Jim Crawford preps a mower to clean some brush on his property in Manhattan. Crawford says his 10-acre ranch keeps him busy enough and he doesn’t need to get online. He is among the 15 percent of Americans who don’t use the Internet.
Washington: Sixty-three years old and retired from a career as a welder, Jim Crawford doesn’t have much use for the Internet.
“I never had to use it on the job and didn’t have to use it at home for any reason,” said Crawford, who lives in Manhattan, Kan. “So I never really learned to do it — and never really got interested.”
The only time he goes online is to read through the automotive listings in the office of a local online auction company. If he sees something he likes, he says, he asks his mechanic to bid on it for him.
Crawford is far from alone: About 15 percent of Americans older than 18 don’t use the Internet, according to a study released in September by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. An additional 9 percent use it only outside the home.
They make up a shrinking, but not insignificant, segment of the population. And the gap between them and our increasingly digitized society is growing wider every day.
“There is a group of Americans being left behind as technology advances without them,” Lawrence Strickling, head of the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration, told an audience at the Brookings Institution recently.
“Americans who don’t have access to the Internet are increasingly cut off from job opportunities, educational resources, health-care information, social networks, even government services.”
These people are being left out even as access to broadband — Internet service provided by cable, fibre, DSL and other high-speed networks, as opposed to the older, slower dial-up service — has expanded dramatically in the past 20 years. Because of a national infrastructure upgrade that Strickling compares to the rural electrification effort of the 1930s, well over 90 percent of US households are either wired for high-speed broadband or can get high-speed wireless access.
But actual adoption of that service lags behind availability: In 2011, the most recent year for which data are available, the NTIA found that 69 percent of homes used broadband Internet service. That’s remarkable growth from 2000, when only 4 percent of homes used broadband, but it still indicates a significant gap.
So who are these Americans who remain disconnected from the online world?
“They are disproportionately older,” says Kathryn Zickuhr, who wrote the Pew study. According to the survey, which was done in May, 49 percent of non-Internet users are older than 65.
They also are, in general, less educated. Although nearly everyone in the US with a college degree is online, 41 percent of adults without a high school diploma are offline.
The digital divide linked to household income is less extreme but still substantial. Nearly a quarter of adults in households making less than $30,000 per year don’t use the Internet, the survey showed, as opposed to fewer than 1 in 20 adults in households with annual incomes above $75,000.
There also are racial disparities — particularly when it comes to Internet use at home. Seventy-nine percent of whites surveyed by Pew used the Internet at home vs 70 percent of African Americans and 63 percent of Hispanics. Urban and suburban Americans are more likely than rural residents to be online at home.
The Pew survey asked these people why they don’t go online. Perhaps surprisingly, cost wasn’t the most common answer.
The most prevalent reason, given by 34 percent of offline respondents, was that the Internet is not relevant to them. Like Jim Crawford, they aren’t interested, don’t want to use it or have no need for it.
“Man, it just drives me nuts,” Crawford says of the young people he sees consumed by their smartphones. “It seems like all kids do is play on video games or the Internet and never go outside. That might be part of the reason I’m not interested in it — just seems like there’s so much else to do.”
A slightly smaller group, 32 percent, cited problems with using the technology: They said that getting online was difficult or frustrating, or that they were worried about issues such as privacy or hackers.
As Zickuhr points out, those reasons are “pretty interrelated in many ways. Many of the people who think it’s too hard may also think the Internet is not relevant or would not be useful to them.”
Nineteen percent of non-users cited concerns about the expense of owning a computer or paying for an Internet connection.
Like Strickling, most policymakers would disagree with that sense of irrelevance. They point out that people who aren’t online have a harder time accessing vital services such as Medicare and Medicaid or the new health-care exchanges created under President Barrack Obama’s health-care law. WP-BLOOMBERG
