15 Percent of Americans Afraid of or Confused by Internet - The UpStream

15 Percent of Americans Afraid of or Confused by Internet

posted Saturday Sep 28, 2013 by Scott Ertz

15 Percent of Americans Afraid of or Confused by Internet

A report released by the Pew Research Center reveals that 15 percent of American adults, 18 or older, do not use the Internet at all. The main reasons cited for avoiding the net are its difficulty to use and a lack of relevance.

34 percent of respondents that don't go online said that their reasoning is a lack of relevance. Since basically every piece of information that has ever existed is available online, we will assume that irrelevant means that the respondents actually mean that they have no need for or are not interested in the availability of the information.

The next reason in line is that it is too difficult to go online, coming in at a whopping 32 percent. The difficulty mostly comes from the fear of hackers, spam and spyware. This number is up significantly higher than that previous studies, with this statistic never breaching the 20 percent level.

Interestingly, 40 percent of the offliners have asked someone else to look something up online. I guess that means that there is information on the net that is relevant, though it could be from the other 78 percent that have asked. My guess is that most of the reason for not using the Internet is a lack of experience requiring assistance.

Another interesting number to come out of the study is that 14 percent of these people were once online, but secluded themselves later. Unfortunately, Pew did not have any follow-ups to determine why they cut the cord, so it is all guesses for us.

Several other reasons for offlining were the expense of owning a computer with Internet access and being too old for the Internet. Also, 3 percent of respondents WITH Internet access are still using dial-up.

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