Our first guest blogger is StartupCafe regular commenter – Mark Sutherland! Mark is a member of Technical Staff at Cadence Design Systems (this apparently means he writes software for electrical engineers) and previously played Bass Guitar in a band called “Hard Spank”…
A ritual part of Edinburgh’s monthly Tech Meetup is the introductions, where everyone takes a turn to say who they are and what they do. This often feels more like an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, so this month I introduced myself as follows:
“Hi! My name is Mark, and I have an Internet problem.”
Someone helpfully gave a suggestion for what I should do about it: “Have you tried turning it on and off again?”
I do have an Internet problem, but it’s not the mythical Internet Addiction I suffer from. My problem is that I regularly forget that very few people use the Internet, and even less use the parts of it I pay any attention to. This may sound strange, given that, a full two thirds of the UK population use the internet these days. However, the most populous part of the internet I regularly use is Facebook, and that has only 18 million UK users, which is roughly half of those who use the internet, and according to the news most of those are now between the age of 35 and 50, an age group very few of my friends are a part of.
In truth its even worse than that, as my meagre Facebook “friends” list (total: 154) doesn’t truly reflect who my friends really are. Many of them have chosen not to get Facebook accounts for the sake of their privacy, or simply out of a lack of interest. If I decide to organise an occasion using Facebook’s “Events” feature which sends invitations out to other users on Facebook, I’m implicitly rejecting them unless I remember to give them a call or send them a text message. These dissenters are on the other side of the digital participation gap from me, not due to a lack of education or opportunity but through personal choice, and it’s far too easy to forget they exist when the rest of us are discussing the latest world events or episode of Torchwood on Twitter. Their opinions on such matters are silently absent, even though they surely exist.
It’s important we keep in mind not just who we are sharing information with on the internet, but also who we are not sharing it with. We should be expecting social networks to make it easy for us to share the content we upload with non-users as well. We should also be actively involving our non-participating friends when these sites don’t provide convenient methods, instead of taking the easy path and expecting them to get an account they don’t want.
Finally, this digital participation gap also provides significant opportunities for entrepreneurs as it’s a problem looking for solutions. For example, a web app that lets you create events which then sent invitations by SMS, email or facebook, and allowed the invitees to respond through the same medium would do much to solve the dilemma I describe earlier. Besides, lowering the barrier to participation with your service, or with somebody elses service, doesn’t just open up a larger market, it also makes life easier for your current users by giving them a broader choice of convenient methods for interacting with your service.
StartupCafe 
Sigh. It’s been pointed out to me by my girlfriend that Facebook lets you send invitations by email. Goodbye motivating-example-which-holds-the-article-together. I’m sure we can all think of a time when a friend of yours hasn’t known something about you or about something you were organising just because they didn’t have a log in to that particular site though. Right? 🙂
Just ignore that functionality. Most people do 🙂
Yeah I’ve never invited someone by email to a Facebook event – requires you to think extra hard, instead of simply checking names off on a given list. Definitely guilty of solidifying the gap here.
Mark, you’re probably right that there are opportunities for entrepreneurs to find innovative digital ways of filling this gap.
For the people I know who aren’t avid faceboo, etc. users, this misses the point.
The best example is my grandfather, who, at 94, only communicates via written letter, and at a push, the telephone.
For younger, hipper technology-phobes, the problem is still the same. So while it would be nice if a lot of these social networking sites were more integrated across communication platforms, I think we should make every effort to write letters and greeting cards, print and mail photographs, and make telephone calls.
Tech-phobic friends will love it, and your techie friends will be touched by your old-fashioned charm.
I think there’s opportunities for companies to bridge the gap between the digital and the real. A quick search discovered Postful, a service that turns your emails into letters and postcards: http://www.postful.com/ .
However, while these services might exist, there’s little point if we don’t seek them out and make a point of using them. That’s something I’ve never been very good at, but I believe I’m not alone here.
Granted, it’s not the same, but the world has changed, and many of us communicate in significantly different ways these days. Perhaps the best we can hope for is technology which lets us account for this.
[…] August, 2009 by Kate Ho We were so impressed by our guest blogger Mark Sutherland, that we asked him to stick around for a little while. Mark will be our interim blogger for the […]