Last week I took a couple hours at work and read through Mary Meeker's annual Internet trends report. There's a ton of great data in there, some of it really eye-popping. One thing that caught my eye early on was the data on Internet adoption.
While use of mobile devices as a way of accessing the Internet continues to skyrocket, overall adoption of the Internet has slowed to a crawl. In the US, it's remained essentially unchanged for the last five years. Somewhere between 80-85% of American adults regularly access the Internet at their home, workplace, or school; 15-20% do not.
That's somewhere around 60 million people who go through life each and every day without ever looking at e-mail, loading a news website, compulsively checking Facebook, going down the Wikipedia rabbit hole, or playing Tinder. When I think about how much time each day I spend mindlessly "Interneting,"as I've taken to calling it, this is a shocking figure.
The Washington Post published a great breakdown of this crowd of people in August of 2013, based on data from the Pew Research Center. Some of these facts stood out as having particular relevance to politics:
1) According to the Post report, only 53% of Americans over the age of 65% use the Internet. Adults over the age of 65 vote with much more regularity than young voters. This means that a disproportionate amount of electoral power is in the hands of people who cannot in any way relate to how people our age communicate with each other, consume news, research information, find rides in the city, pay each other back, and so forth.
2) Residents of every former Confederate state except Georgia and Virginia, along with Kentucky, West Virginia, Indiana, Missouri, New Mexico, and Hawaii have rates of Internet use that trend significantly lower than the national average. Put it another way, "non-users tend to concentrate in the Southeast." So do Tea Party voters. Just saying.
3) Continuing along the same lines, while a bare majority of non-users are restricted from access because of expense or other difficulty, fully 48% of those 60 million people do not use the Internet because they "don't' need it" or are "not interested." Without getting too melodramatic, I think we can almost all agree that the Internet is one of the most far-reaching and useful innovations that humanity has ever come up with. There are so many uses for the Internet that it is simply not possible for it to be entirely useless to anyone. There is a lot of great debate going on among Internet users about how it affects our lives, and whether there might be ways in which the Internet has been harmful in some way. But that the Internet has been a net contributor to humanity stands as one of those self-evident truths, like the idea that the US government should avoid legally defaulting on its debt, or the fact that CO2 emissions are contributing to a change in the Earth's climate.
….oh, wait. Yeah, not everyone believes those things, either.
Given how many millions of voters literally do not believe in these things, it starts to be less surprising that 60 million people in the US don't use the Internet at all.
I think a lot of us get caught up in how far we've come in the last two three decades, technologically speaking; about how much more access to information everyone has today, about how easy it is to communicate across the globe. We talk about these developments as if they were universally embraced --- because how could they not be?
These data serves to remind us that, in considering society, there will always be a class of people who literally reject progress. The fact that these people vote--a lot--helps to explain some of the insanities about our politics.