Turns out there are not huge swaths of the American public spending their day using social media.  Here are some surprising stats posted by our friends over at Frogloop:

• Twitter: 1.1 % of the U.S. population is on Twitter. (source: April 2011 results from Experian Hitwise.)

• Facebook: While Facebook says that they have 150M U.S. “active” users, which is 48% of the U.S. population, only 50% of active users login any given day. So 24% of the U.S. population logs into Facebook on any given day to check or post updates. (source: Facebook)

• LinkedIn: 0.37% of the U.S. population is on LinkedIn. (source: April 2011 results from Experian Hitwise.)

• YouTube: 19.94% of the U.S population is on YouTube. (source: April 2011 results from Experian Hitwise.)

• MySpace: 1.19% of the U.S. population is on MySpace. (source: April 2011 results from Experian Hitwise.)

Many of us have been closely tracking the evolving “digital divide” in our communities. For the first few decades of the digital revolution we knew that many of our folks lacked access to the basic tools of the internet age — placing them on the wrong side of the “digital divide.”  Then things began to change. The rise of ever-more powerful mobile devices — essentially computers in your pocket — resulted in Latinos and blacks to be more likely than the general population to access the Web by cellular phones, and they use their phones more often to do more things.  So for example:

• 51% percent of Hispanics and 46% of blacks use their phones to access the Internet, compared with 33% of whites, according to a July 2010 Pew poll.
• Forty-seven percent of Latinos and 41% of blacks use their phones for e-mail, compared with 30% of whites. The figures for using social media like Facebook via phone were 36% for Latinos, 33% for blacks and 19% for whites.

But while one divide has begun to close, another may be opening.  Here’s how a researcher at Pew explains the growing problem: “[N]ow some see a new “digital divide” emerging — with Latinos and blacks being challenged by more, not less, access to technology. It’s tough to fill out a job application on a cellphone, for example. Researchers have noticed signs of segregation online that perpetuate divisions in the physical world. And blacks and Latinos may be using their increased Web access more for entertainment than empowerment.”

David Pogue, technology critic at the New York Times, has put together a “handy clip-and-save” primer on social networking.  It’s for those who know little about Web 2.0 — or as Pogue writes: Those that Facebook left behind. Here are the key sections:

FACEBOOK: This is the biggest social networking service, with almost 500 million members — 22 percent of everyone on the Internet — and it’s growing by 5 percent a month.

It’s a glorified “facebook”— name-and-photo directory — of the sort that colleges distribute to incoming freshmen. (In fact, Facebook started out exactly that way, as an electronic facebook at Harvard.) You answer as many questions about yourself as you feel comfortable sharing: your name, contact information, relationship status, favorite music and maybe a few photos. Then you search for friends, past or present. When they accept your friend invitations, you can now see their Facebook pages and they can see yours.

Why you’d bother: Facebook is great for sharing news, photos and videos with people who might care; for finding long-lost friends (or snooping on old lovers); for joining groups that support various causes or interests; for sending messages (it’s somewhat more streamlined than regular e-mail); and for playing games with each other (FarmVille, Mafia Wars).

Why not: Facebook keeps making policy and programming blunders that expose personal information to other Web sites. It also lets its advertisers place ads on the pages of very targeted members: divorced 45-year-olds in Texas, for example.

Similar: MySpace (a teenage and preteenage crowd, heavily focused on pop music and do-it-yourself page designs), Bebo and many others.

LINKEDIN: It’s Facebook for the professional set. Here, the concept is establishing a “who you know” network of current and former business colleagues.

Why you’d bother: LinkedIn is especially useful when you’re looking for a new job — or a new employee, which helps explain its 70-million-strong global membership — because you’re no longer limited to asking your immediate colleagues for referrals. Now you can ask colleagues of colleagues, which greatly expands your reach. LinkedIners can also vouch for one another as references.

A popular feature called Answers lets you ask business-related questions of people who might know — advice on everything from résumé formatting to business software.

