Published by Grant Blank on 30 November 2011

Here at the Oxford Internet Institute we have been exploring the effect of attitudes towards technology on Internet adoption. Positive attitudes toward technology may make people more interested in adopting new technology, more willing to learn new technologies, and more willing to cope with the problems of technology. The latest OxIS report shows that Internet use is strongly related to age. More concretely, 80% or more of people younger than 55 years are Internet users, while the proportion of elderly Internet users is much lower, reaching as low as 18% for those age 75+ (see the green line in the graph below).

In the graph below we explore how the relationship between age and Internet use is mediated by attitudes toward technology. Attitudes are measured by agreement with a statement “Technology is making things better for people like me”. Agreement indicates a positive attitude; disagreement shows negative attitudes toward technology. The blue line represents the percent of Internet users among people with positive technology attitudes. The red line shows the percent of Internet users among those who think technology is not making things better. The graph clearly shows that respondents are more likely to be Internet users if they have positive beliefs about technology. For example, among people who are both between 35 and 44 years old and technology averse there are only 77% of Internet users while 95% of their technology supporting counterparts are Internet users. Moreover, this gap widens as we move further along the horizontal axis to higher age groups. It is at its maximum at age 55-64, where respondents with positive attitudes are almost 40 percentage points more likely to be Internet users.

The red and blue lines are surprisingly different. For people with positive technology attitudes the horizontal blue line between age 14-64 indicates the relationship of age and Internet use disappears entirely up to age 64; it only reappears among people of retirement age. This shows the powerful impact of attitudes. The relationship is different for people with negative technology attitudes. The red line is only horizontal between ages 14-44, so the relationship between age and Internet use is stronger than for the people with positive attitudes.

This suggests that personal beliefs about ICTs and their outcomes play an important role in Internet adoption and use.