Slashdot Mirror
Analyst, 15, Creates Storm After Trashing Twitter
Barence writes "A 15-year-old schoolboy has become an overnight sensation after writing a report on teenagers' media habits for analysts Morgan Stanley. Intern Matthew Robson was asked to write a report about his friends' use of technology during his work experience stint with the firm's media analysts. The report was so good the firm decided to publish it, and it generated 'five or six' times more interest than Morgan Stanley's regular reports. The schoolboy poured scorn on Twitter, claiming that teenagers 'realize that no one is viewing their profile, so their tweets are pointless.' He also claimed games consoles are replacing mobile phones as the way to chat with friends."
The schoolboy poured scorn on Twitter, claiming that teenagers "realize that no one is viewing their profile, so their tweets are pointless".
Sounds familiar:
So now the Emperor walked under his high canopy in the midst of the procession, through the streets of his capital; and all the people standing by, and those at the windows, cried out, "Oh! How beautiful are our Emperor's new clothes! What a magnificent train there is to the mantle; and how gracefully the scarf hangs!" in short, no one would allow that he could not see these much-admired clothes; because, in doing so, he would have declared himself either a simpleton or unfit for his office. Certainly, none of the Emperor's various suits, had ever made so great an impression, as these invisible ones.
"But the Emperor has nothing at all on!" said a little child.
"Listen to the voice of innocence!" exclaimed his father; and what the child had said was whispered from one to another.
"But he has nothing at all on!" at last cried out all the people. The Emperor was vexed, for he knew that the people were right; but he thought the procession must go on now! And the lords of the bedchamber took greater pains than ever, to appear holding up a train, although, in reality, there was no train to hold.
My work here is dung.
From the article: Morgan Stanley points out that Robson's assessment of the media landscape doesn't have the statistical rigour of its regular reports.
-- $G
Texting is hard! http://gizmodo.com/5312623/teenager-falls-into-open-manhole-while-texting
User interviews still considered useful
If a 15-year-old "analyst" writes one of the most "clearest and most thought-provoking insights" for your publication, that says a lot more about your publication (and the state of American journalism) than the 15-year-old in question.
Why don't we ask him to write about homework ("a near-epidemic in America") early bedtimes ("a gross violation of the constitution") and girls ("icky!") while we're at it?
Fucking embarrassing.
Maybe for 10 year olds, but certainly not for the rest of us.
Caveat Utilitor
I don't see the report linked from TFA. I dont see it on the linked pcpro article either. what exactly is news here? that a 15 yr old wrote something?
fifteen jugglers, five believers
teenagers "realize that no one is viewing their profile, so their tweets are pointless".
Wow. I'm totally floored. I would never have guessed that the vast majority of people, more specifically teenagers, don't care when you tweet you're on Main Street and saw a cute girl. Or, in the case of Gabe, taking a shit.
Guess this is another example where not having an MBA is an asset.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
"Robson also had bad news for the mobile phone operators, claiming that games consoles have become a more attractive medium for chatting to friends than their phones. "
Yes I'm sure a 15 year old would rather chat with his friends in Halo than on a Cell phone but it doesn't change the fact that Cell phones are still what the rest of the world uses to communicate, last I checked you can't pocket a PS3, and even if you pull the DS card, it then becomes just a GSM transceiver away from being a cell phone.
"The 15-year-old poured scorn on social-networking site of the moment, Twitter, claiming that teenagers don't use it because "they realise that no one is viewing their profile, so their tweets are pointless"."
Absolute bollocks, teenagers don't use twitter because THEY CANT AFFORD MOBILE PLANS FOR THE VOLUME OF MESSAGES IT TAKES TO KEEP IN TOUCH WITH EVERYTHING BECAUSE THEY DON'T HAVE FUCKING JOBS. Also you cant completely trash the appearance of your profile and put a really bad post-punk emo song somewhere hard to turn off that auto-plays on load.
I'd like to see his actual writing. But I would not invest in a company who listens to a 15 year old's tirade with no basis in fact or logic.
