A new report from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project shows that Americans are increasingly accessing the internet wirelessly (including mobile phones, game consoles, and laptops). And 32% of Americans have accessed the internet from a mobile device (meaning mobile phone or other handheld device). Two years ago that was only about 20%.

Even more interesting is that African Americans are the leading users of mobile internet, and their use of it is growing fastest: 48% said that they had at one time used a mobile device to access the internet (the national average is 32%).

These figures have important implications for the issue of how best to bridge the "digital divide", especially as Congress and President Obama consider spending billions to increase access to broadband internet landlines around the country. Looks like that money might be better spend elsewhere, as increasingly people connect via wireless technologies, not landline broadband.

This also makes me even more sure of something I've predicted for some time: in the future, very few of us will primarily access the internet via large screen devices (ie desktops and laptops). I suspect that most of us will use something closer to an iPhone, and that we'll keep a large screen device at home for when we really need that big screen: for graphics, video, spreadsheeting, etc.

In that respect, I think African Americans are more representative of everyone's future patterns of use. The emphasis on mobiles also mirrors the emerging internet access mode in developing countries from Southeast Asia to Africa to Latin America. So the relatively well off (whether richer Americans or richer countries) play the role of early adopters, and those who come relatively late to the game gain the benefit of those early trials.