Why not: As with Facebook, not all connections are legitimate. When people accept “friend” invitations from people they don’t actually know, the whole trusted-colleague concept weakens.

TWITTER: This is the service that lets you send tweets — er, brief, 140-character updates that feel a lot like text messages. They can be news, jokes, observations, links, gripes, questions, anything.

Except instead of sending them to just one person’s cellphone, you’re sending them to a handful, or thousands — as many as have signed up to receive them from you. Meanwhile, you’ve signed up to receive other people’s postings (to “follow” them). Once you’ve signed up for a few good ones, the messages scroll up your screen, like the transcript of a global cocktail-party conversation.

You can use Twitter on its Web site, but it’s much easier if you do it using a free Twitter-reading app for your computer or phone, like TweetDeck, Twitterific and Twitter (the official Twitter app for the iPhone, formerly called Tweetie).

Why you’d bother: News frequently breaks on Twitter (by being passed around so fast that pretty soon, everybody’s heard it). It’s fun to follow famous people; the stuff they (or their minions) type appears directly on your phone or computer screen, without any layers of interpreters in between.

Using search.twitter.com, you can find out what the world is saying about you, your company or any topic that interests you.

And if enough people, or the right people, follow you, you can get something truly revolutionary: expert, instantaneous feedback on questions or opinions.

Why not: Twitter can be a lonely place when you first sign up. Figuring out whom to follow, and how to get people to follow you, takes time and effort. And Twitterites use a lot of conventions and shorthand codes that can be confusing at first.

Similar: Google Buzz, FriendFeed, Facebook updates.

FOURSQUARE: As cellphones with GPS become more popular, crazy new possibilities pop up — like Foursquare.

It knows where you are. So when you open the Foursquare app on your iPhone, Palm, BlackBerry or Android phone, you see a list of restaurants, bars and shops near where you’re standing. By “checking in” (tapping the name of the one you’re in), you broadcast your location to your friends. There’s a game element, too: you earn points whenever you check in. In fact, whoever visits a certain place the most becomes its “mayor,” and may be rewarded by a giveaway from that business.

Why you’d bother: You can see where your friends are right now, making it easy to meet them. Businesses can offer you free products as you walk by (“Since you’re right outside, how ’bout a free coffee?”) — win-win marketing. And your buddies can leave pointers about an establishment (“avoid the halibut”) that appear right on your screen as you enter. Really cool concept.

Why not: With not quite two million members — mostly bar-hopping twenty-somethings — Foursquare isn’t for everyone. Most people don’t use it, and most businesses aren’t listed yet.

Similar: Gowalla, Loopt, Brightkite.

YELP: It’s a huge database of restaurants, shops, hotels, doctors, museums and attractions, all easy to find, with store hours, directions and phone numbers, covering 34 cities. But the magic is in the customer reviews: 11 million of them so far, mostly helpful and articulate.

Why you’d bother: Armed with those reviews, you have no excuse to go to a terrible restaurant or shady shop again.

Why not: There’s always a chance that the reviews are being manipulated (although the company says it’s diligent about filtering out suspicious ones).

Similar: OpenTable, Urbanspoon.

THE BOTTOM LINE: These sites all derive their power the same way: We, the people, provide the information — not the Web site owner. Some of these services establish lines of communication between people who might otherwise never meet, joining them by interest rather than geography. Others connect you with people you do know, or once knew, so that you can help each other out.

Ever heard of “social search engines”? They’re sort of a cross between Google, Twitter and Facebook.  Social search engines aim to connect people with questions to people who can answer those questions. By contrast, regular Web searches take questions, break them into keywords, and then find Web sites that have the most relevance to these keywords.

According to the NYT Bits Blog the “idea has gained momentum with the increased use of Twitter and Facebook, where people rely on their networks for information, blasting queries to their social networks and, if their networks are good enough, getting useful, personalized responses.”  Companies like Aardvark and Mahalo are trying to create better tools for people with questions to connect to people with answers. Some think social search has the potential to go beyond Google and fundamentally change the way people use the Internet.

