By Ellen McCarthy
Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, April 17, 2003; Page E05
Now that people can log on at work, at home, in coffee shops, in airports and even in public parks, the Internet seems like a pervasive, nearly seamless entity in most American lives.
Most, but certainly not all. Forty-two percent of Americans still don't use the Internet and the majority of them do not believe they ever will, according to a study released yesterday.
Missing out on the most popular movement of the 1990s didn't seem to bother the unwired survey respondents. More than half of nonusers said they don't want Internet access or don't need it, a study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found.
It's not just a matter of not being able to afford a computer or a connection, although cost did play a role for about a third of the nonusers. What PC enthusiasts overlook, but skeptics don't, is the time it takes to learn to use these technological tools, and the fact that the technology is often frustrating. Those issues play a role in why the dramatic rate of growth in Internet use has flattened out since the end of 2001, the survey's author said.
"What we've seen since the end of 2001, is that net growth has really stalled," said Amanda Lenhart, principal author of the study. But the population of Net users is not static, with "people coming online and people dropping offline."
Half of the people not using the Internet are over 50 years old, Lenhart noted, while people enrolled as students are the group most likely to use the Net.
Internet use also continues to vary by race, income and education level, according to the Pew report. While only 40 percent of white Americans are nonusers, 55 percent of African Americans and 46 percent of English-speaking Hispanics are offline as well. Forty-one percent of nonusers have a yearly household income below $30,000 and a quarter of them did not graduate from high school. People living in rural areas and in the South are also less likely to go online.
Thirty percent of nonusers said the price of going online is a major reason for their abstention, and nearly as many said they don't have time or that the Internet is "too complicated and hard to understand." Fifty-two percent of this group said they simply don't want or don't need the Net. Nearly a quarter of nonusers said they have never tried going online and know few others who log on regularly.
"There will always be a certain portion of the population that doesn't see any need or any urgency to adopt new technologies -- or see any benefit of what those new technologies bring," said Daniel E. Hess, vice president of ComScore Networks Inc., a Reston-based research firm.
A fifth of nonusers live in houses that are connected to the Net. The study found that some of these people are intimidated by the technology and some live with people who monopolize the computer. Another group views their nonuse as a source of pride and "are delighted to reject such a popular technology," the report said.
Phone interviews with 3,553 people in the spring of 2002, along with group interviews conducted in the Washington and Baltimore areas, provide the basis for the report. The survey had margin of error of 2 percentage points.
