Interesting piece of research caught my eye this a.m. — broadband adoption seems to be leveling off.
That's my audience Pew Research is talking about. Pew Research, for those of you who don't know, is one of the more notable names in media research. In this case, they telephoned over 2,000 folks and asked about their Internet use. (Read the full report here.)
The good news was that two-thirds of the folks surveyed, which we're taking to be representative of America as a whole, use broadband Internet — the type of high-speed Internet connection that works well for fast surfing and booting up heavy data files like videos.
(By the way, ?)
The bad news is that that's only a slight gain from the 63% figure the year before. Broadband adoption used to grow by leaps and bounds. (Of course, the law of large numbers may be kicking in — percentage gains decline as your base number gets bigger and bigger).
Here's the even badder news: About a fifth of the American population isn't interested in the Internet at all and "express little interest in going online," says Pew. More explicitly, the researchers say half those folks "do not find online content relevant to their lives."
*Sigh.* That hurts. Us new media types — especially in the journalism biz — like to think we're making the world a better place with our offerings and that EVERYBODY must want them.
A little Net myopia, I guess.
