Study: 7 Million UK Adults Have Never Used The Internet

Think about the last 24 hours of your life. If you're like most individuals, it was likely filled with dozens of instances of accessing the Internet, probably starting with a smartphone in the morning and a laptop or tablet at night. The Internet is everywhere, and many use it for essential tasks, such as navigation, shopping, work, and school. Because of this, it is hard to imagine having never used it, making the results of a recent study a tad surprising. In the UK alone, 7 million adults have never used the Internet.

The study looks at Internet users age 16 and older, and not surprisingly it is that youngest age group that has the highest rate of Internet usage, with 97.1-percent of the 16 to 24-year-olds age group having used the Web within the last three months. Jumping to the other end of the scale, however, only 34.3-percent of those aged 75 and older have used the Internet.

While it isn't particularly surprising that the elderly are the least among Internet users, it is also not surprising that they are the demographic most quickly adopting an online presence, with the number of users having jumped 3.6-percent over the previous year to 30.7-percent at the end of 2012. Between the two age groups, we see a slight-but-steady drop in users moving from the youngest to the oldest age groups.

An area that shows an interesting trend is the fairly rapid decline of female Internet users compared to male users as one progresses through the age groups. While female users and male users are nearly identical (down to a tenth of a percent, in some cases) in the three youngest age groups – going up to 54-year-olds – the number of female users starts declining compared to male users in larger percentages from age 55 onward.

In the oldest age group, 43.7-percent of men use the Internet compared to only 27.3-percent of women. Also shown by the study was that out of the European Union, the United Kingdom has the highest rate of overall Internet users compared to other locations.

SOURCE: The Guardian