Lyndal Curtis’ commentary on the recent Media 140 conference in Sydney suggests she’s not done her homework. Despite admitting to being something of a geek, early adopter and rich social media user, she asks where we find the time and if we’re missing out on talking with big chunks of society.
Has she not connected the change in her own activities with parallels amongst those she writes for?
Lyndal, did you not read Here Comes Everybody? Or at least read or watched some of my doppelganger, Clay Shirky’s public speaking? Do you not check the Pew Internet and American Life Project? Maybe even read some of danah boyd’s work on the rich online lives of teens?
For an established and respected journalist like Lyndal, that suggests lazy research. There’s more than enough research – from here, Asia, the US and Europe - to prove beyond doubt that society in the West, and increasingly in Asia and Africa (where the greatest growth is) is moving a large chunk of its collective lives online.
Busy lives and families? Just look at Mommy-bloggers as an example. The mums with babies demographic is considered, rightly, to be one of the most powerful groups online. You don’t cross them or annoy them unless you want to invite massive backlash. Online is where these people live, coordinating their meetups, commenting and criticising the organisations they deal with from P&G, to J&J to Starbucks and McDonalds.
It is the foolish men in grey suits who believe their lives are too important to “use that social media stuff – I don’t understand it anyway” who are making themselves irrelevant and redundant in a world that increasingly ignores their viewpoints anyway.
The ones not online are now the dispossessed, the disenfranchised and the those who are being left behind in a digital divide of their own making and ignorance. For most of us, the divide is no longer a matter of not having (we can be connected almost anywhere on the planet) but a matter of choice.
And that choice means were making big changes – we’re online, connecting with our communities more and seeking meaning in our own search for information while we give up activities like mindless time in front of the box, or listening to radio, or reading newspapers made by smearing poison on dead trees.
Lyndal, you must be witness to this change in yourself, surely with a little research and some extrapolation, you can see what we’re all up to?