And I thought me being 15 and reading /. was geeky.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
...there have been numerous articles written on the lameness of waste of bandwidth that twitter is and they get shot down as anti-pop babble. Yet a 15 year old kid writes a dismissive and somewhat rambling "analytical" report saying that twitter is lame and a waste of time and all of a sudden he's a genius with social insight in to media tools?
Tools meaning things people use to communicate, like telephones (yes, they still have those). Not tools meaning the talking heads like the ones the reported on the 15 year old's report.
Once I read this report I tossed out my iphone and blackberry. I now walk around with the convenience of a xbox 360 and Playstation 3 strapped on each side of my hip. I also attach an atari 2600 to my chest for legacy situations.
Me: 1 Technology: 0
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
Here is the report
I once had a signature.
It's a facet of human nature that people tend to assume that others think and behave broadly the same way they do. Like the techs in the recent Gnome 3.0 posts arguing that everyone intuitively understands what icons, links, files and folders mean on a computer (tell that to my dad, who just barely knows how to click the "internet" icon and browse simple websites), or political activists who assume that their oppositions must see the world the same way they do, so they're just lying. Heck, there's the whole "internet community" who read a pile of overlapping sites (/., techcrunch, digg, boingboing, etc) and assume that the rest of the internet does too, so that a survey of those sites (legalise cannabis, allow torrents, etc) represents the views and priorities of everyone else. They forget e.g. the big rings of craft websites whose members have probably never heard of 4chan and digg, much less read them, not to mention the many more people who simply don't go on social websites beyond facebook.
It's just the echo chamber effect. A teenager knows that this is how he and his friends use technology, so he assumes it's true for everyone else. So the report might be an interesting insight into how he thinks, but totally useless for anyone who wants an actual profile of his age group.
Sounds like Morgan Stanley feels that this point is so blatantly obvious that it even by delivering it via a virtual nobody from the demographic that twitter is supposed to be the most popular with wouldn't dilute the truth.
However, while I think twitter is pretty boring myself you do have to admit -- if you're a 15 year old kid writing research reports for Morgan Stanley odds are you don't have the pulse of social networking trends.
Otherwise, the kid has it on the nose. Not that that's a surprise; it's just that he seems to be the only person with the courage to come out and say it.
I piss off bigots.
Has anyone actually found the damn report? As another pointed out, google search is so polluted with 2nd and 3rd hand accounts that googling the report is singulary unrevealing (or perhaps more accurately: multiplicatively unrevealing). Unlike other snarky comments here, I wouldn't be surprised if this kid's observations weren't dead on. I'm unsurprised twitter is considered passe, I'm unsurprised that teenagers are finding better ways to chat than SMS messages pecked out on a cell phone number pad, and I'm unsurprised that teenagers are abandoning television and print media as primary information sources, given how often those expensive and slow media forms have been shown to be inaccurate, overtly deceptive, and (worst of all for a young person) utterly out of touch with the zeitgeist of the moment.
About the only surprise in the captions is that young people are using gaming consoles more than other media for chatting, but that may be down to me not being a gamer. In any event, I'd like to read the report before passing judgement, and particularly befor joining the jaded, knee-jerk reaction of "the kid's clueless, we shouldn't listen" mantra that seems to have become so common on slashdot (and makes us all sound like cranky old men, even more out of touch with the world's current trends than the Old Media).
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
If a 15-year-old "analyst" writes one of the most "clearest and most thought-provoking insights" for your publication, that says a lot more about your publication (and the state of American journalism) than the 15-year-old in question.
What it says is that most people working in "business" are disconnected from reality and produce nothing of value.
The only real problem is that some moron let this kid inside to see the Slurm factory and now he knows.
Hilarious as this may be, a single 15-year old's experience cannot possibly speak to the entire experience of people and media today. FAIL.
@acehole Never thought of strapping the atari to myself, but I think I'm going to follow suit.
so what? it happend before and it will happen again: media hype, marketing hysteria etc. and then a child comes along and states the obvious: the emperor has no clothes on. Every politician tries to be hip and use twitter - but the void in their heads can not be turned into wisdom. and using a volatile medium like tweets does not help either.