Rather than trying to replace traditional search engines, the folks working on social search tools believe “there is a large class of subjective questions — especially longer, contextualized requests for recommendations or advice — which are better served by social search than by web search.”

It’s far from clear how social searches might be useful for grassroots organizing.  But then again we’ve always valued community knowledge over “expert” opinion, and we “crowdsource” every day as we knock on doors and organize community meetings…

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has released their latest report examining social media use among teens and young adults.  One important finding is that teen blogging is on the decline while social media use is on the rise. Here are some key points of the report:

• Just 8 percent of Internet users ages 12 to 17 reported that they use Twitter.
• Blogging is declining as a means of communication for teens.
• Many teens are migrating from MySpace to Facebook.
• Three-quarters of teens and 93 percent of adults ages 18 to 29 have a cell phone.

The New York Times recently ran an article entitled “The Internet vs. Obama”, which argues that “technological evolution has made it progressively harder to get big things done in this country, and now it’s just about impossible. This isn’t just Obama’s problem; it’s America’s problem.”

One of the arguments supporting this view is that the division of readers and viewers into “demographically and ideologically discrete micro-audiences makes it easy for interest groups to get scare stories (e.g. “death panels”) to the people most likely to be terrified by them. Pollsters barrage legislators with the views of constituents who, having been barraged by these stories, have little idea what’s actually in the bills that outrage them.”

The article continues:

It’s no exaggeration to say that technology has subverted the original idea of America. The founders explicitly rejected direct democracy — in which citizens vote on every issue — in favor of representative democracy. The idea was that legislators would convene at a safe remove from voters and, thus insulated from the din of narrow interests and widespread but ephemeral passions, do what was in the long-term interest of their constituents and of the nation. Now information technology has stripped away the insulation that physical distance provided back when information couldn’t travel faster than a horse.

It’s hard to agree with this view from a grassroots perspective, especially since Web 2.0 has granted many of us the tools — now cheap and easy to use — to participate in and fight for change. The elites’ power to control the national debate has been eroded, making them long for the “good old days.”   They feel threatened and that’s a good thing…

The right-roots are taking credit for the Scott Brown victory in MA. In Sunday’s Washington Post, two GOP online consultants argue that being out of power has allowed the rightroots to leapfrog over the established GOP leadership. Here are a few of their key claims: 

• Previously rightroots strategists were laughed out of high-level campaign meetings, told that online budgets are the first thing to go and informed that having a Facebook page is “unpresidential.” And it wasn’t until recently that people stopped asking techies to fix their computers.

• Being out-of-power nurtures online organizing: It’s not as though GOP organizers woke up last fall and realized they’d better learn to use this Internet thing. [Repubs] are out of power — and the party out of power has the stronger incentive to innovate. If it doesn’t, the base will. Netroots protests dragged the Democratic Party into the 21st century kicking and screaming in 2006 and 2008. Frustrated with the president and health-care reform, the conservative “tea party” movement has done the same for the Republicans in the past year.

• It’s not that the GOP is any less capable of using technology than the Democrats are. It was just that during the years that the netroots really took off — 2004 to 2008 — Republicans were not angry enough (or desperate enough) to use all the weapons in their arsenal. A single, unifying outrage, like the Democrats’ opposition to the Iraq war and to President George W. Bush, was missing.

• The Internet isn’t a line item in a campaign budget anymore. It’s not just something you have to pay for, underneath catering and radio ads. It has reorganized the way Americans do everything — including elect their leaders. Candidates who would have had no chance before the Internet can now overcome huge odds, with the people they energize serving as the backbone of their campaign.

• These forces all came together in the MA Senate special election. Scott Brown’s supporters became fans of the candidate on Facebook, where they commented on his status updates and uploaded their own photos. The Republican Senate hopeful took to Twitter, using the #masen hashtag to let his followers know how the race was going. His campaign powered its field operation through targeted online ads and Web-based spreadsheets, and raised $12 million from 157,000 individual donations in the last two weeks of the race. After he won last week, his team live-streamed the election-night party in Boston online.

