A Day in the Life of the Tech Middle Class
by
on June 21, 2008,
My initial reaction to Steven Hodson's post about the digital divide between the haves and the have nots has stuck with me, but apparently, 10 days is too long for it to have remained in the attention-deficit world of the Twitterati. The gap between the designers and the intended users is growing ever wider, and you have to wonder if the eventual fate of Web 2.0 won't be a result of the chasm in the middle.
Personally, this week has been one of increasingly long periods of time with reduced connectivity for me. Playing single parent for the week, I've had to take the kids to more activities than usual, some of them lasting up to three hours in duration. None of the locations has had WiFi. In order to get any writing done at all, I load up as many tabs as I can with content, and try to work offline to the best of my ability.
Add in a husband traveling in Europe with a phone that wouldn't accept a SIM card, and I've been cobbling together a rag-tag form of online communication all week. The easiest way to do so? Twitter. The mobile version loads quickly, works well aside from frequent Fail Whale appearances, and the short form lends itself easily to viewing on my totally non-fashionable RAZR. Most of my conversation with my husband this week has been on Twitter from necessity, but according to Robert Scoble, we are doing it all wrong.
Sure, I can use Ben Golub's FF To Go on my RAZR, but as you can see from the picture accompanying this post, it's no great fun. It's difficult to read. I have no scrolling, so have to move from link to link in order to read. And by the time I can see the third comment, the first one is gone, and I have to scroll back up to remember what I may have wanted to reply to in the first place. Not to mention my phone browser keeps wanting to go back to FFToGo's original state whenever I come back to it. When I pointed this out in the FriendFeed thread, one response was "time to get a new phone."
No, it's not time to get a new phone. It's time to realize that most people in the world aren't connected to the Internet 24/7, and last time I checked, no one was offering a private beta for plugs in our heads. Most people don't have iPhones with unlimited data plans. Most people can't afford wireless card add-ons for constant connectivity from their laptops. Most people can't afford to buy the latest and greatest phone to use the latest shiny app that the early adopter crowd has flocked to.
In developing new applications and sites, it's tempting to design for the Twitterati. They have pretty iPhones, and you can make lovely mobile apps for iPhones. But the Twitterati alone can't support an app. In order to gain mainstream acceptance, it has to be usable and appeal to at least the Tech Middle Class. MySpace and Facebook went mainstream because they didn't require constant attention. If I do need to use an app on my phone, Facebook looks much better on my phone than FriendFeed does. So does Twitter. And while the conversation may be great, if it's always the same old people saying the same old things without ever making it readily available to the next lowest digital class, it's going to circle around the same exact topics of conversation, eventually winding down.
Joe and Jane Average have no desire to be continuously connected, as Stowe Boyd deals with. Maybe instead of expecting them to be, we should be working to develop applications and usage patterns that don't require that same level of dedication to being online.
