The federal government, you may have noticed, really believes these days in making its websites mobile-device friendly and is big into social media. This isn't a bad thing, but it is perhaps an opportune moment to examine who this really benefits.

The answer is the young and the educated--in other words, a populace likely to be the least vulnerable among us, and therefore probably the least in need of government help or contact.

I draw my conclusion based on a new poll by the Pew Research Center, which contacted 1,001 U.S. adults over the telephone March 25-April 14. The Pew results for the United States have a margin of error of 4 percentage points.

The poll finds that that 80 percent of Internet users aged 18-29 use social networking, while 62 percent of those aged 30-49 do and only 26 percent of those aged 50 and above do so.

Internet users with at least a college degree are also more likely to use online social networking, Pew says, finding that within the United States a 16 percentage point gap in social networking usage according to education attainment. Forty five percent of American Internet users without a college degree use social media, while 61 percent of those with a degree do so, according to the poll.

When it comes to cellular-device usage, an age- and education-rift also appears in the polling data. Within the United States, 73 percent of 18-29 year olds with a mobile device use it to connect to the Internet, while 49 percent of those aged 30-49 do, and only 21 percent of those aged 50 and above do so.

Similarly, 53 percent of American cell phone owners with a college degree go online with it, while only 39 percent without a college degree do so.

In moving aggressively to be social-media friendly and to construct mobile platforms for its web devices, in other words, the federal government has greatly favored a particular segment of the populace--and as I noted earlier, one that's generally the least in need of governmental assistance.

That's not to say the government shouldn't do these things. But it is time to question whether the resources expended on doing so are wisely spent to the extent that they are, and whether more traditional methods of communication need shoring up.

Are there over-burdened call centers that could use additional personnel? Could existing websites meant for loading on a personal computer be improved, thereby expanding the government's presence in cyberspace but ensuring that the expansion is felt by all Internet users, rather than the subset who possess smart devices? (Almost all those connecting to the Internet via a mobile device also have Internet access via a personal computer.) Could the much vaunted data transparency that the government has promised be enacted in a better way, thus leaving much of the decisions about consumer platform to the private sector? The answers, I believe, are all "yes." - Dave