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"Of the next six adults you meet, chances are one of them has never sent an e-mail." This is a misleading way to restate the title of the article. It's mislead
by wskinner 11y ago
"Of the next six adults you meet, chances are one of them has never sent an e-mail."
This is a misleading way to restate the title of the article. It's misleading because this statement is not actually equivalent to "1/6 of Americans don't use the web" and actually obfuscates what might be an interesting topic - how internet usage is distributed geographically. I suspect that given a person has read this article on WaPo's website, nearly everyone that person ever meets is likely to be a user of the Internet.
Perhaps the author could have explored the dichotomy between places where Internet usage is essentially a daily necessity, and where it is functionally irrelevant. But I guess that might not fit the standard narrative for this sort of piece.
--edited to fix typos
- ghaff 11y agoThe article is sort of all over the place. The lede, as you say, is simply untrue. I'm pretty confident that the next 6 adults I meet have all sent an email. Then there's the matter of providing Internet access to those who can't afford it. And then there's the matter of those who simply don't see the Internet as relevant to their lives. Is this a problem or not? I dunno but the solution (if, indeed, one is needed) is going to be different from the prior case.
- will_brown 11y agoSeeing as the title begins with "37M" (~1/10 Americans) I don't think the author was using 1 in 6 adults as a way to mislead anyone so much as highlight a certain demographic where the statistic is almost double that of the general population.
- true_religion 11y agoThis distribution isn't uniform. If everyone over 80 hasn't used the internet, that isn't too surprising. That's over 6 million people already,