31 percent of Americans now among the 'tech elite'

The difference, though, is that techies in their late teens and 20s are more likely to create online content, like weblogs, or "blogs." Generation Xers are more likely to pay for content on the Web, while wired boomers and seniors generally plumb the Internet for news or to do work-related research.

So are you part of the "tech elite"? Consider these other Pew findings about how they live:

They spend, on average, a total of $169 a month on broadband Internet service, satellite or cable TV, cellphones, and Web content. That is 39 percent higher than the national average, $122.

29 percent of them have broadband, compared with 17 percent of everyone else.

About 7 percent of technology aficionados have canceled their landline phone and gone all-wireless. Only 2 percent of non-techies have done that.

Despite being plugged in to the Internet and other sources of data more often, only 13 percent of the tech-savvy crowd feels overwhelmed by information. By contrast, a sense of information overload plagues 25 percent of the rest of the population.

So why do the people who immerse themselves in information feel less besieged by it?

It could be that technology helps some people organize their lives, Horrigan said. Or others are simply better at knowing "how to cope with the information that is flooding at them."

Pew produced the report after surveying 1,677 American adults in October. It has a margin of error of two percentage points.