The decade of the social Web (fixed & mobile)

The '00s were when Web 2.0 hit – the increasingly mobile social Web, from desktops to laptops to gameplayers and smartphones, that spelled a media makeover as radical as the printing press did nearly 500 years ago. Why so radical? Well, maybe people felt the realtime one-on-one conversations of the telephone were just as radical in their time, but now we're talking realtime multi-directional, one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, multimedia, user-produced and professionally produced, un-regulatable conversations and productions and environments all through the same "pipeline" and appearing on multiple, often mobile devices of all sorts and sizes. Robert Sibley of the Ottawa Citizen asks if what I just described is good, quoting Samuel Morse quoting the Bible when he tapped out the first message by telegraph in 1844, "What hath God wrought?" As radical as this shift we're experiencing is, if God hath wrought it, I think it wasn't the media so much as change itself that He or She wrought, since change is truly the only constant. The current change in media and technology will certainly change us, as media shifts always have, but the changes are always both good and bad, for example the ability to photograph and share with distant grandparents a kid's hockey goal or a brand-new-baby photo in realtime is enabled by the same technology that instantly mass-distributes the nude photo of a minor who could later be prosecuted for producing and distributing child pornography.

This is a scary juncture in media history, as we collectively figure out how to preserve the good and mitigate the bad things about it, but it also presents – impels, really – a tremendous opportunity for us to pool all our forms of expertise and find solutions in the collaborative way these complex problems call for. It's also calling upon us to develop unprecedented critical thinking skills, the kind that grasp the implications of behavior (ours and others') as much as content, because media are social, or behavioral, now. If we can answer that call and collaborate in a more multi-disciplinary way then ever before, civilization might actually advance because of new media.

Some people, however, seem to think this juncture is just unprecedentedly bad – especially where youth are concerned. In his long, reflective essay, Sibley cites the view of Emory University Prof. Mark Bauerlein that social networking teens "never grow up," remaining "narcissistically embedded in 'gossip and social banter' instead of attending to the knowledge they need to be mature and responsible adults." There is actually a lot of opposing evidence that social media are not just about "gossip and social banter" to youth - see this three-part interview with Stanford University cultural anthropologist Mimi Ito by author Howard Rheingold.

But if you feel youth indeed are growing up more slowly, author Po Bronson agrees. In a Newsweek blog post, he suggests, however, that the fault lies in our over-protectiveness, not in social media. He cites the view of author Joe Allen that "our urge to protect teenagers from real life – because we don’t think they’re ready yet – has tragically backfired. By insulating them from adult-like work, adult social relationships, and adult consequences, we have only delayed their development. We have made it harder for them to grow up. Maybe even made it impossible to grow up on time." Bronson's referring to Escaping the Endless Adolescence, by Drs. Joseph Allen and Claudia Worrell Allen.

Hey, you can see from my essay yesterday that I worry, too, about the impact on youth of portable, 24/7 exposure to the drama of adolescent social lives, but I think it's way too easy to blame the technology and I also worry – a lot – that all this fearing of or, at best, adjusting to, the new media environment by us adults is causing this regrettable over-protectiveness of our kids and distracting us from doing our job, parenting, which includes helping our children develop the most protective filter they'll ever have, the one that'll be with them wherever they go for the rest of their lives and improves with age: the software between their ears!

Related links

"Online Safety 3.0: Empowering & Protecting Youth"

"From users to citizens: How to make digital citizenship relevant?"

"'Continuous partial attention...'"

"School libraries: Vital filter developers"

US's mobile Web: Data snapshot

Here's the picture, courtesy of Nielsen: The number of US mobile phone users aged 13+ right now is 223 million. The number of mobile Web users is 60.7m (up 33% from 2008 and expected to double by the middle of next year). Compare the 60.7 million to the number of active Internet users – some 195 million – and it looks like the number of mobile Web users is about a third of fixed Web users right now. Within 18 months, Nielsen figures there will be three times as many mobile Web users, or about 120 million. An example of mobile Web use is video-viewing on phones. That growth is pretty exponential too: About 7% of cellphone users view video on their phones now (about 15.6 million), growing to a project 90 million by mid-2011. [One more interesting factoid: 21% of US households are cellphone-only now, Nielsen says, meaning no landlines.]

