One of my favorite podcasts, ATP, has spent time recently discussing their desire to increase the number of women listening to the show. It's an interesting question, because achieving this means that you need to either capture a greater proportion of the existing female tech audience or try to convert more women outside of the tech audience to an interest in tech. Trying to tip that interest in tech is one of the many reasons I like teaching science. But the hosts sideswiped another demographic interest of mine and moved right along, and it stung.
ATP is often focused on Apple technologies. The discussion usually isn't hostile toward other platforms (and Casey works in the MS stack), but none of the three hosts has much love for Android. In last week's episode, Marco was talking about the difficulty in pleasing everybody and made a crack about Android users. After a chuckle, he mumbled that that was about choice, unlike gender. Marco doesn't seem to care that the Android users he's talking about are disproportionately working-class. For many of them, a choice of a phone involves major price-sensitivity. So here's my question - is ATP a tech podcast for everyone, or just for people who can afford nice things?
We're lucky enough to have Chromebooks in our classrooms, so my students spend part of every day interacting with Chrome and the web. In our high-need school, Android is definitely the dominant platform for my students' phones. I don't see much Verizon and AT&T; I see a lot of MetroPCS and some T-Mobile. Some of my students have WiFi at home, and others have to get their work done via a hotspot from their parents' phones.
Last week, I noticed a student doing something strange - tweeting photos with the tag "ignore these" to use Twitter as storage so she could free up space on her phone. The ATP guys discussed photo storage at length on the podcast and how Apple should solve it on the devices they use. But they're missing how people outside the world of high-end technology are solving these problems. Many of my students have just an iPad or just phones in their house - technology is a big part of their lives, but it's not the 'MacBook + iPad + iPhone' world that the ATP guys live in. High-end technologies provide plenty to discuss, but if you don't worry about the cheaper technologies that half of the population is using, you're never going to understand the kinds of problems they're trying to solve or the solutions they are finding. While ATP is thinking about increasing the gender diversity of their listenership, they should consider increasing its SES diversity as well. And that might require seeing Android as something more than a punchline.
