The world seems all a titter that teens don’t use Twitter

Was the whiz-kid correct? Two teens give opposing views

Teens spurning Twitter was one of the bombshells from 15-year-old Matthew Robson that the media highlighted in a report he wrote for investment bank Morgan Stanley.

However, it wasn’t really breaking news that teens don’t use Twitter.

• Last November, the Pew Internet and American Life Project found the median age of Twitter users in the US was 31, higher than 26 for Facebook and 27 for MySpace.
• In April, web metrics firm comScore reported that the majority of Twitter’s 10m or so users were over 35.
• In June, comScore reported that 11.3% of visitors to Twitter.com in the U.S. are ages 12-17. Internationally, only 4.4% of visitors were younger then 18, according to comScore data from May.
• In June, Pace University said that while 99% of 18-24 year olds have profiles on social networks, only 22% use Twitter.

In a battle of the teen prognosticators, 16-year-old Daniel Brusilovsky, writing on TechCrunch says that teens don’t use Twitter because it’s a completely open network and anyone can see your status updates. Teens prefer the privacy of closed networks such as Facebook. Brusilovsky said it makes teens feel “unsafe”.

It’s probably more about teens wanting to establish a privacy perimeter from the prying eyes of adults rather than a safety issue.

That’s not entirely true. Twitter users can protect their updates so only followers they approve can follow their updates.

Also, as David Meyer points out on ZDNet, Robson only referred to updating Twitter via SMS. However, as Meyer points out, Twitter is now used mostly via a range of desktop applications and internet apps on smartphones. Also, up until recently Twitter was MIA in the UK via SMS because Twitter and the carriers couldn’t reach an agreement on pricing.

A number of bloggers, including my wife Suw, took Morgan Stanley and the media to task for mistaking anecdotes from a 15-year-old for hard data.

Suw wrote:

Neither Morgan Stanley nor the media seem to be able to tell the difference between anecdote and data. This “research note” is more note than research, and it should not be taken to be representative of all teens. A teenager in a rural setting, or in an inner city estate, or one who feels socially excluded from web culture will have a very different experience than a teen who’s well-connected enough to get himself an internship at Morgan Stanley.

Beyond criticising Robson’s methodology, there is something more interesting going on here. As comScore’s Sarah Radwanick pointed out, as technology becomes more common, teens and college students aren’t the only people in the population that can be considered “technologically inclined”. She said:

…trends are much more prone to take off in older age segments than they used to.

It challenges the idea that the youth are the only people who are “digital natives”. Charlie Beckett, director of journalism thinktank POLIS at the London School of Economics, challenges the whole idea of the digital native:

As Matthew Robson describes, most teenagers use a variety of digital devices, but when you talk to people who work with teenagers they describe a much more complex picture of what they actually do.

The same teenagers who have literacy problems have media literacy problems. Many of the teenagers apparently comfortable with new media are in fact only using a very limited range of applications and in a very limited way.

Other researchers indicate that teenagers are getting just as frustrated as the rest of us with the complexity and cost of many online and mobile applications.