Four out of five adults agree on TCP/IP

Harris Poll results released this week give an overview of who in the US is online, where they log in, and who's still lagging.

The poll, conducted by telephone during the latter half of October and the first days of November, reached 2,020 adults who were doubtless glad that the pollsters weren't asking about McCain and Obama. Of those polled, 81% say they log in from at least one location; 75% from home, 43% from work, and 32% from "other" (libraries, cybercafes and the like). respondents spent an average of 14 hours per week online, three hours more than they did a year ago.

That 81% percent works out to an estimated 184 million adults, the most since Harris started polling more or less yearly back in 1995. In that year, just 17.5 million Americans were online, or 9% of the population back then.

Harris found huge jumps in usage during the first few years of the survey -- to 19% in 1196, to 30% in 1997, and a wild jump in 1999 from 35% to 56% -- after which adoption numbers have settled into a mellow 2-4% gain each year.

At this point, all demographic segments report that a majority of their members are online, though seniors (65+) and those with high-school educations or less are comparatively underrepresented. Interestingly, Harris's race/ethnicity breakdowns show that only African Americans have exactly the representation online (11%) that they do in the general population; whites and Hispanics are 1-2% underrepresented, and Asians...strangely enough, Asians don't appear in the stats at all.

White, black, or brown; rich or poor; dropout or postdoc -- we can all apparently agree on one thing, and that's that computers are sort of pointless without Internet access. A whopping 98% of computer users go online. And the other two percentage? The poll doesn't say, but one does wonder what they make of the cultural obsession with LOLcats, Netroots political activity, and the word "fail" as an adjective.