More on Pew
by Daniel Taylor
I read about the Pew Internet & American Life report on Monday, but in a very 0.1 mode downloaded the report and printed out the first ten pages so that I could read them on an airplane. I do enough reading online, so it’s a pleasure to read printed word without a backlight. I did that and was ready to post on it, and then Russell so eloquently hit the high points.
The only stone that Russell left unturned — at least for me — was the prospects for how things will change over the next couple of years. I tend to see a larger percentage of the “Few Tech Assets” crowd that comprises 49% of the U.S. population according to Pew, and I find myself wondering how things will be different down the road.
Clearly, the “Few Tech Assets” group will decline in size, but which of the other groups will grow? Will it be “Elite Tech Users” (currently 31% of the population)? Or will it be the “Middle-of-the-Road Tech Users” currently at 20% of the U.S. population?
Russell points to the “Mobile Centrics” as one potential growth area. If we see the bulk of user growth in this community, then perhaps the concept of being “online” or even “present” is outmoded.
With mobile devices, we’re connected whenever we need to be. We’re “online” all of the time. And “presence” is simply a matter of responding to interactions.
The point being that 2.0 isn’t just about the evolution of the technology — it’s about the collective experience of the users driving the trend.
I spent my childhood being lectured by baby boomers about how great the 1960’s were. My dalliance in that decade was clearly not enough for me to understand the meaning of the collective experience, but we had the seventies and eighties to re-hash the glory days. Perhaps those stories of shared experience will be joined by an explanation of the birth of the commercial Internet, nostalgia for dial-up and re-worked versions of Mosaic, Archie and Gopher. I recently found myself looking for a version of Lynx that I could run on Windows Vista, so perhaps those days are upon us.
So what will be the shared experience of the “Mobile Centrics?” Will they reminisce about their Sidekicks much in the same way that my contemporaries talk about the Atari 2600, Amiga and TRS-80? How will they define their role? What will they see along the way? What do they see that others cannot?
