One of things that strikes me about the scholarly approach to the Internet -- in particular when it comes to democratic theory concerns, but other things as well -- is the tendency to ignore casual, mass use in favor of focusing on uses that relate to political communication, mobilization or participation in some way but that tend to involve only a certain segment of the Internet population. This is nothing new, to be sure -- lots of early networked communication/virtual space scholarship centered on the construction on new identities unlinked to one's physical self -- changing genders most often, but changing anything else as well. This doesn't appear to be something that's really panned out now that the Internet actually exists and is well populated. Some people do it, sure, but they're few and what they do online doesn't tell us much about how people in general use the Internet.

My point is that given the huge changes in the technology and demography of the Internet over the past ten years or so, we actually don't understand very well how people use the Internet, and we don't spend much time trying to find out. Rather than studying casual, mainstream users -- if only to have some idea of what the baseline is -- we talk about blogging, or mash-ups, or homemade political ads on YouTube, or social tagging, or Second Life, etc. Among younger users these things are much more common uses than they are among older users, of course, though it's hardly a straight-up correlation, but they're not exactly widespread in any age group. (It should be noted that within the group that is using these things, we often ignore what the Second Life people call "griefers," or at least naively assume there is some rationale behind their behavior other than adolescent misanthropy.)

So let's assume that five million Americans are doing any given one of these activities somewhat regularly -- often enough that they're not just trying it out, but are actually using it. That's probably too high (the well-publicized "One Million Strong for Barack" Facebook group has just over 300,000 members at the moment), but for the sake of argument, let's say something has five million users. That's about 2.5% of the adult population in America, and probably 3.5% of the adult Internet user population. Let's say that across all these tools and sites that are so interesting in scholars, there are ten million people using at least one of them. That leaves over 90% of online Americans being largely unstudied, perhaps using the Internet for news, perhaps wary of "Web 2.0" tools for one reason or another, but largely unaffiliated with what so many scholars see as a revolution of social politics. While there is certainly something important in examining how people on the cutting edge are using the Internet, it's a mistake both to assume that the things they are doing will filter down to the rest of the online population eventually and to assume that the mass of vanilla users have nothing to tell us about how people interact through networks.