The General Populace Still Doesn’t Use New Media

This past week I attended the large fantasy, sci-fi and media convention Dragon*Con. I heard that this year there were over 30,000 attendees.

Now, in a group of esentially geeks, you would think most (if not all) would have at least heard of various social media and new media tools.

You’d be wrong.

About a dozen (or so) of the crew of one of my podcasts sat on a panel about podcasting and about 3/4ths of the room didn’t know what podcasting was.

Granted, some of them didn’t even understand what radio dramas were.

These, my friends, are the general populace. While a good portion of the world is wired, plugged in and new media saavy, there’s still a even larger part of the world that is not.

We were quizzed on how we got the files to each other (did we send them through the mail?), asked how we paid for the podcast, and other items that seem to fascinate our audience.

What does this mean to you? Remember that you might need to “educate” people about social and new media or use terms that they can easily grasp [we've had to tell people we do radio shows on the internet]. While social media and new media is entering the public’s consciousness (blog and internet writers are being consulted by the likes of CNN and the New York Times), not everyone online understands.

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