As I continued on my travels through the world of Loopt, I figured it was important to see the demographics of Loopt users. As estimated why quantcast.com loopt attracts an average of around 7,400 new users a month. Of these new users- 57% are male with 43% being female. The most popular ages of use were 35-49 year olds, second only to the 49% use of 18-34 year olds. It was most common among Caucasions.
This being said, it also was noted that Loopt has extensive privacy policies that attempt to prohibit the use of the program with with kids under the age of 14. C-Net journalist, Kevin Ho, commented in “The Loopt app: A Loopy Privacy Dilema” “to me it is not necessarily the third-parties I’d be concerned about, but would disclosing your location to first-parties, i.e. your friends and family, be the best thing?” I think this brought up a great point. When we engage in these activities that compromise our privacy, not only do we put ourselves in danger, we compromise our image with our family, friends, and collegues. If your family was able to track your every movement and see which neighborhood you were in and when- itd be creepy! Think of how many relationships would be over after their girlfriends or boyfriends found out they were cheating.
And likewise- I think Loopt is generally confined to bigger cities. Not only are cities the places with the highest concentration of i-phone and blackberry users, it is relatively easy to navigate within a city. In a rural area, loopt would be useless since everything is so spread out. I think this also plays into the idea of instant gratification. People in urban areas are more accustomed to the idea of instant gratification since everything is at our fingertips. If we want pizza, we can walk to the corner and get it. If we want to go to a bar, we can walk downstairs to a bar. Live music- no problem. Hooking up- now your cell phone can help you get that after a few minutes!
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2 Comments
Your last point–that Loopt functions in metropolitan areas because we already have a cultural expectation for instant gratification–is interesting in the discussion about the relationship between the ‘real’ world and the digital ‘world.’
I keep noticing that the digital world mirrors the landscape of the physical world, and that digital mirror actually magnifies & intensifies the realities of the physical world. Do you think that demographic (middle age, metropolitan, white, male) is becoming increasingly expectant of instant gratification, because of technology like Loopt?
I agree that Loopt would be pretty difficult to use with success in a rural area and that Loopt does indeed feed into the “mindset” than people in cities have. I don’t know if this instant gratification was what the creators of Loopt had in mind exactly but it does sound as though they wanted it to be a way to track people. When it comes down to it people may want to know where their friends are but does that mean they really want their friends to know where they are 24/7?
Also on another note, when you tried out Loopt in for your own experiment did you find any individuals who were not looking for the “instant gratification” and actually wanted some form of friendship?