I was watching a weekly Sunday night news magazine called Fantastico here in Brazil with my father. Little caveat: my father is a complete Luddite, he hates technology and only uses it when it’s extremely necessary. It’s common to hear my dad joking about how us “Internet boys” live such a dependent life, plugged to our gadgets and not living the “real life us normal folks live in…”
Well, back to that show where they reported on the latest stats about Internet usage. 25% of the Brazilian population has access to the Internet, according to study backed by three of the most serious public opinion institutes here. My natural reaction, being an “Internet boy”, was celebratory. Wow, we have now almost 60 million people using the web, dad! My father as a little more skeptical about it and I had to agree with him.
That means that only 1 out of 4 people know what the heck is the Internet. If we compare that to other mass media such as TV, Radio, Books, Newspapers, etc… we’re still way behind. But we act in an arrogant way, as if our medium where a Mannah descended from heaven to be humanity’s only solution for all their problems. Of couse, the Internet has grown faster than any mass media and it’s poised to grow to an even larger share. But the reality is that we, Alpha Geeks, don’t understand that life goes on for ¾ of the population without access to the web.
One example is the meme “#iranlection” on Twitter. I remember when around the time the elections where happening on Iran, a lot folks made their “virtual protests” ranting on Twitter or even changing their icons to green as a form of “fighting against the injustices there”….
Come on… less than 0.04% of Iranians have access to Twitter, only 2.95% in Brazil… Do you really believe you can change the world just tweeting from the comfort of your Lay-Z-Boy chair while sipping a Coke and having some chips? Come on…
Our work, as pioneers sailing the waves of the web since the last century, would be putting down the barriers that separate us from the rest of the population. And that’s the lingo we use, the hermetic conversations we hold, the fact that we believe our notions are absolute truths and that we want to impose our ideas instead of emerging from common sense.
Folks always ask me why we don’t get the advertising dollars we deserve as a mass medium. The answer is that we make it so complex because we think we are the majority, when we are just a minority.
Food for thought, Internet marketers.