The right roots think that their party seems finally to be catching up online — just in time for 2010 and 2012.

The community using the tool monitors Sidewiki entries by voting up comments that are useful and informative, and voting down irrelevant or unhelpful posts. Similarly, the community can flag any illegal, pornographic or copyrighted content by using the “Report Abuse” button.

For those at the grassroots, Sidewiki allows us to directly comment on corporations and politicians’ websites that block user comments.  It opens up a new space for discussion and debate. And of course, it also gives the other side the same new powers…

Many of us use various forms of direct action in our fights for social justice. And like social movements the world over — such as in Iran, Egypt, Moldova and South Africa–many of us have begun to rely on Twitter to communicate with each other at large protests and other varieties of CD actions (think of the folks in LA that were using Twitter to warn immigrant workers of impending ICE raids). Well, according to a recent report in the Guardian, we should be worried: A New York activist was recently arrested by the FBI and charged with using Twitter to help demonstrators evade Pittsburgh police.

This case of Twitter activism and the government’s response is laden with irony. According to post on the Progressive Exchange Listserve, the arrest is:

Most striking because just a couple of months ago Twitter prided itself on being used by protesters to  evade police repression  — in Iran. Democracy Now did an interview with Elliot Madison and his lawyer yesterday.  When the host said they were the first activists to have been charged with crimes for use of Twitter to monitor police activity at protests, Elliot responded: “We’re not the first. We’re the first in this country. During the Twitter revolution going on in Iran, in Moldova, in Guatemala, in the earlier newscast about Honduras, in all those cases, repressive governments have arrested folks for using Twitter.

The only difference is, in all those cases the State Department, the US State Department, has condemned the arrest of these Twitter activists and had gone so far in the Iranian situation, the State Department, according to an article, asked Twitter to postpone its regular maintenance so as not to interfere with Iranian protesters to be able to send out their tweets. So the only difference is we’re the first arrested here. But this is a—over the past two years, repressive governments have been arresting people. The only difference is, the State Department has supported—I’m expecting the State Department will come out and support us also.”

This news proves that we need to be increasingly conscious of the implications of using public social networks as we fight for social change. Two of the most obvious issues we need to think through when we are planning protest activity are:

• Government officials are now actively monitoring our social networks. According to the Guardian:  “Twitter has rapidly established itself as an important tool in the armory of protest groups and demonstrators. During the summit, the police openly monitored Twitter to listen in to the protesters’ communications.”
• These tools are owned and operated by corporations: Twitter, the corporation, is aiding the police in their efforts to track down activists acting within their constitutional rights to protest.  In the Pittsburg case, Twitter provided information on the Twitter users’ locations so the police could go after them.

According to the findings of a new report by the Pew Charitable Trust, despite claims to the contrary, “the internet is not changing the fundamental socio-economic character of civic engagement in America. When it comes to online activities such as contributing money, contacting a government official or signing an online petition, the wealthy and well-educated continue to lead the way.”  Here are the some of the report’s other highlights:

• Those who use blogs and social networking sites as an outlet for civic engagement are far more active in traditional realms of political and nonpolitical participation than are other internet users…We found that 33% of internet users had a profile on a social networking site and that 31% of these social network members had engaged in activities with a civic or political focus…on a social networking site.  That works out to 10% of all internet users who have used a social networking site for some sort of political or civic engagement…[J]ust under one in five internet users (19%) have posted material about political or social issues or a used a social networking site for some form of civic or political engagement.
• The internet is now part of the fabric of everyday civic life. Half of those who are involved in a political or community group communicate with other group members using digital tools such as email or group websites.
• Those who make political donations are more likely to use the internet to make their contributions than are those who make charitable donations; however, large political donations are much less likely to be made online than are large charitable donations.