The world modelA composite, not a person
Tom
52Leeds
Delivery driver
Short sessions, hard interruptions, and a phone held in a parked van. Almost nothing is designed for him.
At a glance
Online
- Depot breaks
- Saturday morning
Where
- YouTube because football highlights and van tours in the cab at lunch.
- Facebook because the five-a-side league and the family, in that order.
In the field
Reads, never postsEvenings
The day
Tom is paid by the drop, so a break is a decision with a cost. Eleven minutes in a parked van with a sandwich, then back out. He watches with the sound off because the cab door is open and the depot is loud.
Saturday morning is the only unhurried screen time he gets, and it goes to the five-a-side league and whatever his family has posted. He has never commented on anything from a business in his life.
Field notes
What is observable about this kind of audience, and the published work that describes it.
01Sessions end exogenously
His viewing is terminated by work rather than by loss of interest. Where interruption is external, drop-off measures the working day, and reading it as disengagement attributes to the content what belongs to the job.
02Silence is the default state
He has never left a comment, so any engagement rate reports him as absent. Duration and repeat viewing are the only evidence of him that exists at all.
03Two kinds of attention, priced the same
Eleven distracted minutes and one unhurried Saturday hour are treated as equivalent inventory by almost every planning tool, and they are not remotely equivalent to the person spending them.
Who sits nearby
Nearness in the field is behavioural, not geographic. The unnamed individuals around a reference persona are people whose observable behaviour resembles theirs.
References
- Simon, H. A. (1971). Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World. In Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest. Johns Hopkins Press.
- Nielsen, J. (2006). The 90-9-1 Rule for Participation Inequality in Social Media and Online Communities. Nielsen Norman Group.