The world isn’t totally lost! The ‘web 2.0 crowd’ is only a minority on the web!
As you might have read in some of my posts, I’m not a big fan of the ‘web 2.0′ phenomenon, said in a short way, I think it’s an overhyped name for old techniques combined with overrated designs. Of course this isn’t entirely true, there are some positive things about it, such as the enhanced usage of asynchronous reloading of parts of webpages, making browsing a more relaxed and even faster thing to do.
It’s also commonly known that the most Digg users are a big fan of this terminology, which might seem like a whole lot of people. However, according to a research done by the American company ‘Pew’ and their latest publicly readable project titled ‘Internet & American Life Project‘ only a minority of the Americans are part of the ‘elite users’ of the technology at the time this research was done.
As the PDF they’ve published has a whopping amount of 65 pages, I’ve decided to make use of a smart blogger that made readable statistics of it, which was Greg Sterling from SearchEngineLand.com, with the article ‘Pew Research: ‘Web 2.0′ Crowd A Small Minority‘. According to his post the researches divided the ones interviewed into three groups; ‘Elite users’, ‘middle of the road users’ and the not so tech savvy users with limited use of technology.
I must say two things directly surprised me while reading the article; according to the research 31% of the U.S. adults are considered to be ‘elite users’, even though this might be a broad term, it’s quite a big group, almost one third of the country actually. The second surprising part is the huge group of not tech-savvy people; it counts for 49%! According to the description of this group technology didn’t mean too much in the lives of these people and they most likely wouldn’t miss it; I suppose still quite a lot of people live in the inlands of the US where no internet or mobile phones are available?
Nonetheless an interesting project, it’s questionable whether it’s reliable for Europe or not though, I’ve got a feeling various countris here have smaller amounts of strong conservatives or ‘middle of nowheres’ in general.
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