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United States Businesses Communications The Internet Technology

Use of the Internet and Smartphones is No Longer on the Rise in America (qz.com) 99

For years, the number of Americans who have reported using the internet, social media, and smartphones has been on a meteoric rise. But that rate has slowed to a near-stall. From a report: New data published this week by the Pew Research Center show that, since 2016, that number has plateaued, indicating those technologies have reached a saturation point among many groups of people. The percentage of Americans using smartphones (77%), the internet (88% to 89%), and social media (69%) has remained virtually unchanged during the last two years. "Put simply, in some instances there just aren't many non-users left," the report states.

More than 90% of adults younger than 50 report they use the internet or own a smartphone. This number squares with some of the trends noticed earlier this year by Gartner, a global research firm. The fourth quarter of 2017 marked the first time since 2004 that the market for smartphones declined globally compared to the prior year. People are less frequently buying new phones.

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Use of the Internet and Smartphones is No Longer on the Rise in America

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  • by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Monday October 01, 2018 @12:22PM (#57405136) Homepage Journal

    It's pretty simple. We won't see any improvement in smart phone and computer usage without advances in technology that cater to the needs of an increasingly illiterate or sub-literate population.

    • by hey! ( 33014 )

      Well, the rates of functional illiteracy in the US is shockingly high: about one in seven adults have reading and writing skills that are so poor that they affect their ability to function, but they aren't technically totally illiterate.

      That said, I don't think there's been so much a growth in illiteracy as a growth in accommodating peoples' laziness. Also as stuff is increasingly made in China and sold across the world, things like user manuals are almost a thing of the past. User produced YouTube videos

    • That computer literacy bar is currently very low. I think it is more of a case of peak demand.
      Those who want a smartphone and internet already have it. Even people who are homeless and are on social security has a smart phone. Because they are rather affordable already, and in general a good deal compared to the alternatives (a Lan Line/a computer and internet)

      My father after a Fox News watching session wanted to get me on how people are taking advantage of our social security with people having these fa

  • I agree (Score:5, Funny)

    by 110010001000 ( 697113 ) on Monday October 01, 2018 @12:23PM (#57405148) Homepage Journal
    I have never used a smartphone OR the Internet and I never plan to.
  • by Oswald McWeany ( 2428506 ) on Monday October 01, 2018 @12:25PM (#57405162)

    Sell your stocks in companies that specialize in taking cat photos now!

  • you would think the amount of cord-cutting would get more multicast video streaming on the net....

    • by skids ( 119237 )

      Multicast is all but dead due to the on-demand culture... multicast really only works well if you have a bunch of people all watching the same thing at the same time. Or at the very least caching it at the same time. That doesn't really happen very much in real life.

    • there are a half dozen TV streaming companies in the USA

    • by Kjella ( 173770 )

      you would think the amount of cord-cutting would get more multicast video streaming on the net....

      Long haul bandwidth is expensive but caching is cheap and the last mile cost mostly installation and maintenance, so there's not much savings from multicast over unicast from a CDN. If it wasn't for copyright you could set up a super effective simple, open LRU cache for torrents, every time you download externally the ISP caches the chunks. If one chunk = 4MB then a 4TB HDD = a million chunks and you don't need any redundancy. Next person who downloads only sends the hash and gets it right from the ISP's ne

  • Many companies in the space have stock valuations based on unlimited growth. Normal growth, or stasis, will be a big hit. I do not think investors understand profit and earnings rations anymore.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      Many companies in the space have stock valuations based on unlimited growth.

      Yes, well, whatever insane bullshit has caused the stock market to believe in unlimited growth is about due to be corrected.

      It is not possible to have 10% growth forever, no matter what the delusional idiots in the stock market think.

      The stock market has been dominated by all sorts of stupid and irrational shit for years, but the believe in never-ending growth takes the cake.

    • by djinn6 ( 1868030 )
      Most of those companies have foreign operations in places like India and Africa, who are just getting online now. Granted, they're still very poor so you wouldn't expect profits there to scale at the same rate with respect to the number of users.
    • by Kjella ( 173770 )

      Many companies in the space have stock valuations based on unlimited growth. Normal growth, or stasis, will be a big hit. I do not think investors understand profit and earnings rations anymore.

      Some investors understand other investors well enough, a lot of people go by the way the arrow's pointing - up you buy and down you sell. And they get seduced by their own profit, I made lots of money on this stock so invest more. If you're too conservative or too twitchy you're likely to bail out of a booming stock too early, maybe it's not entirely rational based on book value but it's rational based on the market dynamics. Of course if you play the sucker's game too long you end up being the sucker but i

  • You can't be on your smartphone more than all the time.

  • by bobstreo ( 1320787 ) on Monday October 01, 2018 @12:40PM (#57405332)

    was set too low.

    I'm still rocking a 2 core AMD laptop from 7 or 8 years ago.

    I haven't bought a new phone in about 8 years (the cellular company gave me a free one when the last one I purchased wasn't supported any longer)

    My needs are pretty simple, my NAS is about 5 years old and my ATOM server (mail/web/DB) is about 9 years old.

  • Oh come now (Score:5, Funny)

    by cascadingstylesheet ( 140919 ) on Monday October 01, 2018 @12:42PM (#57405360) Journal
    Surely we can get more growth by having internet connected tablets for pets or something.
  • I got a smartphone for my mom. She was the only person on the planet who didn't have one.

  • We do what we can, but between all the Facebook updates, Twitter, email, Pinterest, Instagram, Reddit, Tumblr etc we have to watch where we're going or we'll get run over by a truck.

  • "People are less frequently buying new phones." Maybe the "trendy" "hip" types have found something else to waste their money on that a new iPhone/Galaxy smartphone year after year. It is amazing that a minor upgrade, processor, ram speed, display, warrants prices as high as they do for these things. Minus ad/R&D a 64% margin between build cost & retail price is something most other retailers would DREAM of. It's just "not worth it" wasting that amount of money on a smartphone. I usually walk a lar
  • Trends clearly showed that internet usage by 2019 would be 135%

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