schrockmedia

In 1980, Tomita created a simple chart of communication technologies, mapping the number of participants by speed of communication. What was revealed in simple terms, and popularized in 1991 in Neuman’s “The Future of Mass Audience,” was a “gap” in the functionality in existing mediated communication. Online communities clearly fit easily here, providing new ways for audiences/users to communicate in nearly real-time speed. Nearly 3 decades later, the question is: has this area been saturated, or is there still room for expansion?

Certainly, it is here that Internet communicative modes and collaboration has experienced growth that continues to this day. According to a recent study by the Pew Center for Internet and American Life, around 11% of American adults use (and 20% of adults 25 – 34 have ever used) a service that involves “status updates.” However, this is inclusive of Facebook, which has couched status updates within a more familiar website framework, and is doubtless more popular than the newcomer Twitter. Even more popular, worldwide, is messaging (SMS or otherwise) on mobile phones.

I’d go so far as to say that we’re reaching a saturation point for short-message, different-place, fast-but-not-quite-synchronous communication. Message boards famously filled this gap quite well decades ago. Rather than being a purely functional issue, the question becomes whether average users, on a fundamental social level, find a need for a micro-blogging such as Twitter. RSS feeds are my favorite example of a technology that never reached mainstream use. It has always remained on the cusp of acceptance, but used more by leading edge adopters, and is more used as a common format to transmit information of various kinds across a network behind the scenes. There is another roadblock to Twitter: it offers functionality that can be easily replicated. And if Twitter never acquired significant usership, and doesn’t emerge as a brand name a la Yahoo or Google, users could easily be poached by another service that offers significant advantages - less frequent downtime, closer mobile integration, or multimedia capabilities.

Labels: addiction, mass media, neuman, tomita, twitter