Despite the fact that that more than 2.7 billion people are now online, a new report from consulting firm McKinsey & Co. reveals Internet adoption has slowed and will continue to slow.
Consulting firm McKinsey & Co. analyzed 20 years of research regarding global Internet adopting, finding that despite increasing technology use, the United States makes the list of the 20 countries that have the majority of the world's "offline population."
The report found that there are 3.2 billion people offline. Smaller, less developed countries like Nigeria and larger countries like China and India had more people offline compared to the U.S. However, the U.S. still made the list, with about 20 percent of Americans not using the Internet. The report was, a bit ironically, sponsored by Mark Zuckerberg's Internet.org, which aims to bring Internet access to the deprived foreign masses.
McKinsey suggests that Americans are not going online because they simply don't want to, a factor that may be linked to age.
According to the survey of the U.S. offline population, 34 percent of people cited relevance and 32 percent cited usability as the main reason why they don't use the Internet. Most people who cited relevance were just not interested, whereas others reported not needing it, being too busy to use it and some felt it was a waste of time.
Internet access can also be expensive or hard to access for low-income women in rural areas, making it a class issue. The Pew Research Center reports that about 99 percent of high-income U.S. adults use the Internet, whereas only 77 percent of low-income households do.
The statistics are surprising, given that the U.S. is the country that developed Internet innovations such as Google and the iPhone. This further emphasizes the point that Internet usage seems to be a class issue in the U.S., with 80 percent of the offline population in the U.S. living below the poverty line.
