7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they? (2024)
For many Americans, going online is an important way to connect with friends and family, shop, get news and search for information. Yet today, 7% of U.S. adults say they do not use the internet, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted Jan. 25-Feb. 8, 2021.
Pew Research Center regularly studies technology adoption among U.S. adults. This analysis focuses on the rates of internet adoption among Americans based on a survey of 1,502 U.S. adults conducted Jan. 25-Feb. 8, 2021, by cellphone and landline phone. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, age, household income, education and community type. Here are the questions, responses and methodology used for this report.
Internet non-adoptionis linked to a number of demographic variables, but is strongly connected to age – with older Americans continuing to be one of the least likely groups to use the internet. Today, 25% of adults ages 65 and older report never going online, compared with much smaller shares of adults under the age of 65.
Educational attainment and household income are also indicators of a person’s likelihood to be offline. Some 14% of adults with a high school education or less do not use the internet, but that share falls as the level of educational attainment increases. Adults living in households earning less than $30,000 a year are far more likely than those whose annual household income is $75,000 or more to report not using the internet (14% vs. 1%).
There are no statistically significant differences in non-internet use by gender, race and ethnicity, or community type.
Despite some groups having persistently lower rates of internet adoption, the vast majority of Americansare now online, as ongoinggovernmentand social service programs encourage internet adoption in underserved areas. Over time, the nation’s offline population has been shrinking, and for some groups that change has been especially dramatic. For example, 86% of adults ages 65 and older did not go online in 2000; today that figure has fallen to just a quarter.
The share of offline adults ages 50 to 64 has dropped 8 percentage points since 2019, from 12% to 4%. The shares of offline Black and Hispanic adults have also fallen significantly during that period, from 15% to 9% among those who are Black and from 14% to 5% among those who are Hispanic.
For many Americans, going online is an important way to connect with friends and family, shop, get news and search for information. Yet today, 7% of U.S. adults say they do not use the internet, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted Jan. 25-Feb. 8, 2021.
Roughly a quarter of Americans who are 65 or older say they never go online. That's about 13.5 million seniors opting to bypass the information superhighway. Not surprisingly, the younger the population, the more they're plugged in. Just 1% of adults between the ages of 18 and 29 say they don't go online.
Compared with the other sectors of the population, there is a significant decay in internet usage by the elderly: While older adults often use the Internet for shorter amounts of time than other adults, they are also less likely to engage in email writing, social media usage, and Web-based shopping.
GWI's data indicates that 6.8 percent of internet users aged 25 to 64 did not use any social media platforms in Q2 2022, while that figure had inched up to 6.9 percent one year later.
Neo-Luddism or new Luddism is a philosophy opposing many forms of modern technology. The term Luddite is generally used as a pejorative applied to people showing technophobic leanings. The name is based on the historical legacy of the English Luddites, who were active between 1811 and 1817.
The Amish are a religious and Protestant group that inhabits certain areas of the United States and Canada, and it is well known that the most strict do not use electricity or cars because they farm with hand tools and travel on horseback.
As of April 2024, around 70 percent of the male population in the world was using the internet, compared to only 64.4 percent of women. This disparity is seen in almost all regions across the world but more so in the least developed countries (LDCs).
A key trait of people who prefer to stay private and rarely post on social media is that they value personal connections. You cherish one-on-one interactions and deep conversations more than casual online chatter.
Never had a Facebook account: According to a 2023 survey by Pew Research Center, 68% of US adults say they ever used Facebook, meaning roughly 32% could potentially fall into the category of never having had an account.
How Many Americans Use TikTok? According to TikTok CEO (Shou Chew) statement in January 2024, TikTok has 170 million monthly active users in the US. That's an increase from 150 million reported in February 2023. According to a recent Pew Research Center study, 33% of US adults report ever using TikTok.
The answer, surprisingly, is yes. In 2021, the Census Bureau estimated that more than 375,000 people were using dialup internet services to get online. That's about 1/1000 the U.S. population, but it's not nothing.
By 2000, about half of all households (51 percent) had a computer. In 2015, this percentage had grown to 79 percent. The ACS, by contrast, indicated that in 2013, 84 percent of households had a computer (desktop or laptop, handheld, or other), with the percentage grow- ing to 87 percent in 2015.
Introduction: My name is Twana Towne Ret, I am a famous, talented, joyous, perfect, powerful, inquisitive, lovely person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.
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