The cell phone vote and technology use shifts


Two fascinating posts on technology adoption and trends at Clive Thompson’s “Collision Detection” site.

Young people with landlines are more likely to be Republicans than young people with cell phones only. While not affecting polls dependent on landline telephone responses this year, a Pew study found among the cell-only respondents under age 30, there is a 34-point gap: 62 percent identify themselves as Democrats, 28 percent Republicans.

Not sure what would cause that trend.

The other post points to some stats from Amherst College’s incoming freshman class of 438 students and other campus-wide stats of technology usage at the college.

Only 14 incoming freshmen brought a desktop computer to school; only five got landline service. Nearly all — 432 — were on Facebook. The classes of 2009 and 2010 were more likely to have Windows-based computers while the classes of 2011 and 2012 were more like to have Apple laptops.

The stats, as Nicholas Carr noted, show the reign of email. The amount of disk space required for storage of email in 2007 is the same as in the previous five years — combined.

This small college of about 1,700 students (about the size of a high school in Knoxville) is getting 180,000 emails a day, 94 percent of them spam.

I would love to see similar stats for the University of Tennessee.

These shifts certainly should be ground into the strategic planning of media companies, hoping to win the class of 2012 and beyond as their audience.

(via Nicholas Carr)