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For most of us, it’s hard to imagine life without the internet.
For better or worse, we’ve become hyper-dependent on the digital universe housed in our screens. We use it on a daily basis to communicate with friends, book flights, shop, skim the news, watch movies and television shows, and stay up-to-date on Kim Kardashian’s derrière.
As access to the internet has improved in the past two decades, the offline population has steeply declined: today, only 11% of Americans don’t use the internet, down from 48% in 2000.
[...] The stories here represent only a small sample of Americans who don’t use the internet, and the reasons why.
Data tells us that the majority of non-users are elderly, but this shouldn’t endorse the trope that old people are technologically challenged. There is certainly no dearth of octogenarian techies, like my grandfather, who was the first in line to buy a PalmPilot in 1997 and has been at least 3 steps ahead of me on the gadget front ever since.
In fact, 51% of of 65+ citizens have broadband internet at home, and 34% are active on social media. In case you need an uplifting anecdotal addition to this, two of the world’s oldest men — Walter Breuning (114), and Alexander Imich (111) — were reportedly frequent and adept internet users until they died.
And though some of the rationales the folks we interviewed seem a bit like stubborn rants, they do have merit: the internet has negatively effects on face-to-face communication, creativity, attention span, social anxiety, and depression — and in light of recent scandals like Cambridge Analytica, data and privacy concerns are certainly valid.
Source: https://thehustle.co/meet-the-11-of-americans-who-dont-use-the-internet/
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mendax on Wednesday July 25 2018, @07:27AM (1 child)
Let's not forget the roughly 1% of the US population that is incarcerated [prisonpolicy.org]. That's about 10% of that 11% of the population without Internet right there. These people don't have Internet access, unless you want to count whatever unknown number of inmates who have smart phones that have been smuggled in by the guards.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday July 25 2018, @01:00PM
And 14% of the USA population is defined as "elderly" by ... someone. I guess that means over 65 although that seems to be changing over time.
I have a MiL and a UiL (uncle in law) both without internet access and they never use the net. My mom only uses the internet at the library, for decades she's been VERY confused about my jobs, hobbies, clients, leisure activities. Its quite a generation gap.
My mom is just not into "internet culture" she's more a craft-woman with many crafty hobbies and something like SN but for scrapbooking or quilt making would really not appeal to her. On the business side she's just old person standard, doing her bills and paperwork like its 1990. She likes collecting DVDs and talks about case art the way vinyl record people talk about LP art, in that its very important to them and the general population is very WTF. But, apparently, the original x-files season dvd sets were the pinnacle of 90s art albeit very abstract and dark compared to the harry potter directors cut DVD case from the 00s or whatever mom as long as you're having fun.
My MiL has very bad vision, there are screen readers and she has a kindle with the font size turned up to about 3/4 of an inch, but for her the net and its culture isn't her thing.
My UiL is in a lite-nursing home and basically watches early boomer TV 16 hours per day. People who don't have education or intellectual hobbies when they're young are not going to magically get it when they're old and slow, so, hello day time TV...
There are weird side effects. They actually believe the propaganda on the news and simply mirror behavior/beliefs off extensive observation. So that is weird, both their beliefs are weird because they're outright propaganda AND their priorities are weird. For example my MiL was very interested in some very small boat that sank because the TV told her it was fascinating and she's supposed to be very interested and she was supposed to be very sad and anxious about it; she was offended by my suggestion she not watch fake news. The blue pilling of elderly is amazing, younger people will bend the knee knowing its all a fake ruse but elderly actually believe stuff like that, which is kinda weird. They're also into religion pretty hard core.
My wife has power of attorney over my semi senile UiL but that dudes life is a total blast from a gen-x youth, he gets like ten paper bills per month to pay with handwritten paper checks and stamps are expensive for all those envelopes. Its been ten, twenty years since I paid an electric bill with old fashioned paper check in an old fashioned envelope and postal mail, but for my UiL his bill paying process is like paying bills in 1990. Being old he goes to the doctor a lot and takes plenty of pills, and those side effects are probably what is messing him up, and every time he talks to a dr there's like five old fashioned paper mails received by my wife for billing and insurance in the process of collecting money.
I have another weird observation... boomers and older compulsively have a process and procedure for reconciling their checkbook paper register and monthly statement, roughly gen-x and younger don't use paper registers and don't reconcile. Once I got online bank access around or before the turn of the century I stopped that and kinda spot-reconcile every time i write an old fashioned legacy paper check (maybe, I donno, ten a year at most?), but older people can't break the habit. Another possibly related oddity is nothing is more boomer than paper checks at retail stores. I'm not sure I've ever paid with a paper check, or not since the late 80s or early 90s at least. Cash or CC, always. But boomers will write like 15 checks per month at the food store just to drop in and buy a loaf of bread, leading to paperwork chaos, WTF old people? Boomers also barely tolerate answering machines, refuse to call cell phones (because its so expensive, LOL) and rarely if ever use an ATM to get cash. They'll spend like $45 ordering custom printed paper checks with puppies and flowers on them, use them all up in like two months going to the grocery store every day, then lecture me on how I'm throwing my money away on ATM fees just like the TV news said when I visit to the no-fee ATM at my credit union drive-thru while driving them around for errands. And then they'll spend half a day trying to reconcile a stack of paper checks per month.