Big sign of increasingly mobile Web

If anyone had any doubts about how big the mobile Web will be, Google's release of its Nexus One phone should erase them. It's part of Google's "careful plan to try to do what few other technology companies have done before: retain its leadership as computing shifts from one generation to the next," the New York Times reports. And this shift is computing, shopping, gaming, info-gathering, communicating, photo-sharing, learning, teaching, producing, etc. on smart phones. Some pundits have been calling this "Web 3.0" (and I'm not sure what else Web 3.0 would look like). According to Nielsen, about 18% of mobile phones were smartphones last year (up from 13% the year before, and a projected 40-50% of mobile phones sold this year will be smart phones. It'll be very interesting to see how much competition Nexus One will give the iPhone, the rival it's clearly going after. Certainly, smart phone manufacturers have the youth market in mind (see this on a hybrid of the netbook and smartphone aimed at teens).

Tiny computers, er, phones proliferating

What does this say about kids 'n' tech? Well, what we've been saying for some time: that their social lives, informal learning, media-sharing, social producing, and creative networking are getting increasingly mobile and 24/7. The media- and tech-enabled part of their lives are in their pockets, wherever they are. [It's one reason why they don't wear wristwatches - have you noticed that?] But here's some evidence: Acer – the world's 2nd-largest computer maker after Hewlett-Packard, according to Forbes – is "joining the stampede into mobile phones," where the grass is very green. "Worldwide sales of mobile phones – an estimated 1.1 billion units this year, including 150 million smart phones – far exceed the expected sales of 280 million personal computers." Forbes adds that smart phones earn "gross profit margins of 30% or more, compared with the 3% or 4% for the low-cost computers that compose much of Acer's business." I think this is a solid sign that Web 3.0 – the mobile Web – is here!

Huge growth in texting, mobile Web access

Just in the first half of this year, people sent 740 billion text messages over the US cellphone networks, according to CTIA, the wireless industry's trade association. That's 4.1 billion a day and nearly double the number (385 billion) for the first half of 2008. Photo and other media sharing has grown even more. CTIA's semi-annual survey found that "more than 10.3 billion MMS messages were reported for the first half of 2009, up from 4.7 billion in mid-year 2008." That spelled a 31% increase in revenue from data (non-voice) for the industry over the first half of 2008. In fact, there's growth every which way you look. Users: There were 276 million cellphone users this past January through June, up 14 million. Minutes: 1.1 trillion, or 6.4 billion a day. Revenues: $76 billion for the wireless industry in those six months. ["MMS" stands for "multimedia message service" and "SMS" for "short message service," now just "texting."] Here's Washington tech pundit Adam Thierer's blog post on the survey. [See also "Teen drivers: Take a 'text stop'" and "House rules for texting."]

Web access over mobile phones is showing big growth, too – in fact, the mobile Web is overtaking the fixed one, internationally. "More people are using cell phones and other portable devices for high-speed Web access than are signing up for fixed line [computer] subscriptions to the Net," according to report from the International Telecommunications Union cited in the San Jose Mercury News. It projects 600 million mobile broadband subscriptions by the end of this year, compared to 500 million "fixed line subscriptions," a 50% increase for mobile over the past year.

Surfing by phone: Significant growth

Seems it's only a matter of time before Americans are accessing the Net via phones as much as on computers. And certainly, Web access is coming to the cellphone of a kid near you! A just-released survey by the Pew/Internet Project found that 56% of US adults have accessed the Internet wirelessly - via laptop, mobile device, game console, or MP3 player, and about a third (32%) have used a cellphone to access the Net "for emailing, instant-messaging, or information-seeking." That figure for phone-based access is up one-third since December 2007, "when 24% of Americans had ever used the Internet on a mobile device." On a typical day, Pew adds 19% of Americans use the Net from their phones - 73% growth over 16 months.

Mobile Web's arrived

"The mobile Web is here, and it's huge," reports Chris O'Brien in the San Jose Mercury News. This from a reporter who started covering telecommunications in 1999 and heard at countless mobile industry trade shows that "next year is when the mobile Internet really takes off." As evidence, sure there's the iPhone nearing its goal of selling 10 million unites, the coming new, non-business-y versions of the BlackBerry, Google's new Android OS for mobile phones, and the "countless developers rushing to build new applications" for phones. "But more than anything, my recognition of this moment is based on personal experience." He got the BlackBerry curve and "I've been completely shocked at how indispensable it's become and how it's changed the way I work and communicate," and he's not a gadget freak and this isn't his first BlackBerry. This one's his mobile computer, where he manages all his email in odd moments, reads his news, comments on friends' profiles, sends his Twitter tweets, posts to his blog, snaps and sends loads of pictures, and - through GPS-enabled software called Telenav - finds the nearest ATM or coffee spot wherever he is. Add game-playing, which is not on Chris's list, and you're looking at how our kids use phones. Good filtering between their ears is increasingly the best online-safety "application." See also "Tweens are into phones", with Nielsen Mobile research showing that 26% of US 8-to-12-year-olds owning cellphones (46% using them) and 77% of US 13-to-17-year-olds owning them.