The Participation Gap

I’ve been persisting with Facebook, and my initial scepticism is beginning to fade as my network has grown. I’ve also noticed I’m using it differently than I initially set out to do. I started off by trying to connect with all the people I’ve ever known, focussing predominantly on those from the more distant past. And I did connect with them. However, those connections have faded (probably for the same reasons we’re not real life friends anymore) and the day to day value I derive comes from interactions with people I still have a relationship with and who I see on a reasonably regular basis.

A couple of observations though. Firstly, despite living a highly ‘blended’ life, I use Facebook almost exclusively for non-work related things. I think that’s been driven by a couple of factors – the fact that any work-related stuff would be open to my entire network, which would be inappropriate, and secondly that very few of my work colleagues have connected with me on Facebook, possibly because they themselves only use it for personal things. Clearly this is (potentially) a flaw in my blending theory which I need to think about some more. My second observation, is that not all my friends and contacts use Facebook, or any other kind of social networking site for that matter. Which means my Facebook activity only represents part of my life network. Some of those missing are from a different generation, but many are not. They simply have different priorities and a different mindset. Whatever the reason, they are missing. This is the participation gap.

As with many technologies, there’ll always be some ‘never adopters’, or ULAs - ‘ultra late adopters’, or those excluded for other social reasons – and this inevitably means the value I get from the network will not reach full potential. Will this gap eventually close, as it did with TV? Or will the network keep migrating to new platforms before the ULAs have a chance to catch up? Does it even matter? I guess we need to wait and see.