I wonder whether it counts people who use internet, but don't know it. My grandma uses her phone to chat with me, check the weather, recipes and news. But if you ask her whether she uses internet or not - she'd say no and she has no use for it.
Yeah you can basically arbitrarily expand or restrict the circle of people. If I don't use the internet otherwise but I go to a machine to buy myself a train ticket. The machine is internally connected with the train company's servers which might be in the cloud, so the signal goes via "the internet" for a short time. Does that count as use of the internet or is the internet just an implementation detail?
No you could say, because you don't use it at home and you use an appliance. But then is your grandma using the internet, because she uses a bunch of appliances, too? And someone who uses the internet through an internet cafe, something very common in some asian countries, wouldn't be "using" it either as they are not at home.
Basically all modern cars built in the last 5 years send telemetry data back to their manufacturers. Is driving a Mercedes EQS/Tesla usage of the internet?
Up until two weeks ago my car didn't (or at least it didn't send any data anywhere, I know one mechanic hooked up an iPad to it to get some sort of real-time data from the engine once when diagnosing a transmission issue).
Drove a sedan from 2008. Had over 150k miles on it. Still drives fine, next owner might be able to get another 50k miles from it.
Pfft, my ‘88 hilux is on 1,350,000 km. Drive train, engine, all original. The only stuff that gets changed are filters, glow plugs, tyres and oil, and the very occasional thing that goes wrong.
When it doesn’t work I can see what’s wrong by looking at it, and can fix it myself with cheap parts that are available everywhere. It’s cost me €200 in maintenance in the last three years.
Conversely I stupidly bought a 2016 truck last year and just sent it to be scrapped, as it has been absolutely nothing but trouble, has cost me about €8,000 to repeatedly repair, and it then still needed a new engine, computer, and gearbox - I’ve driven it maybe 100km and it just keeps falling apart.
They’re getting seriously good at the planned obsolescence bit.
I drive an ‘89 4Runner which at the time was the same platform as your Hilux. I have the same experience as you. It just keeps running and thrives on neglect. I hope to never replace it. The new stuff is so poorly made.
I used to read the encyclopedia when I was little, before I had the internet. Was I fractionally connected to the internet, as opposed to 100% unfettered Wikipedia access?
I see this headline as 63% of the world now uses the internet in some shape or form. Irrespective of whether they know this or not, any threats to this vast communication network will affect their lives in some shape or form. A large part of the world has started to treat internet as a utility and the disruption of this utility has implications for people irrespective of how it's structured, managed or made available.
The Network is a utility. Historically the previous two iterations of the Network were treated that way, the Universal Postal Union and the Public Switched Telephone Network.
It's true that it's possible to live without access to the Network, people did up until the Treaty of Bern (in 1874) - it is also possible to live without access to electricity, or fresh water and people did that too, they're still utilities.
I read it differently - 63% of people when asked will say that they directly use the internet. Most of the data seems to come from surveys, and some of the data notes seem to mention stuff around households being asked.
Im not sure a person using an internet connected ATM would count, or a person who uses the internet in some form at work but does not have a broadband connection at home etc
If you count indirect usage, I suspect the figure is much higher - ie do we really believe that c13% of Europe manages to get through a month without using the internet in any form? I’m a bit sceptical on this data as it appears to be poorly explained in terms of methodology (and some is even just forecast through a model).
I was trying to think of other technologies people use but don't know it. If people drive they probably also know that they use the road, but maybe they don't know that they "use" the drainage works that were put in hundreds of years ago. At what point does it become silly to ask the question? "Do you use the water treatment facility on the edge of town?" "Do you use money?"
Banking. (Which is a technology, albiet quite an old one.) If someone doesn't personally have a mortgage or car loan, and gets paid in cash, and doesn't use banks at all; Does such a person need banks to exist? Does society? Some people I've talked to honestly believe the answer is no.
To be clear, are YOU advocating for the belief that banks don't need to exist?
Because the statement is technically true, but basically meaningless... Cars don't need to exist, modern medicine doesn't need to exist, electric lightbulbs don't need to exist. But they all provide conveniences and functionality that most people seem to appreciate, and would not be willing to part with.
Water's a really good one! Where does your tap water come from? What water district are you in? Or conversely, what's your ISP's ISP (Level3/etc)? Where's your closest Internet Exchange (IX)? How many hops away are your closest friends on the Internet?
In 2017, 71% of the global population (5.3 billion people) used a safely managed drinking-water service – that is, one located on premises, available when needed, and free from contamination.
