In keeping with my homage to William James, I suppose that this blog post should be subtitled, “A Study in Human Nature.” However, my goals are not quite so lofty as James’s; I am merely an observer, and not a philosopher, of online social activities. Perhaps a better title would be, “A Field Guide to the Social Media Participants of the Online Realm,” but even that is a bit pretentious, don’t you think?

Those of us who live in the rarefied air of Silicon Valley tend to assume, almost always incorrectly, that the “rest of the world” experiences social media the way we do. It therefore comes as quite a shock, at times, to discover that there are enormous hordes of online users who do not experience the Internet the way we do. Here are some facts about the “other half” of the online world:

• Many of them do not know what a URL is, nor what a search engine is. There’s a reason that the most common search query at Yahoo! is “Google,” and the most common search query at Google is “Yahoo.”
• The term hyperlink has no meaning and is probably confused with something in science fiction.
• They have never heard of Techmeme, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, TechCrunch, or any of the other dozens of sites that we tend to rely on for our daily news.
• They believe that the Internet is a scary and dangerous place, and will rarely, if ever, divulge any personal information, much less their credit card numbers, online.
• They have no sense at all of the relatively safety or security of one website versus another. “https://” vs. “http://” is meaningless.
• They tend to perceive Internet sites as TV channels: different content, to be sure, but fundamentally the same technology.
• If they notice the URL, they get concerned if the site does not use “www.” before the domain name, thinking that it somehow controls the behavior of the web.

It’s not surprising, then, that these people tend to have different experiences of social media. This is an attempt to catalog, based solely on my personal experience, the various types of social media behaviors that occur.

The grandma

She has an account on Facebook after frequently seeing her grandchildren using it. She has had a computer since the 1990′s, and it’s mostly used by her grandkids when they come over to visit. She’s good at a few tasks using the computer: she can print out maps and directions, she can retrieve her email, and she can upload pictures from the tiny little Canon point-and-shoot camera that she carries everywhere.

Unfortunately, she has no fear and little understanding that there are Very Bad People on the Internet who would like to take over her computer and use it to send thousands of spam messages per hour for the next few years.

Her social graph consists of a) her immediate family members, b) some people she knows from church or the local community, and c) scammers who would like to inherit her modest fortune.

She loves seeing the pictures of her children and grand children, and she’s a big fan of casual games online. She has a farm on Farmville.

She reads every word of text on a web page before taking any action at all; because of this, she does not distinguish between actual content, navigation, and advertising.

Because of her innocence, she needs to be protected. Default privacy settings that reveal her name and location to the world could put her in very real physical danger. She will never be a mobile device user, and strategies that encourage her to become one will only confuse and frustrate her. She gets far more value out of “real life” social interaction than she does online, and she will drop the online interaction in a heartbeat if she has an opportunity to do something that involves real people.

The student

He is in high school or college, and has never known a world without the Internet. He does not wear a watch and probably never will. The concept of a “landline” is a novelty, since he’s never known a phone that would not go everywhere. He will not use email personally because it’s too slow, instead relying on SMS (text messaging) for most of his interaction with his peers.

His attention span is under two seconds: if he looks at a web page and cannot figure out how to use it in that time (or if it takes longer than that to load in the browser), he will drop it and move on to something more interesting. He is incredibly frustrated with his college’s website, and will scream out loud at how difficult it is to use.

He is completely and totally paranoid. He was raised hearing horror stories about online dangers and will go to great lengths to avoid giving any personal information online. He has no way of determining the difference between real and imagined risks. He will grudgingly order things from Amazon, but he will not allow them to save his credit card information for later, preferring to enter it each time.

He uses Facebook almost exclusively on his smartphone. He updates his status several times today, often with totally introverted comments about his state of mind.

Because of his paranoia (some of it justified), the student needs to be enticed to expand his social media horizons. For people his age, the best way to do this is with sex. The ability to share with people of the opposite gender is a strong attractor, overcoming many fears. Seriously, however, the student needs to be introduced to things gradually; he needs to be assured that he has control over who can see his personal information, and what it will be used for.

To be continued…

Note: some minor corrections based on comments.

Robert Scoble hits the nail on the head when he says that, “On my phone I only use voice about 5% of the time I use my iPhone.” He was responding to Louis Gray’s post on how he switched from iPhone to Android.

It amuses me to hear the ongoing debates about call quality on AT&T vs. Verizon vs. Sprint, etc. My personal experience is, of course, nearly irrelevant (since my personal experience may have little to do with how you or someone else experiences it), but I’ve been with AT&T for 10 years now and cannot yet find a reason to change.

I live in a house in the hills east of the Santa Clara Valley. The nearest cell towers (of any variety) are over 3 miles away. I get one bar of signal strength no matter which carrier I use. When I had an Amazon Kindle (which uses SprintVerizon for its “Whispernet” service), I often had difficulties downloading books to it. Recently, I’ve installed an AT&T 3G Microcell in my home, and I now get 5 barsstars. Likewise, at work, there is an AT&T repeater. In addition, since AT&T is a partner of Yahoo!, we get a substantial employee discount on service. So, you see, I have a huge number of incentives to stick with AT&T. In addition to that, however, is the fact that I’ve almost never had connectivity problems; I suppose that, if I lived in downtown San Francisco where I competed with tens of thousands of other users, I might have problems, but I don’t.

But, to return to the original discussion—I use my iPhone so rarely as a phone, the carrier is nearly irrelevant. I use Skype on my MacBook Pro more often for voice communication than I use my iPhone. Unlike Robert Scoble and Louis Gray, I don’t have companies tossing various models of Android at me to let me try them for a few weeks, so I can’t compare. But the essence of my argument is that, for many “mobile professionals,” the telephone carrier is almost irrelevant. Both AT&T and Verizon are “good enough,” and we should be making our purchase decisions on other factors, such as the battery life (which seems to stink on every so-called “smart phone”).

Louis Gray agrees when he points out that the call quality isn’t what moved him from iPhone:

Yes, AT&T has been dramatically underdelivering in terms of quality and functionality, but this did not drive me away from Apple as much as the lack of choice did.

If you are a person who spends most of his or her time on the phone, then call quality should be a determining factor in which phone you purchase. For the rest of us, the user experience, battery life, underlying platform, and so-called “ecosystem” of applications and support are vastly more important than which carrier we choose.