their lives in ways they don't realize.
karaterobot 6y ago
If Lizardman's Constant is really 4%, that would be the safe minimum safe bet. https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...

zulban 6y ago

I wonder how clearly the survey defined "internet" for respondents. I can see a lot of people thinking they don't use it, but they do. Like the many worthless AOL subscriptions that still haven't been cancelled.

splithalf 6y ago

People rationalize with “I don’t look at the bad parts” and “I can quit anytime I choose, I just choose not to right now.” People don’t see that they’re addicted to something that is destroying all that is good. Using Facebook or Twitter on a regular basis is bad, in some cases it turns lethal. Even worse is functional addiction, where it warps you slowly over the years, too gradually to notice. We regulate big pharma, we should do the same with big tech companies that are built around manipulating human minds (google, Facebook, Twitter). They used to put cocaine in Coca Cola. We are at that point with tech products. Coca Cola business model seems far more ethical, and they cause diabetes.

Smithalicious 6y ago
This sounds suspiciously like "websites I use good, websites I don't use bad" Disclaimer: never did get into Twitter and Facebook though I periodically give Twitter another try every half year or so
- splithalf 6y ago
  No I think when you get into the business of doing even very innocent things like ab testing you are doing human subject research and should be bound by the same standards as have been the tradition in the social sciences. We don’t allow pharma companies to try out fun new addictive pills that serve no purpose beyond profit. That’s unethical. Why do we exclude the brain from our realm of health concern? Why do we care more about our bodies than our brains? Dollarinos.
rhino369 6y ago
Absolutely many people are addicted to social media. But many more people aren't. I'm able to use facebook and twitter moderately, but regularly (less than 10 minutes a day on average, never any more than 20 minutes in one day). That said, I think its possible to create social media that works 100% for me without being so addiction forming in other people.

creyes12345 6y ago

My mom does not use the internet. She is 87. We’ve tried to teach her to use email. Once you explain the process at her level of technology, you realize how complicated to use it really is.

LatteLazy 6y ago

16% cannot drive 8% cannot speak English (8% of over 5s). I'd say 93% is 100% in this case...

major505 6y ago

they are happy. This is what they are.

misiti3780 6y ago

I am currently staying with my parents in upstate NY, and we do not have high speed internet. I am able to tether on my phone, but we obviously cannot stream netflix etc. It really is a weird world not being hooked up to the grid.

slumdev 6y ago

I dream of not using the internet one day.

kodah 6y ago

My parents live in a very rural place. Not only is internet ungodly expensive there but people don't think of the internet as part of their way of life. I imagine this number is much bigger than 7%, though that alone is a lot of people.

canadianfella 6y ago

Amish