Digital divide

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July 19, 2011 | 1:34 PM | By

Are Latinos the ultimate smartphone users?

Photo by Simon Carrasco/Flickr (Creative Commons)

It’s been reported recently that smartphones are helping narrow the digital divide, particularly among Latinos, the group with the least access to home broadband. But it gets better than that, according to a piece on the ClickZ marketing news site today, which makes the case that Latinos are in fact leading the smartphone charge.

Almost half of Latinos own smartphones, according to the piece, and many depend on them for Internet access. Among these, the majority are also English speakers. More details:

Seventy-four percent of Hispanic mobile subscribers are between 18 and 44 years old. Being younger than the overall populations as well as more tech-savvy is helping drive smartphone penetration. These users are young, bilingual, dynamic, and connected. They live fast-paced lives, always on the go; their phone is an extension of self and they rely on their mobiles for everything.

Latinos are early adopters of the iPhone: more than 30 percent of iPhone users are Hispanic. But they are also Android fans: around 30 percent of Latinos with a smartphone have an Android phone and growing.

The iPhone has a better share among 25 to 34 year old Latinos and skews male. Android has a more even distribution in terms of age and sex.

From a language perspective, 52 percent of Latino smartphone users are English preferred with some Spanish, and 38 percent are Spanish preferred.

Clickz also cites numbers from one research firm that have Latinos leading in mobile activity, with 55 percent of Latino mobile phone users classified as “SuperConnecteds,” i.e. “the most sophisticated users of mobile phones that access the Internet at least weekly and do multiple advanced activities monthly or more often,” compared to 34 percent of non-Latinos.

A significant down side to being reliant on a smartphone for web access is, of course, limited and less complex use of the Internet on a small screen device. Still, it’s access.

Two recent reports, one from the Public Policy Institute of California and another from The Nielsen Company, also identified Latinos as heavy smartphone users, including as those who send the most text messages.

FILED UNDER: Culture/Identity, Economy, Digital divide, Smartphones
June 24, 2011 | 11:26 AM | By

The smart phone vs. the digital divide

Photo by steefafa/Flickr (Creative Commons)

Much has been reported over the years about the “digital divide,” the lack of Internet access experienced by Latino and black Americans in comparison with other groups. Latinos in particular are on the losing end, less likely to have access than non-Latino whites, or to have a home broadband connection or a cell phone, according to a recent Pew Hispanic Center study. They also lag behind black Americans in home broadband access.

But smart phones may be narrowing the gap. KQED’s MindShift education blog in San Francisco has highlighted a new report from the Public Policy Institute of California, which concludes:

…although Latinos are the group least likely to have a computer or Internet access at home, Latinos who use their cell phones to go online are twice as likely as whites (40% to 21%) to say that they mostly access the Internet this way.

It’s not the first research to find that Latinos put their smart phones to good use. In May, a report from The Nielsen Company concluded similarly:

Hispanics are very active on their smartphones, texting the most out of all races/ethnicities (943 texts per month) and employing a wide range of mobile activities, including mobile banking. Smartphone penetration has reached 45 percent, matching only Asian-American usage levels in popularity.

A divide persists in the use of computers, however. From a summary of the PPIC report:

Using a desktop to connect to the Internet is more common among whites (64%) and Asians (58%) than among blacks (49%) and Latinos (42%), as is use of a laptop to connect (65% Asians, 62% whites, 57% blacks, 38% Latinos). Use of a desktop or laptop computer to access the Internet increases with education and income.

But even there, it’s not all bad news. According to the report, while Latinos are still the least likely group to have home broadband access, the share of Latinos with a home broadband connection has doubled since 2007, from 28 percent to 55 percent.



FILED UNDER: Health/Education, Digital divide, Internet access, MindShift, Pew Hispanic Center, Public Policy Institute of California, The Nielsen Company
February 10, 2011 | 12:31 PM | By

Latinos on losing end of the ‘digital divide’

Source: Pew Hispanic Center

A new Pew Hispanic Center study finds that U.S. Latinos are still on the losing end of the long-reported “digital divide,” with Latinos less likely to have Internet access than non-Latino whites, or to have a home broadband connection or a cell phone. They also lag behind black Americans in home broadband access.

From a summary of the report:

While about two-thirds of Latino (65%) and black (66%) adults went online in 2010, more than three-fourths (77%) of white adults did so. In terms of broadband use at home, there is a large gap between Latinos (45%) and whites (65%), and the rate among blacks (52%) is somewhat higher than that of Latinos. Fully 85% of whites owned a cell phone in 2010, compared with 76% of Latinos and 79% of blacks.

The disparity is related mostly to income and education levels, and “Hispanics and whites who have similar socioeconomic characteristics have similar usage patterns for these technologies,” the report summary reads. Not surprisingly, 71 percent of U.S.-born Latinos are likely to have a home Internet connection, versus 45 percent of foreign-born Latino immigrants.

The relative lack of Internet access among low-income minority students has been seen for years as a problem that holds these students back in school and beyond, getting in the way of learning and job prospects. However, the New York Times reported last year that some researchers were having second thoughts about the benefit of computers in low-income students’ homes. From the piece:

Economists are trying to measure a home computer’s educational impact on schoolchildren in low-income households. Taking widely varying routes, they are arriving at similar conclusions: little or no educational benefit is found. Worse, computers seem to have further separated children in low-income households, whose test scores often decline after the machine arrives, from their more privileged counterparts.

Parental supervision could be the key, but in low-income households (where parents spend much of their time working or caring for a child solo), less supervision could be giving kids more opportunity to use computers for entertainment rather than school work, one study suggested.

The divide persists, in one way or another.

FILED UNDER: Health/Education, Digital divide, Pew Hispanic Center