I had a funny thought yesterday.
What if there are a lot less people actively using the internet than is generally assumed?
You are a geek right? Or married to a geek or at least hunkering down on the rim of the geeksphere. So most of the people you know are at least moderately techy, and what if that creates a distorted view?
You see someone in the street using an ipod...music had to be downloaded from the net, so he or she is a regular internet user, obvious innit.
However, what if the only web use that person partakes of is 'download music'? What if the only reason that person can download music is because someone in his or her circle of friends knows a geek who knows how to do it, and the knowledge was passed on painstakingly. Our theoretical ipod listener knows how to get a tune from itunes, and that's as far as they go.
How is this person going to watch your hand crafted video?
They go on youtube don't they? They know how to search don't they?
Ever wondered why idiotic videos get so many hits when perfectly good ones maybe don't? What if specimen B, lolcatz viewer, has never visited youtube in their life. What if the only net activity they can manage is opening their email, and oh look, their cousin's wife's boss's nephew's aunt in australia's son's boyfriend sent them the embedded video in a mail (and it was forwarded on..a few times)
What if there are actually very people who are capable of finding new content, in the same way that there are not that many people who can map read, or follow a knitting pattern, and still fewer who could make a map, or design a jumper.
Thought in process.....
The empty net....
Posted by
Kate Fosk
at 03:33
Posts
5 comments:
What's the worry, Kate? In my experience, and I have been about a fair bit in communities, particularly deprived ones, is that the kids have plenty of access and if they can't afford a device at home then they will find a place to go to that has (e.g. outreach centres). It's the old folk who are probably in the majority of not being savvy. That's changing, I think of my Dad, and an old retired neighbour who, once started, developed extensive and cool skills. A gut feeling is that the balance starts at 80/20 for the young and that graphs to 20/80 for the old. Give it a few years and even the old will be 50/50. This is, of course in developed countries.
I think it's actually slightly worse than that. A lot of people think they can find stuff, but in reality can't. It's serious in business, the very people who you might have thought would be reasonably good at searching. For instance, in a recent Network World (2010) article on findability, it was said that research has found that professionals...
"spend 20% of their time looking for information and they find what they are looking for less than half of the time. That’s equivalent to spending 10 weeks a year searching for information and remaining ignorant half of that time."
Rhe Summer 2010 ROI Research survey of 500 search-engine users found that...
"19% abandon the online search, taking it offline [because they can't find the information]"
A lot of it is down to the almost complete lack of training in using search tools, from primary school onwards. You might have thought that a literate society would see the need for widespread in-depth search training in the age of the Net.
Thanks for the comment Russell, I think opportunity is a factor, but the keen will usually find a way, whatever their age and circumstances. I guess I'm wondering what percentage really are keen, even amongst youngsters. if they lukewarm about the net do they hide that fact?
@ Anon, very interesting..and how much more difficult if the searcher doesn't really know what they are looking for, or that something exists which they might be interested in.
The other problem is that quality content on the web is expanding exponentially, but the educated audience for it has generally plateaued. That means that even great content can get minuscule audiences, which ten years ago would have had an audience of millions each year.
Blogger had an outage and some comments have disappeared, which is a shame as they were interesting :(
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