I just had this discussion with my wife over the weekend, but in our case we were talking mainly about Facebook and not Twitter, but the same principal applies. My take is that I like the concept of being able to keep in touch with friends and family easily, but the implementation of facebook, myspace, twitter, and sms messaging leaves a lot to be desired. Facebook and myspace allow other people to post things which you may or may not want posted about you, and it keeps those postings for a certain amount of time (# of posts). Yes, you can delete them, but that's not the point. If there was damage, it's already done. Twitter is completely abused by people posting things about going to the store or going to a movie. Who really cares about that except stalkers or people who need to live vicariously through other more exciting people? I see the point for texting/sms, but I can't stand hearing about people that constantly text their friends. If you need to have a conversation with someone with multiple questions and answers, then it's a lot quicker (and cheaper) to call them. It's only quicker to text if it's a single message with a single response. Yes, I'm very technologically literate - I have worked in the computer networking hardware industry for ten years. But the implementation and addictiveness to many people of these four services is really bad. I know a few people who use these services solely for posting pictures and stories for family and good friends - I definitely get that.
For the flip side - my wife uses facebook quite a bit and likes getting updates from people she probably wouldn't call and talk to. Also enjoys looking at pictures when someone posts them. I get that - I just don't get the constant attention it requires. I look at her page, and see 3-4 updates from some of her friends on a daily basis, and we're not talking high school or college kids here. And half of them are lame attempts at introspective comments like - "can't wait to go drinking", "feeling lonely", "two days until the weekend", "my life is like xxx song lyric", etc. She agreed with me about that stuff, but it seems like most of our joint friends enjoy posting comments like that. As for twitter, she equated it to instant messaging. Definitely not the same thing because it's kept forever and isn't a two way conversation.
I'm not starting flames. I just don't understand why so many people are so addicted to these computer based types of social networks when to an outsiders perspective many of the posts seem either phony or useless. There have to be other people out there that agree with me, or that can come up with rational reasons as to why I'm wrong.
Seriously, this kid sounds like he must have no friends or social life. I mean I personally think that Twitter is one of the most ridiculous concepts imaginable and a site with horrible stability, but it has its place. I mean it is helping in places like Iran and Eastern Asia. Twitter is one thing, but a 15 year old who is trashing video game consoles saying they are replacing cell phones? How long has this kid had a cell phone to begin with that the game consoles are replacing them? None the less I don't think a game console is going to replace a cell phone, most people like the idea of the phone evolving from a backpack, I don't foresee that coming back. Of course this child only being 15 wouldn't remember that cell phones were that big at one point. This kid needs to go out and play with some kids his age and enjoy his childhood instead of hanging with Morgan Stanley analyst. If he doesn't by the time he is 40 it will be like the movie Falling Down.
Just because you are wrong and I called you out on it doesn't mean I am a Troll.
And World of Warcraft is becoming one very big IRC chat room, with casual topics.
I can't believe an editor let that report pass. "Near impossible", ">4", "1/3 of teenagers have... 50% having ... 40% with", and "Some teenagers make purchases on the internet but this is only used by a small percentage", to name a few. There's punctuation errors, capitalization mistakes, poor abbreviation, and subject-verb agreement problems. One sentence, leading a paragraph, begins with a numeral. This report is an unreadable mess; the poor phraseology and numerous mistakes draw attention from whatever point the little moron is trying to make.
A game console is used in one particular room and is tethered by wires. They have no buttons or dials, but in would be possible to swing a Wii controller in a circular "cranking" motion to log on. Someone should patent this!
Business people reading a 15-year-old's commentary on what teenagers think about products aimed at teenagers? Is this really a new concept?
Wait, if this catches on, maybe next they'll ask programmers what they think about technology projects in the workplace?!
Adidas To Bring Back Sneakernet
Some musician said - a while back - that if you're not into music videos, you should relax. It doesn't mean that you're anti-culture, it just means you're not 14 years old. The obvious implication being that videos were (are?) largely created for the entertainment of teens rather than adults.
Twitter is clearly a powerful communication tool - witness its use in Iran recently. But it's not particularly aimed at teens, and I struggle to see much that it offers teens that they can't get elsewhere, while at the same time the features that makes Twitter powerful to some constituencies have no value to teens.