There is more people using the internet than hungry. This is both good and bad. Consider that most of these people do have access to internet but have minimal culture or education to judge what is conspiracy, conspiracy theory, fake news or downright lies. People don't know what science is or what is the scientific method. They don't know what is the difference between opinion and fact, prejudice and moral, dogma and respect. Most have no idea of probabilities and statistics and fall prey to very very poor arguments that appeal to personal emotional triggers. Makes me remember an old report that favelas in Brazil had more TV's than refrigerators.
Instead of becoming an instrument to strengthen freedom, it actually weakens it and promotes domination and inequality.
That's pretty elitist. Do you want to check for a college degree at the door?
Hell, you can just look around HN to see that a formal education/"culture consumption" doesn't stop people from falling into messy baseless conspiracy theories. And a lot of people confuse "disagreeing with me/having different foundational truths" with "being wrong" no matter how much Foucault they've read.
I think a lot of what people take as indicators of lack of judgement or skills to handle information are more often just indicators of those who have little or no trust in the institutions or its messengers.
Perhaps the parent post sounded harsh but there's nothing elitist in acknowledging that billions of people lack access to good education (and food, water, etc). It's not their fault and nothing shameful.
> And a lot of people confuse "disagreeing with me/having different foundational truths" with "being wrong" no matter how much Foucault they've read.
HN is known to be an echo chamber, and also no amount of education is a silver bullet. But learning critical thinking (including reading Foucault) does wonders.
Unfortunately a lot of "formal education", especially around STEM, is focusing more and more around the "how" and less about the "why".
> Instead of becoming an instrument to strengthen freedom, it actually weakens it and promotes domination and inequality.
I don't agree with this, other communication mechanisms can be more easily controlled for propaganda purposes and can completely exclude contrary information.
The idea that "access to information is bad because some information is wrong" is very popular but there's not much to it other than elitism and a desire for control over others.
> Most have no idea of probabilities and statistics and fall prey to very very poor arguments that appeal to personal emotional triggers. Makes me remember an old report that favelas in Brazil had more TV's than refrigerators.
For someone who is taking the high ground on this topic, this is a strange topic. I'm pretty sure there are more TVs on my street than there are refrigerators; we only have one fridge but have >1 tv for example.
now, i have family members who are "glued" to their "insta". constantly swiping up, laughing, "see this, see this", meh, "oh cool, nice", sharing on whatspp.
rinse and repeat. i don't know how that feels like. i personally do not use whatsapp or telegram so i am somewhat shielded by the whole sharing culture. neither i use instagram or facebook for some reason. i'd rather spend my time window shopping on libby, granted that is becoming a small minority but still...
the amount of absurd BS peddled on instagram and tiktok is staggering. like you have endless supply of videos sharing health benefits of ginger and for the next week your family tells you about ginger and balding, weight loss, weight gain, kidney stones, heart health, brain power, on and on.
next week its chia seeds, then nigela seeds. There was a time i hear when astrology was seen as harmless, now, not so much because your insta astrologer can make you do stupid stuff for "cosmic alignment" and its all like farming.
i have a question. When discussion on peertube comes up, "creators" cry "well, youtube gives me ad revenue so why bother" but those same people and more than them spend considerable time on instagram and tiktok without any cash earnings so why is that acceptable that time ?
You're on hacker news which is really just instagram for people who like startup cosplay. Most of the internet is a waste of time but at least things are written forever and the global consciousness moves faster together as one. If that's through Instagram or Wikipedia who cares.
ok point taken but that was about me. instagram imo is ephemerial, tiktok more so. same as whatsapp. you need fresh content to keep the machine churning. people don't usually spend time rewatching old stuff, or do they?
that is "haram" by all means. i'm not advocating it, i was making a point. that's all.we don't have newspapers publishing the horoscope or something or palmists on roadside willing to read your hand for a sum. that thing is properly not practised in the masses. i was saying, the "internet" with all it s good because of lack of proper education, people are warming up to ideas that they should not.
take the example of online gambling. people bet like anything today. we have dozens of "he won 1 crore today, wish i had won the same. let me try to do this tomorrow". the argument is, "well, no money is changing hands. we are not handing out money with our hands. that is haram. this is just taking money from our accounts and getting back some. we aren't touching anything".. i have genuinely heard this argument the other day and my mind was blown at that time. my point is, people are milking the gullible for profit and justifying it.
>"well, no money is changing hands. we are not handing out money with our hands. that is haram. this is just taking money from our accounts and getting back some. we aren't touching anything"
Unfortunately my family doesn’t belong to Kashmir :( - I had a Kashmiri Muslim classmate in Masjid Sunday school in grade school but only Kashmiri speaking people I know now are family of this Pandit lady I went to university with
One of the greatest ironies of the 20th-21st centuries is that the lower and upper classes are closer to each other (in living a life driven by primal forces), than the middle classes are to either.
