Early Adopters

USA Today crunched some numbers and found that 29% of US households are "likely to be early adopters" of technology. That should have raised some flags. It's not early adopting if a quarter of the country already does it. They looked at 20 behaviors like making VOIP calls (done it); replacing landlines with cell phones (what, and give up my TiVo?); using Wi-Fi networks outside the home or office (done it); playing group online games (and get my butt whipped by at 10-year-old? I think not); and buying home theater, PDA, PVR, etc. (done it). They then put the data through the wringer and came out with that 29% number.

I have an easier way to tell if you're an early adopter. Count the number of things in your house that track, tell, or display the time. Divide that by the number of people in your household who have a firm grasp of telling time in either a digital or analog format. Add 1 for every timepiece satellite linked to the US Naval Observatory or that displays time in binary. If the result is more than 14, you may well be an early adopter.

How did I come up with that? Time is one of the foundations of technology, so pretty much every bit of advanced technology includes a clock. I figured basic time-telling devices--alarm clocks, living room timepieces, wristwatches, and such--account for about 3 clocks per capita. Another six timepieces can be accounted for with what would hardly be considered advanced technology: microwave, VCR, car dashboard, home computer, stove, cordless phones, answering machine, etc. A third class of technology may have been in use longer in early adapters, but is fairly common in most people's day-to-day lives: cell phones, PDAs, laptops, video game consoles, MP3 players and the like. These account for another five clocks. So people who live connected but not technologically advanced lives can reasonably be expected to have about 14 things in their lives that tell the time, even if that is not their main function. More than that, and you probably have some cutting-edge technology, multiples of some of the items, or a very large cuckoo clock collection (there are of course flaws in my system). The bonus points are for what I consider truly geeked-out timepieces.

My score, by the way, is 17.