So I see the report as being accurate, but not necessarily having significant insight (except for those who haven't thought much about Twitter and are wondering if/when it will become the next Big Thing with the teen market).
This only has relevance because it agrees with existing opinions that have no way to be expressed. Think of "The Emperor's New Clothes", in which everyone has a thought, but anyone who expresses that thought will be ostracized (executed in the orignial story, but ostracism is the nonlethal modern alternative). Just think of a New York Times journalist who came out and said twitter was crap and people who use twitter are self-absorbed idiots who shouldn't be trusted with the fourth estate's reponsibility to safeguard democracy. His opinions would be attacked and discarded faster the Joe the Plumber.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
In other news, the Pope tweets that he's thinking of becoming a catholic, and bear posts "took a sh*t in the woods" as facebook status.
My 21 year old brother chats with his friends through his game console... my 30+ year old neighbor does the same.
What do they have in common? They like playing games and they're both guys. I wouldn't expect my neighbors wife or the 16 year old girl down the street to fire up the PS3 or XBOX to chat with her girlfriends though why that's any different than using MySpace or Facebook as a chat board I couldn't tell you.... only that the girls want to be able to chat ALL THE TIME - so that cellphone isn't going anywhere.
Twitter as social networking for teens IS a fad. They're all fads for teens. As a micro-blogging tool OTOH, those teens who have a use for it will continue to use it, the rest will get too busy with the next thing that comes along or maybe just bars, parties, getting laid, etc. Twitter could still be used to broadcast where the hot bar is, or the next party and it could get you laid as a rexult - so teens/20somes will keep using it for that if nothing else.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
How does one get to be an intern at an organization at M-S at age 15?
ps--kid's right, twitter is dumb
Ooh, ooh!
35 year old men don't play golf. I mean, I'm 35 and I know a few 35 year olds, and none of us play golf.
Shower gratitude on me for my unique insight. Better sell all your shares in the golf industry.
dear /.
I feel that it is important to report market information that I have assembled.
Based on a survey of the people I'm living with, Ubuntu has a 25% market share of the laptop market.
None of my friends own an iPhone, so I assure you that it is a dead market space, MMOs fall into the same category.
On average, there is only one care for six people with driver's licenses.
Wii has 100% of the market share.
All teenage girls love anime and The Lion King.
In terms of popularity, 4 out of 5 of my roommates wanted a joint memorial for Billy Mays and Michael Jackson.
Everyone I know hates MySpace. I mean everyone. Its a really stupid facebook. The only people who use it are retarded. Surveys report that people are more willing to twitter than use MySpace, which is quite shocking considering previous reports.
All of these reports are held to the highest standards of statistical accuracy and truthfulness. It has the statistical rigour usual to all of my reports.
I would say, yes, those people are indeed that superficial.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I wonder if this is how Cringely got started.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Looks like after a decade or so, the "analysts" and "consultants" have finally come around to doing the math on the famous "15 minutes of fame" for everybody.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Maybe someone has already posted it but I couldn't find it, after Googling here's what I found: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/media/5817515/Teenager-causes-City-sensation-with-research-on-media-report-in-full.html
Life is about being a Phoenix!
Perhaps I am one of the few people in the world without a FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter, Digg, or any other social networking site in my pocket, with my fingers just itching to tell the world all about me.
My question is: "Who cares?" Twitter especially... I don't care what you are doing at this very moment. If it were worth me hearing about, I have a perfectly good AIM/MSN/Email/Phone. Give me a call, tell me about it. Everyone is concerned about "big brother," and then willingly contribute their "tweets" for the world.
Whatever happened to actually interacting with friends, and not "tweeting that you are tweeting?" I would just like to point out that this is barring the great job it is doing for Iranians in their political push... THAT is good.
Something witty.
1 nude MMS of the 15 year-old chick who sits next to you in class is more than worth 140 characters of anal-retentive self-promoting status alerts.
Does anyone else get that a teenager is obviously going to use a PS3 or 360 because that's what his parents bought him?
