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Comment by samatman | Hacker News Reader

7% of Americans say they don't use the Internet when polled.

Some unknown percentage of that is the Lizardman's Constant[0], some of them mean "not much", plenty of them use the map on their phone and don't think that's "using the Internet", probably a decent amount who use Facebook to look at pictures of their grandkids but figure they aren't using the Internet because they don't own a computer (if you told them a smartphone is a computer they would look at you funny). Some are religious plain folk and genuinely don't use the Internet, some are retirees who only have a land line (and genuinely don't use the Internet).

[0]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...

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Some data points from Indonesia and Nigeria:

But a closer look at the data shows that 11% of Indonesians who said they used Facebook also said they did not use the internet. In Nigeria, 9% of Facebook users said they do not use the internet.

https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-id...

> some are retirees who only have a land line (and genuinely don't use the Internet).

A lot of phone lines use VoIP nowadays, so if they actually use the landline to call someone, there's a good chance they are using the internet anyway (even if their actual endpoint is still analog, which, in itself, is already becoming rare).

This was my thought...

Do none of these people have credit or debit cards and only use cash and check? Because plastic uses the internet. Even when they go to the bank to get cash out, they're vicariously using the internet through the service reps terminal to look up their account etc...

If they ever call customer support I wonder the percentage of voip ivr systems use....

Are they on the power grid? Pretty sure most grids are internet connected....

Do they fly out use taxis?

Seems nobody except maybe amish can claim 0 percent Internet use.

“I’m in a world that relies on the Internet thus I use the Internet” isn’t the most useful way to find out who uses the Internet.

Sure. But you need to clearly define this. Is looking at Facebook really that different from a EC payment? Both are just instructing some electronic device to send packets over the internet. Having a call via VoIP can be abstracted to the same thing.

I agree that the sledgehammer approach of saying 'everyone does' is not helpful, but neither is an unclear and inconsistent definition of use.

An actual solution might be to ask who directly pays for internet access or who knowingly uses it; the latter of which is probably what the study found.

“Internet adoption” is the phrase that recurs in the linked article.

The methodology linked from the article[0] defines it as people who answered "yes" to either of these questions:

> (1) Do you use the internet or email, at least occasionally?

> (2) Do you access the internet on a cell phone, tablet or other mobile handheld device, at least occasionally?

Before mid-2013, the survey used different questions.

[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Non-i...

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