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.
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.
America has passed the point of peak literacy (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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The U.S. public education system has been run by leftists for generations, and suddenly the reason that it sucks is because Trump came along in the past 2 years? Give me a break.
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Easy. She is not "qualified" as you want. Mainly, you're blinded by your views, not her actual qualifications. I will agree, she has an agenda. By your response, I'm assuming you don't agree with it. I'm ok with that, and what I would like to hear is your opinion on what is good. Please don't same more of the same thing. That's not working well.
By the way, you're not an "asshole" if you state the obvious, which was the US public education system has (is) being run by leftists and needs to be improved
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Re:Or we could fix our education system (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe you should point out where we've had quality public education before instead of blaming someone for wanting to try something different. I bet you weren't complaining about the shitty public schools before she came along, and if you don't believe they were shitty then there's no helping you.
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Maybe you should point out where we've had quality public education before
Every year from, oh, let's say 1920 to 1980.
deVos is just another in a long line of those out to destroy public education. The existence of previous piles of shit doesn't mean we have to accept the latest.
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I went through public school in the 60s and 70s. You're way the fuck off.
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If that's the case, they you have no complaint about someone making an attempt to fix what is clearly broken, asshole.
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Re:Or we could fix our education system (Score:5, Insightful)
But that same reasoning holds that we can afford massive tax cuts for the wealthiest of its citizen. These tax cuts are limiting our ability to deal with future crises.
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Disclaimer: I'm not on any sort of social program. I make far too much money.
On behalf of every sane person on the planet: Fuck you you selfish piece of shit.
We pay for plenty of stuff that helps you. In fact, you scream incessantly about how terrible it is if we cut spending on something that helps you personally. The second it would help someone else slightly more, you scream "NO!!! MY MONEY!!!".
Your greed-above-all-else attitude can not die out fast enough.
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We don't have to sit around and let our education system continue to go to hell.
I've been hearing this since the 80's and 90's, back when I was in school. The problem I see is people don't want to accidentally pay for some stranger's kid to get a free education. America is a material girl, Living in a material world.
We just need more funding for education in low-income communities.
I had hoped that the information age would improve literacy, and it has somewhat. But I think we've leveled off and can't expect much else to happen without effort (and money). As long as people are OK living in a gated community and can avoid interaction with the lower cla
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Our education system is doing quite well, despite the nay-sayers. When we look at NAEP scores, which is one of the oldest measures that provided consistency in its content, we see that the schools are doing quite well. This is particularly true when we consider that we test all students. I have taught in other countries. Many other counties have a filtering approach that insures that the less promising students do not advance , and are not able to pull the average down. If a person compares top 20% US to ot
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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
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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)
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I have never used a smartphone OR the Internet and I never plan to.
That's probably for the best. There are way too many mediocre news aggregator sites for nerds on the internet.
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Um, you just used the Internet. :P
SELL. SELL. SELL. (Score:3)
Sell your stocks in companies that specialize in taking cat photos now!
streaming? (Score:2)
you would think the amount of cord-cutting would get more multicast video streaming on the net....
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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.
Re:streaming? (Score:5, Informative)
Many of the channels (like AMC) on Slingtv.com and plutotv.com are "multicast". You cannot rewind or fastforward the channel. Everyone is seeing the same second at the same time (live)
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there are a half dozen TV streaming companies in the USA
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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
This will be a big problem for some (Score:2)
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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.
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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
Well, duh. (Score:2)
You can't be on your smartphone more than all the time.
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Two smartphones. Now you're on a smartphone 200% of the time!!
I guess the rate of planned obsolescence (Score:3)
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)
Re:Oh come now (Score:4, Informative)
Surely we can get more growth by having internet connected tablets for pets or something.
My pets are way too smart to waste time online.
It's my fault (Score:2)
I got a smartphone for my mom. She was the only person on the planet who didn't have one.
Re:It's my fault (Score:5, Funny)
I got a smartphone for my mom. She was the only person on the planet who didn't have one.
I didn't know that I had a brother! Have mom give me a call.
Normal (Score:2)
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.
About flippin' time (Score:2)
How could this be? (Score:1)
Trends clearly showed that internet usage by 2019 would be 135%