I hate twitter as much as the next guy, but other things "passe" to a fifteen year old might include:
showing up on time
white tennis shoes
working outside
The Beatles
playing actual instruments instead of the ones with Rock Band
So, if I wanted to market a product - like a smartphone - to teenagers, I'd probably read his report with a little interest. And then I'd remember that he's not old enough to sign a contract to get one in the first place, and couldn't afford $100 a month anyway. So I'm glad he wrote a report, but let me ask the most significant question that has escaped the great minds at Morgan Stanley We-Fucked-The-Goat-When-It-Came-To-Recognizing-The-Real-Estate-Bubble: who gives a shit?
I didn't understand when I was his age, but I do now. And that is, get a job and an apartment - without mommy and daddy's help - and then we'll talk. By the way, my youngest sister, who's still a teenager, types on her non-smart phone all the time, and so do all her friends, even when they are playing video games. Why? Because it works, they don't have to be at a computer or a game console, and since their parents have somewhat of a clue, it's free with an extra $10 a month on their cell bill.
Analyst, 15, Creates Storm After Trashing Twitter ... First he hacks a social networking site, then he creates his own hazardous weather? Look out, Doctor Horrible.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The thing is, you're not wrong. You SHOULD be, but society is learning that you're actually not. I've read it elsewhere, too - the people that you have 'lost touch with' aren't suddenly better/more interesting/more worthwhile people because of the internet. MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and whatever's coming next all sell a service based on a non-product. We're not supposed to know that it is a non-product, because it is supposed to be a valuable service. The premise, however is flawed. "No one cares about my tweets," is insurmountable and cannot be solved via technology. Not even Web 3.0 will change the basics of humanity.
Once a majority of people find that their Facebook accounts are more of a negative than a positive, Facebook will have a hard time staying in business.
Thus the controversy. Not so much what this kid said, but the gap between what was promised and what actually gets delivered. The kid is just a vessel.
i don't Twitter or have a Facebook page. I do have a Myspace page for my music, but i visit it maybe once or twice every 2 weeks to automatically allow all friends, reply to the odd mail message and delete spam. so i don't have much of an addiction to social networking. MY big addiction is reading /. comments! i should be working right now!! i'm sure others are in the same boat, ammarite??
stop being so interesting/informative/insightful/funny!
If you actually read the report, you'll see that he and his friends are mainly concerned with cost. Twitter is not used because sending a text message to twitter costs money, and, since nobody reads their profiles anyway, it's better to send the message to friends directly. The rest of the report is on the same theme: teenagers don't want to spend any money. This is certainly not a new trend; when I was in high school, my allowance was certainly inadequate to subscribe to expensive services, buy computer games, or expensive gadgets. I don't see why anyone is surprized that this is all still true today.
twttr suxz0rz l0lz
cu l8tr
What is clear from reading the report is that ANYWHERE that money is required, especially in terms of a CONSTANT FLOW of money (subscription or annual fees, etc), Teens don't partake. Teens don't have a steady income, and therefore don't pay any form of utility. The point about having features on their phones like email was interesting, but again it's a matter of money and the fact that teens don't communicate with the people that are most important to them via email. They have no corporate structure mandating teenage protocols, like you do in the workforce. The exception is console gaming, but I believe this is because console games are often gifts from parents, or an item that requires a single payment up front, but then not much further investment. Also console games can be easily shared between other teens. One gets the game, plays it, and then hands it off to a friend. Again keeping expenses to a minimum. Consoles with internet access are probably gaining popularity because parents are generally still unaware of them, and even if they know of it, it keeps the teen in a known location. Additionally, they don't pay for the internet, since it is on the family network. I enjoyed the honesty of the report. Though I do think he avoided discussion of a use of the internet that teens probably don't talk about but what cause most parents a lot of wariness: namely, pornography.
http://www.beanleafpress.com
No-one looks at my twitter profile so I post here to slashdot. Take that 15 year old!!
Consoles are in no way replacing mobile phones. This particular kid evidently has a 360/PS3, and is extrapolating his personal experiences vis-a-vis COD/Halo, to everyone else on earth. The average female (of any age) does not own either console, and the average male (above the age of 18), may own one (inversely correlated with age), but probably spends very little time using it to chat.
