@Digital Summit: Community Sites = Nightclubs? Credible? Education Napster

The IAMAI Digital Summit was held at the Maurya Sheraton in Delhi on the 18th and 19th of January. Day one started off with Professor Jeffery Cole, Director of the Center for the Digital Future who shared statistics from the ‘Digital Future Report (highlights here, pdf), which didn’t include information from India.
According to Prof. Cole, everyone want to be famous now, and the Internet provides a way to get their ’15 mb of Fame’. The usage of social media has tripled in the last year among the under-18 category. Equating online communities with nightclubs, he said that everyone is going to have difficult time hanging on to users. I don’t think that’s going to happen in India anytime soon, and differentiation will become a factor only communities have comparable traction. However, he said, adult users are sticker, so maybe I’m being self referential. :)
Internet users tend to read more books and more movies, and the teens of today are more interested in the news. Magazines will survive, radio faces a threat from podcasting and most people still prefer to read books offine.
20-25 year olds will never own a landline or read offline newspapers. They’ll watch TV on their own schedule, trust unknown peers online more than experts, will be willing to pay for digital content, and the communities will be at the center of the digital experience. Email will be for old people, and for the youth, IM will be the only way to communicate. 25-54 year olds will read offline newspapers and mags, like the mobile mainly for voice, aggregate info and use RSS.
Pankaj Agarwala, JS, Ministry of Communications and IT spoke about the development of an online p2p network, an ‘Education Napster’ for education, and developing a network that supports teachers so they can help students. Apparently, 2mbps is a great initiative (in spite of the data limits). Content that will be utility based will work.
During the Q&A, questions were repeatedly raised on the issue of credibility of online information. I said that there are those who benefit and profit from being credible, and for them to knowingly mislead readers is hara-kiri. There are enough instances of people being caught out by vigilant readers. I think there will be misinformation, but then – caveat emptor.
Avnish Bajaj, Vice Chairman of IAMAI, who chaired this session said that the demand for content will be great, so producers of content should not worry. The 2004 elections saw online petitions, and the 2009 elections will see greater citizen empowerment online.

Comments have been disabled for this post