From the New York Times comes this story about those people who choose not to be a part of our interconnected world.
Despite all the talk about an increasingly connected world, the proportion of American adults who have never used the Internet and do not live in an Internet-enabled home has remained almost unchanged since 2002, according to a study recently released by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
“There’s a group of Americans who are really hard-core offline, truly disconnected,” said Susannah Fox, the author of the report. Ms. Fox said that the truly disconnected were mostly over age 65, and less educated than the rest of the population. Their lack of access to the Internet means, for example, that the federal government has relied heavily on mailings to get the word out about the new Medicare drug benefit.
You can count my Dad among this group — no computer and apparently no interest in getting online at any point in time. To the extent that this is a function of age, I would expect that this percentage of the “disconnected” will drop as time goes on.
