If You Own a Smartphone, You Likely Live In or Near a City

A Pew report finds that smartphone ownership rates are more than 20 percentage points higher in cities than in rural areas.

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On occasion of this being the quarter-century anniversary year of Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s unleashing of the World Wide Web upon the world, the Pew Research Center is releasing a series of reports called “The Web at 25 in the U.S.,” assessing the impact of that invention and its close cousin, the Internet. One report newly out this week finds that the Internet, and the suite of devices we use to connect to it, have become enormously popular in recent years. That said, there’s one geographic wrinkle that jumps out.

To start, adults in the U.S. use the Internet at about the same rate everywhere: 88 percent of Americans living in urban areas use it, compared to 87 percent of suburban Americans and 83 percent of rural Americans. Given that the survey’s margin of error was between 3 and 4 percent, those differences aren’t statistically meaningful. The same holds true for computer use: 81 percent in urban and suburban areas, and just two percentage points lower for those in rural areas.

The story continues along much the same lines for cell phone ownership: 88 percent in both rural and urban areas, and a bit higher — 92 percent — in suburban areas. That works out to nine in every 10 American adults with a cell phone.

Where we see the geographic difference, though, is when it comes to smartphone ownership.

Smartphones are their own unique thing. They have more advanced features than plain ol’ cellphones, like touchscreens, email programs and web browsers,* and they’re a relatively recent creation. “Mobile access to the internet,” reads the Pew report, “took a huge leap forward when smartphones were introduced in mid-2007 with the introduction of the iPhone.” But they’ve gained traction quickly. In 2011, the earliest data Pew made available, some 35 percent of adults in the U.S. had a smartphone. Last month, the rate of smartphone ownership stood at 58 percent.

That doesn’t mean these phones of the future are evenly distributed yet. Today, some 64 percent of urbanites in the U.S. own smartphones and 60 percent of suburbanites. But that rate drops in the neighborhood of 20 percentage points when you look at the country’s rural areas: Just 43 percent of rural Americans surveyed said they have a smartphone. To put it another way, while about six in 10 urbanites have smartphones, only four in 10 rural Americans do.

That’s not entirely surprising on demographic grounds alone. Smartphones skew toward younger people, the more educated, people of color and those with higher incomes. There could be technical reasons at work, too. Smartphones depend on data networks, and those are more limited in rural areas. When you think about how Internet content seems increasingly designed to be mobile-native — to wit, Atlantic Media’s business publication Quartz was launched in 2012 to look and work best on cell phones and tablets — it’s worth considering that we are designing for, among other things, a somewhat more city-centered audience.

* The wording of the survey question to determine smartphone ownership was, “Is your cell phone a smartphone such as an iPhone, Android, Blackberry or Windows phone, or are you not sure?”

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Nancy Scola is a Washington, DC-based journalist whose work tends to focus on the intersections of technology, politics, and public policy. Shortly after returning from Havana she started as a tech reporter at POLITICO.

Tags: shared citybig datacivic techinternet access

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