Comments on: CHI Favorite: Do Rural and Urban People Uses Social Media Differently?

By: Social Web Strategies » Blog Archive » Rural vs urban use of social media

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 13:45:13 +0000

[...] Adaptive Path: useful coverage of Eric Gilbert’s work on social media in rural life. [Link] Eric’s conclusions were that both rural and urban people use social media, but they use it very [...]

By: » Do Rural and Urban People Use Social Media Differently? Web Notes: Design | Strategy | Marketing

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 04:30:19 +0000

[...] Do Rural and Urban People Uses Social Media Differently? | According to the research, yes they do. [...]

By: Nicolas Cohen

Nicolas Cohen — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 02:30:52 +0000

I believe the same pattern occurs between small city and big city inhabitants at least in my country. Argentina’s 40 million population is split 13 million surrounding Buenos Aire, 3-4 million in the few other big cities and the rest mostly in small cities and towns. You don’t see too much mixing of those populations online either.

By: Shawn K

Shawn K — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 17:36:28 +0000

Being from a true rural area, town of 300, 90 miles from any large town, I can see all around me just how accurate that analysis is. However, I don’t think it has so much to do with urban vs. rural as it does with ISPs. Small towns tend to be ignored when it comes to broadband, in fact, under the FCC’s new standards, I technically don’t have broadband internet anymore. However, as I see friends and relatives move to areas with faster internet speeds, they quickly add friends. It’s not that people don’t want to reach out, but they don’t have the time. This is a farming area, people work long, hard hours. They don’t have time to sit and wait for media laden web pages to load just to connect to new people. They will instead, network with those they already know. Being a geek, I will put forth more effort to network like crazy, because I have no one around me with geeky interests, I NEED the internet to talk with these people. To truly branch this divide, America needs to put a big emphasis on getting rural areas the same internet speeds as our urban counterparts. If we don’t, rural America will soon become even more rural, as the internet become more entwined in business.