I’ve stopped to ask myself the same questions many times during this horrid election season which still has nine months to go before we’re delivered from it: Would the current situation have played out the same way without the constant connection to the Internet and endless cable channels? Without a decentralized media, would the air be so poisoned, the candidates so foul? In short: Is this what a technologically enhanced democracy actually looks like?

In a Pacific•Standard piece, Rick Paulus profiled three Americans who don’t currently have an Internet connection for various reasons. In his intro, the offers the Pew Research numbers which break down which U.S. citizens are getting by without cat memes and porn. An excerpt:

Despite its seeming ubiquity at home, at the office, in line at the coffee shop, on sidewalks where people bump into each other checking updates, in the damn movie theater where it can’t wait until the end credits, the Internet is not as accessible or as popular in many parts of the country. According to Pew Research, 15 percent of Americans—or 47 million people—don’t use it at all.

Who are the remaining non-Internet users? Pew breaks it down demographically in the following way: Non-Internet users are split equally between men and women; not dramatically split along racial lines, except for Asians (20 percent of black people, 18 percent of Hispanic people, 14 percent of whites, five percent of Asians); are generally older (39 percent of the folks are over 65 years old); have lower income (those who earn less than $30,000 make up a quarter of the non-Internet users) and lower levels of education (33 percent have less than a high school diploma); and live in rural areas (24 percent).•