Web 2.0 Audience in Mirror May Be Smaller Than It Appears

How ironic is it that Web 2.0–the “participatory Web”–has far fewer participants than its architects would have us believe? According to a new study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, the only world Web 2.0 has conquered is the one that gave birth to it. Pew found that only 8% of Americans have taken an active interest in the Web 2.0 phenom. Far greater is the percentage of adults who have little or no interest in it at all. “Fully half of adults have a more distant or nonexistent relationship to modern information technology,” the report explains. “Some of this diffidence is driven by people’s concerns about information overload; some is related to people’s sense that their gadgets have more capacity than users can master; some is connected to people’s sense that things like blogging and creating home-brew videos for YouTube is not for them.”

I guess Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, was right: Nobody even knows what Web 2.0 means.

“It was very surprising to see just how small a group uses the full potential of modern information and communication technology and just how large a group hardly uses it at all,” John B. Horrigan, Pew’s associate director for research, told the Dallas Morning News. “I read and hear so much about people who write blogs and post pictures on Flickr and watch TV on their cellphones; I expected them to be a much larger group than they actually are.”