Digital Divide: one-fifth of Americans have never used email

Say what? In the land of personal computers, WiFi and the mobile internet, nearly thirty percent of the entire country has never used a computer to create documents. So reported the results of a study on computer use in the US published by CNET on Monday. Also documenting such things as general computer usage, such as using PCs to perform online searches of any kind, or send emails, the data was equally dismal: only 21 percent of all Americans had ever engaged in either activity.

For a country that prides itself in its technological cosmopolitanism, such figures are extremely distressing. Could the scientific and social modernization that has accompanied general computer usage in the US be missing for that many Americans? Yes, if you consider that, despite how cheap personal computing has become in recent years, it remains inaccessible to at least a quarter or more of the population, who can neither afford to buy computers, or see any immediate social value in them.

Though the study attributes computer illiteracy mostly to age and education, it also contends that there appears to be little incentive for these demographics to use computers either. What that necessity is, the authors suggest, is a much deeper question that their study doesn't answer. Could it be that there are parts of life in which PCs are either unimportant or superfluous, or, possibly even unaffordable? Yes, but not according to studies like these, which see total technological modernization as eminently desirable.