Everything you've written is a middle class construct that doesn't exist on either---extreme---end of the class spectrum. These abstract constructs posit that there can be facts, truths, and "good" -- when the reality is that all the forces behind everything that impacts us are human in nature.
We're all working to push our agendas, and reach our own ends (almost always unconsciously or unaware of the deeper reasons).
So long as you keep off-loading all of your thinking and decision-making to others (in this case, the other would be Platonian woo-woo aether concepts), you're instigating the proliferation of middle class "intellectual" propaganda, and further widening the rift between you and the lower classes (one could even say, you're building a moat, because you're pushing the upper classes even further away).
> Makes me remember an old report that favelas in Brazil had more TV's than refrigerators.
When radio and television started to make inroads into public life in many developed country they benefited from a lot of reasonably curated, even cultural programs ran as a public services.
In many countries national television did a lot to provide bits of education to adults, encourage adoption of the national language, learn about other cultures and so on.
What is really bad on the Internet is that many websites and services benefit from misleading content, ignorant comments, conspiracy theories, and so on.
But perhaps it's not so bad: when the level of misinformation is high enough (e.g. on platforms like tiktok) most people learn quickly to be skeptical.
The formally educated have always feared that the poor, unwashed and educated would get access to information. How would they be able to interpret it? After all, they might only have 0–5 years of vegetating at a desk in front of a scolding teacher whereas I have 13+ years of experience with that.
I think those fears are overblown and mostly class-motivated in any case.
Acess to information is life changing, if internet didn't appear I would probably be wondering how to make it till the next pay roll with no perspectives for life lol
On the other hand amount of propaganda and stuff is scary too, so you gotta have strong internet(web) hygiene
I just went 8 years without touching the Internet. You can live without it, but it makes arguments unbearable when you can't look up the real answer on Wikipedia.
I think being able to target propaganda by audience makes it different. If your goal is to disseminate idea X, the way you convince a mid 20s progressive is going to be different from the way to convince a retired Republican.
The internet allows you to target those 2 groups separately, and tailor your message to the audience. You don't even need to pay any gatekeepers; just join the right Facebook groups (whose membership will already be very helpfully divided by ideology, class etc. for you), and start posting.
You could replicate it partially by putting different messages in different newspapers, but not with the granularity we have now.
I remember telling my dad that the internet is serious back when it was reported to have a million users. We used to argue because he thought it was just a passing fad and everything was fake.
That was the common view at the time, that you couldn't trust it because it wasn't from a trusted publisher. The inaccuracy was the implication that you could trust legacy media.
Which definitely isn't wrong for a brand new medium like the internet. Early internet was "marketed" as being able to read articles, news, and academic stuff.
Reminds me of when wikipedia was young, and everyone was worried people would trust articles at face value.
That's still far too low. It should be in the high 90th percentile, where everyone who wants or needs to use it can. When three quarters of the population of a country have no access even if they want it its a sign that more needs to happen.
Educating people to be able to use the internet is part of getting internet access for everyone. It's not just access to the tech; it's the entire infrastructure and knowledge to use it.
Most of the world relies on mobile devices and mobile networks for their connectivity needs. Starlink isn't going to really move the needle in the developing world.
I consider myself very well off. My internet is 4G and gets me about 15-20Mbps on a good day. I was considering starlink, but a set up fee of 600€ is a bit too much. Starlink is NOT feasible in developing countries. It's Elons' cash cow now.
Can’t one dish essentially serve an entire region through wiring to it?
€600 for an entire village/favela/whatever else to have some form of internet sounds fairly reasonable in the early 21st century. And prices will surely go down over the next few years.
I guess that depends on how much they develop and how ubiquitous the tech is.
Cell phones, for example, are widely used in developing nations. Tech in general has been the best at reducing costs over time compared to things like food and energy which haven't really fallen in price.
It's a bit of both. Delivering an internet connection to a remote mountain or desert location is a hard problem. It's compounded by other tech problems like an unreliable electricity supply. If the people there have very few resources it's even harder.
I would guess that poverty is a bigger factor than generational difference globally. The rate of internet use in America is about 90%, so it looks like a wide variety of ages will use the internet if given the opportunity.
The internet is not the (world wide) web. It is actually referring to the underlying infrastructure. The web, email, streaming services, VoIP, ... are working on top/using the internet.
After reading the methodology section of the submitted page, I am still unsure whether the survey actually uses the terms internet and world wide web synonymously or not.
