Social networking vs. age and socio-economic status

 

    It is easy to say every one today is “connected”. Yea there are many communities that do not have near the average income of the United States that might be at a disadvantage of being wired to the world, but they are diminishing. An old John Stossel report had in interview with a person self-labeled as “poor”:

 

Stossel: Do you have a tv?

Man: Yea

Stossel: Do you have a telephone?

Man: Yea

Stossel: Do you have a refrigerator?

Man: Yea

Stossel: Then how are you poor?

Man: Everyone has those things.

 

So our definition of poor has changed and it is quite possible that tomorrows definition will put mobile communications in the list above, if it has not already.

 

Wired is a bad term since it means you have a wire to the internet. Internet searches and bazillions of documents are available and with all that information “wired” seems like an easy term, simple to use. If it is, go to a library and find this: F230.J4 1955.  Many college students, educators and recent college grads know that it is the numbering system for college libraries. Take some one 10 years out of school or never been to college and they will be lost finding that information (Which happens to be Thomas Jefferson’s 2^nd most important work Notes on the State of Virginia. And a library is much smaller than the information found on the internet and has much greater order.

Breeanna Hare wrote an interesting article for cnn.com about the demographics of different social networking sites. While it does not list who has access to what, it does mention the socio-economic levels of their users. Twitter and linkedln has the greatest population of users making over $100,000 a year while MySpace has some of the fewest. She also discusses the migration of MySpace users to Facebook as they get older. Less busy content and a more professional look from Facebook draws an older crowd.

Who has access to what technology is a constant argument in education equality, but when having the access, you cant throw them all in the internet pool and expect them to swim. Pick the social media that targets your demographic the best. For high schools it looks to be MySpace and for college it appears to start heading over to Facebook. In time these might change or have other equally popular ones, but marketing education is not much different then marketing items; if the material is in a format they understand and the client is interested, you got’em.