Participation Divide

I gave a presentation on the social web to a professional services firm yesterday. My two key messages to them were about:

• the fast pace of change; and that
• massive networking changes everything

On the first point I looked back to the early 1990’s – before the public internet and in the days where the few people that had mobile phones carried around what looked like bricks.  Today, there are over 1.6 billion people connected to the Internet and over 4 billion mobile phone users. And we are on the threshold of fundamental change in how people communicate, work and how organisations operate. With the “Participative Web” (Web 2.0) now mature we are moving toward the “Personalised Web” (Web 3.0) where context rather than content is more likely to be king.

The mobile internet space is growing rapidly. Take iPhone for example, with over 1 billion applications downloaded in the last nine months. As I recall, the Skype app is the most popular, helping to spur the Skype user base past 400 million. Such is the ubiquity and potential utility of smart phones, some expect that 80% of Internet connectivity will be through mobile devices.

There are now over 5 million Australians using Facebook at least once a month, half of them using Facebook everyday. Internationally there are over 200 million people on Facebook with 500,000 people joining every week. Then there is MySpace, Bebo, Orkut, Goofy2 and many other social networks and bulletin boards around the world. Part of my presentation yesterday was The Conversation by Brian Solis that shows how many apps there are and their diverse use, all based around that very human activity of conversations. Twitter growth has been just amazing over the last quarter. FriendFeed appears to be on a winner with the introduction of real-time multiple person conversations. During my presentation I spoke about the benefits of the social web to productivity. I spoke about a re-balancing of power between institutions and distributed groups of people.

Now, I had a mixed reception to my presentation. Most of the younger people present were nodding their heads. Some of the older people just shook their heads. They have choosen not to participate, perhaps just regarding the social web as a fad, preferring to assume it will not make much difference to them. Perhaps they just don’t realise that having conversations – that very real and powerful human activity – is happening online as well as offline. It is better to integrate the two, far better, than to assume online conversations are not hear to stay.

Now that is a serious issue. This participaton gap may well be looked upon as a productivity gap, and sooner rather than later.

Pervasive data here and now

Dan Hill has posted an excellent piece called the street as a platform. Taking a ‘here-and-now’ view, Hill describes just how pervasive data networks already are in the urban environment – and raises  substantive governance and legislative questions that are present in the contemporary street.

Having been one of those people that have talked about the pace of changefor some years now, Hill’s narrative led me to reflect on how much ‘change’ is actually here and now.  To paraphrase William Gibson, it’s like the future is already here… and it is becoming evenly distributed. In what Hill calls “a twitching, pulsing cloud of data”, we have (a by no means a comprehensive list):

• online games, newsfeed reader software, video reviews, Google Maps, WiFi and GPS enabled connectivity on mobile devices
• sensor networks indicating the level of ambient daylight on the street
• networked high-resolution display screens used in public places for a variety of purposes such as real-time coverage of sporting events, and semantic connections across complex databases (such as library data and movie clips)
• street infrastructure to support wireless connectivity, geographic information systems, sensor networks and collaborative research projects.

Together with:

• the digital divide and variable digital literacies 
• consumers not being aware of pricing differentials
• online fraud and hacking
• variable network reliability
• a mixture of data that is proprietary, enclosed and privately managed, and other data that is open, collaborative and public.

The governance and legislative issues to deal with go to levels of openness, responsibility, privacy, security, interaction, user awareness and social inclusion/exclusion. The message here is, it’s time to act on these issues now.

Hill goes on to invite us to imagine what the street will be like over the next few years from the deployment of more ubiquitous and pervasive computing…and to consider the challenges involved in identifying, understanding and acting in response to the continual state of flux and change.