Digital Disparities Still Remain

Digital Disparities Still Remain

One-in-five adults do not use the Internet, according to the Pew Internet Project of the Pew Research Center. The difference between that group and the majority of Americans who do go online remains strongly correlated with age, education, and household income, which are the strongest positive predictors of Internet use.

Certain aspects of the current Internet population still strongly resemble the state of Internet adoption in 2000, when one of Pew Internet's first reports found that minorities, adults living in households with lower incomes, and seniors were less likely than others to be online.

Yet while gaps in Internet adoption persist, some have narrowed in the past decade. The Internet access gap closest to disappearing is that between whites and minorities. Differences in access persist, especially in terms of adults who have high-speed broadband at home, but they have become significantly less prominent over the years.

Almost half of adults don't use the Internet because they don't think the it is relevant to them, often saying they don't want to use the internet and don't need to use it to get the information they want or conduct the communication they want.

Among the main findings about the state of digital access:

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One in five American adults does not use the Internet. Senior citizens, those who prefer to take Pew interviews in Spanish rather than English, adults with less than a high school education, and those living in households earning less than $30,000 per year are the least likely adults to have Internet access.

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Among adults who do not use the Internet, almost half have told Pew that the main reason they don’t go online is because they don’t think the Internet is relevant to them. Most have never used the Internet before, and don’t have anyone in their household who does. About one in five say that they do know enough about technology to start using the Internet on their own, and only one in 10 told Pew that they were interested in using the internet or email in the future.

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he 27% of adults living with disability in the U.S. today are significantly less likely than adults without a disability to go online (54% vs. 81%). Furthermore, 2% of adults have a disability or illness that makes it more difficult or impossible for them to use the Internet at all.

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Though overall Internet adoption rates have leveled off, adults who are already online are doing more. And even for many of the core Internet activities Pew studied, significant differences in use remain, generally related to age, household income, and educational attainment.

The ways in which people connect to the Internet are also much more varied today than they were in 2000. As a result, Internet access is no longer synonymous with going online with a desktop computer:

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Currently, 88% of American adults have a cell phone; 57% have a laptop; 19% own an e-book reader; and 19% have a tablet computer; about six in 10 adults (63%) go online wirelessly with one of those devices. Gadget ownership is generally correlated with age, education, and household income, although some devices—notably e-book readers and tablets—are as popular or even more popular with adults in their thirties and forties than young adults ages 18-29.

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The rise of mobile is changing the story. Groups that have traditionally been on the other side of the digital divide in basic Internet access are using wireless connections to go online. Among smartphone owners, young adults, minorities, those with no college experience, and those with lower household income levels are more likely than other groups to say that their phone is their main source of internet access.

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Even beyond smartphones, both African Americans and English-speaking Latinos are as likely as whites to own any sort of mobile phone, and are more likely to use their phones for a wider range of activities.

The primary recent data in this report are from a Pew Internet Project tracking survey. The survey was fielded from July 25-August 26, 2011, and was administered by landline and cell phone, in English and Spanish, to 2,260 adults age 18 and older. The margin of error for the full sample is ±2 percentage points.