Out of all the different technologies that are now available, the internet is overwhelming viewed as the most important and hardest to give up by many Americans. A new report from Statista shows that 46% of Americans feel that it would be “hard or impossible” to give up the internet, followed by cellphones at 44% and TV at 35%.
Considering the amount of work that people now do online, it makes sense that the internet would be the hardest to give up for many people. This is particularly true since some of the other items in the Statista report are actually based on the internet like email and social media, so if the internet was given up, those would be as well.
While the percentages are somewhat interesting, the most surprising statistic present in the report is that 17% of Americans still feel as though they cannot give up their landline telephone. Now that the majority of people do have cell phones, this percentage appears high, though a large portion of Americans have continued to pay for landline phone service.
At the same time as Statista released its graph, the Pew Research Center put out its own set of internet-related research and found that 13% of US adults do not use the internet. For people that have either grown up with the internet or have begun to use it in numerous parts of their lives, the thought of not going online or being “connected” is quite outlandish.
Internet use is on an upward path however, and although growth has slowed down in recent years, it has come along way from the 54% of adults who were not online in the early 2000s.
There are also a handful of connections that Pew has pointed out, such as the percentage of people who earn more than $75,000 and use the internet (99%) and people between the ages of 18 and 29 (97%.)
Summary: More Americans would find it impossible to give up the internet than those who could go without cell phones, TV, and social media. However, cell phones are nearly as important as the internet, while landlines are holding on with more than 10% of the Americans studied.
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