Is it at all possible to read this report as opposed to a report about the report?
Great, so this kid
is telling these rats what other kids do so
they can use psychology against these
kids.
If they cared about kids
they would stop marketting to them like
they do.
KIDS: These guys don't care about you.
They are money whores and you should not trust them.
They will tell you to get degrees in science and engienering
so you can be their slaves.
Meanwhile their children study psychology and operant conditioning
to make you dance like trained monkeys.
Don't help these bastards. Keep your secrets secret.
I was sexually active at age 15, and masturbated much more than I do now.
I thought *all* market analysis was done by 15 year olds, except when they look at Apple products. Then they use the 12 year old.
you believe that crap about twitter helping in Iran?
I was watching the talking monkeys on the news channel who
kept trying to get Iranians to say this but
the Iranians were like 'no'. The
newsreaders must have been told to ask
this by their handlers. Shameful marketting
while real people are being killed.
Micro blogging has been around since
the early days of the Internet
Twitter is being heavily marketted by
the usual suspects. If you believe their
press-releases and their marketting
then you are a fool.
Twitter is for twits. It will not survive.
People who give away lists of their friends
to corporate money whores are fools.
You can do your own site with very short amount
of work and all of your stuff with be yours and not theirs.
I never heard of twitter before January. Blogging, I heard about
that ten years ago. All twitter is: A corporation that is branding blogging.
Facebook, Myspace: same thing. You are making a mistake if you
use these as you no longer have control over your data. The soviets
took lists like these and started killing people in the 1920's.
Let's hope that doesn't happen but . . . the same forces are at work today.
Depending on what you choose to tweet about (notice I used that verb without quotes...not sure why), writing down your daily thoughts is hardly pointless. I realize many people think Twitter is about putting yourself in front of other people but it doesn't have to be. Consider it a diary that you don't mind people reading.
Excuse me while I tweet about by /. post.
Dear god, is that crossing the streams?
"I just had this conversation with my wife! I was all like, I don't like chocolate ice cream, and she's all like, I have these friends who aren't kids and they DO like chocolate ice cream, and I'm like: Oh snap! What would possess a person to like chocolate ice cream when I, a respected member of the ice cream community, do not? The only explanation is that people with different tastes than me are either less intelligent or less mature than me."
The problem is that you're treating people's personal tastes in communication and entertainment in terms of logic (don't forget that FB, twitter, etc. serve an entertainment purpose). Your mistake- and maybe I'm wrong, who knows- is that you think that if two people are smart enough and mature enough, they'll eventually come to agree on things (everything?). You remind me of an older gent that I work with who harangues the guys in the shop who play WoW for "not achieving anything" while he spends his weekends putzing around on a motorcycle or fishing.
Different strokes.
-b
No offense, but I've stopped responding to AC's.
How is this any different from any other "expert" pulledouttamyass-study and "my opinion is fact" essays? I mean, aside of him being actually IN the group being studied, thus at least being true for at least ONE person in the group?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Twitter sucks!
No Brains, No Headaches
Sigh - more analyst wranglers who don't understand that all things technical and social don't automatically sit in the domain of the 15yr old male. I see very few 15year olds on Twitter - I doubt that most can form a coherent thought in 140 characters. The typical 15yr old sends thousands of SMS's a month containing very little content. On Twitter I see adults of all ages engaging in some pretty entertaining, succinct and pithy thoughts.
Seriously I'd just as soon get insights on fine wine selections from a 15 yr old.
How quickly we forget.
#iranelection
#neda
#Iran
I mean I'm all for verbally lashing young whipper snappers, but the report in question does not seem to be available from the site. All we have is some paraphrased version of the report that doesn't really make a great deal of sense. I don't think think that anyone would claim the xbox or ps3 is overtaking the cell phone for "messaging". Surely these comments came with some sort of bounds.
What it says is that most people working in "business" are disconnected from reality and produce nothing of value.
What it says is that most analysts do not speak frankly.
