A whopping 85 percent of American access the Internet via PCs or mobile devices – and most use both, according to a new report released Sunday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The remaining 15 percent are mostly older adults who are content with old media. Based on a survey of 4,001 adults – including 2,822 Internet users Pew concludes respondents can be divided into three groups of technology users: 31 percent are elite technology users, 20 percent are moderate users and the rest live their lives pretty much offline.

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The report drills down in each individual segment, producing a typology of 10 users groups based on their technology use and attitudes (too complex to reproduce in its entirety here). Some highlights:
The high-tech elites, for example, are almost evenly split into:

—Omnivores – die-hard technology users who also express themselves through blogs and Web pages (8 percent)
—Connectors - who make use of the Internet and mobile phones to communicate (7 percent)
—Productivity enhancers – who value technology as a way to do their jobs and manage their daily lives (8 percent)

Mobile users have a love/hate relationship with their devices and their connected lifestyles. The group is evenly split between:

—Mobile Centrics – who fully embrace the features and functionality of their mobile devices to connect to the Internet and with their peers (10 percent – and this is the group of users who use mobile most for texting and entertainment)
—Connected But Hassled – who have invested a lot in mobile gadgets but find them obtrusive and something of a burden (10 percent)

Overall, 49 percent of respondents “have a more distant or non-existent relationship to modern information technology,” Pew observed. “Some of this diffidence is driven by people’s concerns about information overload; some is related to people’s sense that their gadgets have more capacity than users can master; some is connected to people’s sense that things like blogging and creating home-brew videos for YouTube is not for them; and some is rooted in people’s inability to afford or their unwillingness to buy the gear that would bring them into the digital age.” Press release
Download a copy of the report here.