Standing in a line at the bank yesterday (I know, I know. Standing in a line at a bank is so 2G), I overheard two African Americans talking about Facebook and Twitter. One individual was a female apparently in her late 60s; the other a male in his mid-forties. They were sharing their observations about young people were so connected to and buy these two social networks.

What struck me was their conclusion that today’s technology was a sign of the end of times. I rarely discuss religion, but the discussion raised the issue in my mind as to whether religious views may be hindering adoption?

The bank conversation harkened me back to a sermon delivered in my hometown church back around 1979 where the pastor, a man I have the most utmost respect, love, and admiration for, made a similar comment about a satellite that was expected to crash in Australia. In a rare moment of bravery (given that my favorite cartoon hero is Courage the Cowardly Dog, my acts of bravery are rare), I raised my hand in the middle of the sermon and told him that he was wrong. I said it was not the end of the world and briefly explained the science behind it.

Since I’m writing this post, it’s obvious that I lived to tell the tale. Seriously though, if a certain segment of our community is taking a fatalistic view toward technology, won’t that make the technology harder to adopt?

According to The Wall Street Journal, Twitter is valued at $3.7 billion. The social network hasn’t generated a profit and is trying to incorporate advertising into its business model.

Interesting. So how is Twitter going to convince me to review an advertisement from Coca Cola? If Coca Cola starts “following” me, I can block them.

With only 8% of Internet consumers using Twitter, and the potential of Facebook, Google, Linkedin, or Yahoo! to leverage their communities with a Twitter-like product, I would think that Twitter would want to move quickly from collecting cash from venture capitalists and meager fees from Google, and market their base product more aggressively.

Besides, they’ll also have to factor in the Obama administration’s privacy office initiative. The administration wants to eventually draft rules that would require content aggregators to disclose how they collect commercial information on its users and how they intend to use it.

Should the administration be successful in getting these rules on the books, privacy regulation will become an unfamiliar maze that Twitter will have to navigate.

Like any service available for purchase, consumers need to see value before spending any hard earned cash, especially in this economic downturn.

Is the Internet a waste of time? It depends on how you are using it. For designers, artists, publishers, the media, etc., it’s a tool that can help get a message out to the world (and I mean the whole world) in seconds. On the demand side, consumers have to want to hear it and believe that the Internet is the best place to receive it.

When it comes to information consumption, believe it or not, the Internet does have a lot of competition. After dropping my son off to school, I decided to listen to a news radio station. By the time I’d gotten home, I had enough, refusing to turn on even the news on cable television. For a person who lives and dies by up-to-date information, refusing to listen to anymore news is enough to get me kicked out of the pundit club.

Consumers who have not jumped on the Internet bandwagon may be telling us more about the Internet than the people who use it. They maybe saying that we are not interested or find it to be a waste of time because even after twenty years since the first web page, the Internet still hasn’t crossed the line into a utility; a credible, viable tool for life.

I would argue that the Internet is getting closer to that line as the online experience has become more social with the advent of Facebook and Twitter. These social media services have tapped into the most basic of human elements, the need for contact. It’s no wonder Facebook has 500 million users and climbing worldwide.

We’re always surrounded by news. The human element is the one that is most elusive yet brings the most value. When the Internet continues tapping into that characteristic, then maybe we’ll see fewer non-subscribers.

Damian Kulash of the musical group, OK Go, recently shared his thoughts via The Washington Post on net neutrality. He joined the bandwagon of open network proponents that call broadband access communications and a civil right.

Are we really using the Internet to communicate in the way that communications is regulated by the Federal Communications Commission? Yes, we post our thoughts on Facebook and Twitter. We write blogs on everything from politics to grandma’s cookie recipe. We e-mail each other about business meetings and the feelings we have for a lover at the office. But currently, under the law, none of this is the communications that the FCC and its sister regulatory agencies on the state level regulates.

The communications that the FCC should be concerned about is the instantaneous, two-way communications that we employ via radio and telephone. The communications that the FCC should be concerned about is not the accessing of information posted on an electronic bulletin board for someone to access at their leisure. Rather, communications between a mother and the fire department that not only exchanges information immediately but also will call for some immediate action is at the center of communications that the FCC should be regulating.

Ask any fireman or cop in New York on 11 September 2001 what they would have considered to be true communications and they would have told you a telephone. E-mail just would not have cut it that day. Even if Facebook and Twitter were around in 2001, no public safety officer in their right mind would have considered those platforms as communications.

Broadband access services provide you access to information. These services provide you access to digital product, but to call them communications is a stretch. An example would be a grocery store. You enter the store via a door, but walking through the door is not communications. You look around the store and check out the items. The communications occurs when you instantaneously exchange your ideas about the products in the store with your friends and family. Merely walking into the store doesn‘t communicate anything.

What also has me concerned is this civil rights comparison. I have too much respect for my ancestors who fought, bled, and died for the right to access certain public accommodations and to enjoy the same privileges to vote as whites to liken their experience to a bunch of little electrons moving through space, whether on a wire or not.

Give me a break. Civil rights for bits of electronic data? it’s a sad commentary on our society when we equate the government’s abridgement of the right to access public accommodations with a private company’s business judgment regarding the management of networks that are not considered public accommodations. Broadband access providers are not common carriers. Any reading of the law within the context of civil rights would lead you to that conclusion.

The irony of the discussion is that with all the unimpeded access we have to information, why are we being willfully ignorant about what the law says? Why are we not studying the civil rights law and understanding what it really means before launching off into baseless comparisons?

Instead of screaming about civil rights, maybe we should be exercising our duty to be fully informed.