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?