The Poor Do Not Use Facebook

The poor do not use Facebook much. Neither do the poorly educated. Facebook users are not only usually college graduates. They tend to make more than $90,00o a year and be under the age of 50.

The digital divide between young and old has been well-documented. People who were in their mid-teens and early adulthood when broadband came of age are more likely to use it. People who were already well into adulthood a decade ago are less likely to be comfortable communicating, sharing personal data and shopping online. They grew up in a period when media was dominated by the TV, print, and radio.

It is a revelation that Facebook users tend to be rich and well-educated. There are probably several reasons for that.

The poor and lower middle class are less likely to be able to afford PCs and digital broadband services. That causes a sort of digital marginalization, causing the rich to become more comfortable with technology such as search than the poor.

The data, based on information collected by Gallup, means that the Internet divide has two aspects. One is the contrast between city and rural use. This is rooted in the lack of broadband access in areas where the population is not concentrated which makes it expensive for telecom and cable companies to service rural areas cost effectively. This trend combines with age and education to break Internet use into two parts.

Gallup reports that:

Sixty percent of Americans tell Gallup they visit Google in a given week, compared with 43% who say they have a Facebook page. Both sites attract young, affluent, and educated Americans in large numbers, each counting more than half of those under 50, those with college degrees, and those making more than $90,000 a year among their users.

Increasingly, technology separates the haves from the have-nots. Search gives its users access to an extremely broad selection of data.  There are a plethora of news sites to suit a variety of political outlooks. E-commerce  encourages  price competition, which benefits consumers.   Thanks to the proliferation of smartphones,  people no longer need a computer to reach these services.

Facebook is one of the easiest ways for people to exchange important news and information instantly. It has also become a home for multimedia content and e-commerce recommendations. Facebook dominates the display advertising market. It now controls nearly a quarter of the display inventory on the Internet, becoming as dominant in that market as Google is in search.

The Gallup poll finds that the greatest barrier to commercial activity online continues to be worries about privacy. Data about the way marketers target their messages based on data from websites have only increased that care. The things that make the Internet an efficient advertising media are also what drives some users away. The irony of the Gallup data is that the well-educated are more likely to understand the complexities of online privacy. Facebook is alienating part of  its core audience which may be the only significant hurdle to its future rapid growth

Methodology: Results for this USA Today/Gallup poll are based on telephone interviews conducted Jan. 28-30, 2011, on the Gallup Daily tracking survey, with a random sample of 1,487 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, selected using random-digit-dial sampling.

Douglas A. McIntyre