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SOCIAL MEDIA<br />
Are You Stuck in The Mobile Divide?<br />
By Chris Brogan<br />
I<br />
’m up in<br />
Newfoundland<br />
visiting relatives.<br />
Sure, there are<br />
smart phones here<br />
in the e<strong>as</strong>ternmost<br />
province of Canada.<br />
But because I don’t<br />
want to pay huge<br />
data roaming fees,<br />
I opted to buy a<br />
prepaid mobile<br />
phone with b<strong>as</strong>ic<br />
services (phone<br />
and text).<br />
The results?<br />
Eye-popping.<br />
On this prepaid phone, I can call people and text people.<br />
That’s it. I can’t roam the mobile Internet and <strong>as</strong>k Google<br />
what’s around me. I can’t see how my social network is faring.<br />
I can’t find deals from Groupon in my inbox. I don’t even<br />
have an inbox. What does this tell us?<br />
There’s A Mobile Divide, Too<br />
When we talk about “digital divide,” we sometimes use this<br />
term to describe the lack of access to Internet infr<strong>as</strong>tructure.<br />
The conversation often falls along poverty or race lines; but the<br />
digital divide is mix of culture, with one part provisioning and<br />
one part economics.<br />
The mobile divide, meanwhile, is the gap between those<br />
people who use smart phones and those who don’t. Yet.<br />
Does It Matter? Do We Need Smartphones?<br />
Yes. I think that the genie is out of the bottle with mobile<br />
computing. The new dial tone is wherever we choose to be<br />
reached, and fewer and fewer people seek to be reached by<br />
voice. At a minimum, we want e-mail. At a maximum, we<br />
want our <strong>Facebook</strong> and our Twitter and our Foursquare<br />
10 PARTNERS Fall 2010<br />
(not me, but<br />
you might) and<br />
our Google.<br />
Heck, without<br />
a smartphone,<br />
I lack maps. I lack<br />
orienteering to the<br />
outside world. I<br />
lack the annotation<br />
of Yelp.<br />
We can get by<br />
with a simple<br />
mobile device,<br />
but I believe we’re<br />
missing the larger<br />
picture without the<br />
smartphone.<br />
And yes, I realize that this is a first-world problem, and that<br />
people in many communities would be happy with any kind<br />
of communications device. (And yes, Canada is actually pretty<br />
wired, even in rural spots.) That’s not the point of this post.<br />
The point is that in places where technology is supposedly<br />
ubiquitous, there’s a new divide.<br />
Yes. I think that the genie is out of the bottle with<br />
mobile computing. The new dial tone is wherever<br />
we choose to be reached, and fewer and fewer<br />
people seek to be reached by voice.<br />
What’s <strong>Your</strong> Take?<br />
I’m going to presume you have a smartphone of some<br />
kind. You might not have the latest Android or iPhone 4 or<br />
whatever, but chances are, your phone can receive and transmit<br />
more than calls and texts. How much more of the Internet are<br />
you using from your phone these days? Could you live without<br />
it? What do you say? z<br />
About the Author<br />
Chris Brogan is the New York Times bestselling author<br />
of the new book, Social Media 101. He is president<br />
of New Marketing Labs, LLC, and blogs at<br />
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/” \t “_blank chrisbrogan.com<br />
© 2010 American Express <strong>Company</strong>. All rights reserved.
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