This September, Bitcurrent is running the first Bitnorth conference. It’s a weekend-long chance to disconnect and discuss society and technology, and will be held North of Montreal. This year, we will take a reality check and look at how the rest of the world is using the technology we have today.
Here’s what we mean. Apparently 1/5 of Americans have never used e-mail. (Forrester has more details in the Groundswell calculator.) Steve Rubel calls online denizens the Hyperconnected, and we’re a self-absorbed lot. One person at Mesh today told me that certain things were “only interesting to Arrington and his 54,000 friends.”
We spend our time speculating and prognosticating, talking about the future of technology. We’re in love with it.
Arthur C. Clarke once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic; if so, we’re the magicians. What of the muggles (as my sister describes her non-technical self)? What are they doing with this magic, today? How have the Internet and ubiquitous computing affected the very young? Clay Shirky has one idea. How about the very old? The handicapped? Indigenous people? Non-information workers? Farmers?
In this morning’s keynote, Michael Geist commented that social protesters and activists shouldn’t try to get the word out with their own blogs or applications. Quoting Ethan Zuckerman, he suggested they should use sites full of cute cats — the Flickrs, Facebooks, and Myspaces.
Why? Because it’s easy for a government or repressive ISP to block a blog. People don’t care about your blog. But they care about lovable fluffy kittens. For every innocent cat picture, there’s a more insidious, or noble, use. So when you use Youtube to tell the world your story, the bad guys have a harder time taking you off the air because now the Muggles care: it’s unlikely they can interfere without Muggle outcry.
Technologists need to know what the muggles care about, and embrace it, to thrive. And the Muggle Internet is all cats, all the way down. Like it or not, whether you’re trying to sell to the masses, get clickthrough ads on a niche, or convince someone to invest you probably have to care about the online world’s many Cat Venues.
Hopefully we’ll learn as much from thinking about the “now” of the Internet, for the rest of the world, as we do speculating with our hyperkinetic, hyperconnected technoscenti.
