Food for thought:
“More people know what dogging is than blogging, according to a survey which suggests that Brits are not as tech-savvy as might be expected.
…
Research conducted among taxi drivers, hairdressers and pub landlords – backed up by conventional market research of more than 1,000 adults in the UK – has found that seven out of 10 people don’t know what a blog is. Nine out of 10 don’t know what podcasting or flashmobbing are.”Source: DDB Research
This ties in with some thoughts I’ve been having about whether the much-touted benefits of remixing web 2.0 propositions on the web can ever go mainstream (assuming that some pretty hardcore skills are required to do it).
Where does the “average Joe” fit into all this, and do we risk getting carried away with ourselves, alienating the rest of online society?
Clearly if 7 out of 10 people don’t even know what a blog is, we’ve got a lot of work to do.
This doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. For a start only just over half the households in the country have internet access from home (http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=8). Of those that do I’d imagine a fair proportion do little more than send/receive emails and browse the occasional website, especially given that many millions of people are still on dial-up.
People who “live on the internet” are still a tiny (although admittedly growing) minority in this country. We tend to overestimate our own importance because we usually meet like-minded people. But this survey was conducted amongst “taxi drivers, hairdressers and pub landlords” — have a think to yourself: how many of those do you know? REALLY know, well enough to go down the pub with for an evening?
Exactly. Their worlds and our worlds barely collide. I wouldn’t have a clue how to cut someone’s hair to the latest fashions (I wouldn’t even KNOW the latest fashions), why should I be surprised if a hairdresser knows nothing about blogging?
I’m not sure if “the mainstream getting it” is the only measure of worth. The mainstream doesn’t get Janicek, either.
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