#IMA09: Lee Rainie, Pew Center for Internet and American Life

Yes, these are my notes. How special.

An Overview of Online Activity
Lee Rainie’s slides are available here.

2000
46% of adults use internet
5% broadband at home
50% own cell phone
0% connect to internet on wifi
<10% use cloud
slow stationary connections built around computer

2008
74% adults use internet
58% broadband at home
82% own cell phone
62% connect wirelessly
59% cellphone data
42% pc data card
>53% use cloud
fast, mobile connections, outside servers and storage

IDC says there is 10 fold growth in digital info created, captured, and replicated worldwide from 2006 to 2011

The internet has now surpassed newspapers as the source for national and international news

Forrester: to advertisers, the value of people online is one-tenth the value of people who read magazines and newspapers

News Consumer Typology
traditionalists 46%
integrators 24%
net newsers 14%
disengaged 16% (this cohort is growing faster among the young)

young people rely on their social networks more to keep them informed

The venues of intersecting with information and people multiply and the availability of information expands to all hours of the day and all places we are. – Nielsen Co

People’s vigilance for information changes in two directions:
attention is truncated (continuous partial attention)
attention gets elongated (the age of expert amateurs- Terry Fisher)

The vibrance and immersive qualities of media environments makes them more compelling places to hang out and interact
Metaverse Roadmap Project
virtual worlds
mirror worlds (virtual representations of things that exist in real life- Google Earth)
augmented reality (additional rich data around the virtual representations)
life-logging (Gordon Bell, justin.tv)

The relevance of information improves — search and customization get better as we create the “daily me”

The voice of information democratizes and the visibility of new creators is enhanced. Identity and privacy change.
This is a new 5th Estate, and so far, it’s more Left than Right. Statistically, there are more Republicans online than Democrats, many because of the socioeconomic profile.

Voting on and ventilating about information proliferates as tagging, rating, and commenting occurs.

Social networks become more vivid and meaningful. “Networked Individualism” – Barry Wellman

64% of online teens have created their own profile on a social network site; 35% of adults have done so. Fastest growing cohort on Facebook is women 55+

20% of online adults say they remix content they find online into their own creations

Homo Connectus
Different species with a different sense of…
1) expectation about access to information
2) place and distance
3) presence with others (conversations never end)
4) social networking possibilities
5) capacity to build community
6) possibilities of play
7) time use
personal efficacy

The two-step flow of information has been transformed to at least a four step flow

Challenges of attention
- leverage your traditional platforms
- offer alerts, updates, feeds
- be available in relevant places
- find pathways through users’ social networks
Challenges of acquisition
- be findable in a long-tail world
- pursue new distribution methods
- offer link love for selfish reasons
- participate in the conversation about your work
Challenges of assessment
- honor the ethics of your kind of storytelling
- be transparent, link-friendly, and archive everything
- aggregate the best related work
- when you make mistakes, seek forgiveness
Challenges of assistance
- offer opportunities for feedback
- opportunities for remixing
- opportunities for community building
- be open to the wisdom of crowds