This just in from the Census Bureau: About half of all adults in the United States used computers, and about 20 percent of all Americans (children and adults combined) accessed the Internet–in October 1997.
Those stats were part of a computer-usage report based on data from the October ’97 Current Population Survey, released Oct. 14. When you figure many private studies peg the wired world as roughly doubling in size every year, you see how comically out-of-date the Census effort is.
The really funny part: The National Telecommunications and Information Administration, a sibling agency of the Census Bureau, contracted with the bureau to add Internet-use questions to the December 1998 Current Population Survey. That study was released in July.
How’d that happen?
A Census spokesman said the studies aren’t really that similar (’97 focused on computers while ’98 focused on the Net). And the NTIA published first because the Census had a lot of other reports.
Why do I feel the Census Bureau is a few megabytes short of a full complement of RAM? Could be because Census 2000 won’t include any Internet questions. The bureau says “there’s no mandated federal need.”
They’ll still ask whether your mobile home has an installment loan, but this newfangled Internet stuff will have to wait until 2010.