All over the world, Americans are identified as one of the most tech-savvy bunch. From Apple iPhones to live-tweeting, from tablets to Skype, Americans seem to be in the know about almost anything related to technology and the Internet. However, a new study has somewhat contradicted that belief.
According to a national study conducted by the Pew Research Center, Americans’ understanding about the intricate process of computers and how they work and what certain terms stand for is elementary at best. Indeed, they know how to Like and know who Bill Gates is, but do they understand what URL stands for or what Moore’s Law is?
The poll discovered that the vast majority (83 percent) of survey participants were able to identify Bill Gates when shown a photo. However, fewer than one-quarter (21 percent) could name Sheryl Sandberg when given a picture. On the topic of Facebook, only 42 percent knew Harvard was the first university on the social network.
When it came to microblogging website Twitter, 82 percent could describe what hashtags were, but at the same time only 60 percent knew the social media outlet maintains a 140 character limit.
Study authors were concerned that there were a significant amount of individuals that were still unaware about privacy policies, even with all of the news reports and data breaches in the last several years.
“In terms of privacy policy awareness, we found it notable how much knowledge on this issue has not changed over the years,” said Aaron Smith, senior researcher at Pew’s Internet Project, in a statement. “Despite all of the data breaches, news stories and policy discussions that have been happening around this issue over the last decade, Americans are not substantially more informed about this subject than they were a decade ago.”
Most participants (61 percent) understood that net neutrality is the proposal to generate equal treatment of all digital content by Internet Service Providers (ISPs). This didn’t surprise the researchers because the matter has been brought to the forefront of the media landscape since President Obama reignited the issue and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has received approximately four million comments.
“It is a fairly technical issue, so the fact that many people are at least aware of the terms of the debate could be interpreted as fairly significant evidence of how much this has penetrated the popular discussion,” Smith added.
The survey went onto ask some questions about the mechanisms behind computers and even its history. Here are the results:
- 74 percent know a megabyte is bigger than a kilobyte
- 69 percent know “URL” stands for Uniform Resource Locator
- 36 percent know the first iPhone was released in 2007
- 34 percent know what Moore’s Law is (number of transistors on a computer chip)
- 23 percent know Internet and WWW are not the same thing
- Nine percent know that the first graphical web browser was Mosaic
What may be the most interesting aspect of the survey is that in terms of answering the most questions correctly there wasn’t much difference between the age brackets: 18-29 scored an average 10.1, 30-49 scored 9.6, 50-64 scored 8.9 and 65+ scored 7.8.
The online survey was conducted with 1,066 adults between Sept. 12 and 18. It contains a margin of error of +/- 3.2 percentage points.