Here's the actual report:
http://media.ft.com/cms/c3852b2e-6f9a-11de-bfc5-00144feabdc0.pdf
You can immediately see that there is no equivocation.
The kid laws out his opinion as fact and offers zero proof to support his assertions.
Directories
Teenagers never use real directories (hard copy catalogues
such as yellow pages). This is because real directories contain
listings for builders and florists, which are services that
teenagers do not require. They also do not use services such
as 118 118 because it is quite expensive and they can get the
information for free on the internet, simply by typing it into
Google.
I'm not sure why this is so earth shaking.
Any market research firm could quiz a group of kids in order to find out the
exact same answers and provide the statistics to back up their conclusions.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
All it does is facilitate communication. People have always talked about you without you knowing it. Facebook just makes you more aware that they're doing it. As always, social etiquette will adjust slightly around it and we'll carry on just fine.
I mean, I remember when caller ID started to come in and callers would feel mildly freaked by the person answering the phone addressing them directly, without having to go through the till-then-normal procedure of identification at the start of the call. It disrupted one of those little rituals we're all more dependent on than we realise. Now we all just take it in our stride.
Similarly, you'll get used to seeing your friends talking about you, and they'll get used to the idea that they're exposing your activities to a lot of people's attention, and will probably become more discreet.
= Who the Fuck Cares - twittering twatterers are almost entirely useless. They are more wound up in their non-importance than bloggers and that is saying something.
Twitter barely has a profile feature. Sounds more like the kid was clueless about Twitter.
I do agree about the exodus from mainstream media. I opened a coffee shop and have discovered the hard way how litigious copyright companies like ASCAP and BMI are strangling the music industry for amateurs. Few can afford to fork over thousands a year for the privilege of having Open Mic nights. So now I wholeheartedly support the Creative Commons music movement: www.jamendo.com
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
...someone else who finally gets the point that Twitter is stupid.
10 FILL MUG WITH COFFEE
20 DRINK COFFEE
30 GOTO 10
Aside from the portability aspect. ~1.3 billion mobile phone sales anually across the globe - compared to ~100m over a few years for 2.5 / 3G consoles.
If you need to have a conversation with someone with multiple questions and answers, then it's a lot quicker (and cheaper) to call them. It's only quicker to text if it's a single message with a single response.
Meh... Text messages, like e-mail, allow you to "fire and forget" so that you can be doing something else at the same time. You can respond at your leisure, unlike a phone conversation which takes complete attention or at least a large part of it. Consider that it's possible to have 4 or 5 text message conversations at the same time whereas the same would be impossible with the phone.
Overall I agree with you. I think people spend way too much time with this stuff but some of your recommendations are wrong.
"they realise that no one is viewing their profile, so their tweets are pointless". As a steady twitter user - well, duh. You have to actually CONVERSE with people to form friendships there - it's not about creating a profile for others to view. But more to the point - I find it fascinating that Morgan Stanley - and the world for that matter, seems to find the observations of a 15-year-old so relevant. Not that I've got anything against 15-year-olds - I've got a kid of my own. But between facebook, myspace and twitter, I've got hundreds of friends that I actually know in one way or the other - and less than 10 are teens. This is the case for most of the people I know. Why are these observations sparking such a "storm"?
I used to think it was just my ex who misused this expression, but it seems to be everywhere these days.
The media had a field day with this article.
Newspapers were the medium of choice back in their heyday, before television news became popular.
Heyday refers to the time when something was especially popular or prevalent. A field day is what you have when you're able to enjoy something tremendously for a short time.
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Seriously, I write detailed analysis with "get off of my lawn" style criticisms of social networking sites, Web 2.0, Twitter, video games, music, etc, and yet the only "fame" I ever get is thousands of "FUCK YOU, YOUR WRONG!" comments...
He does have a point about a younger generation communicating through video games. I, personally, feel that many remote business meetings that currently use cell phone "bridges" would be infinitely ameriliorated by use of Ventrilo server, or a similar service. I mean, if you've ever had to join a bridge and sit for hours with your phone on speaker, running to the phone to un mute it, etc. it's a huge PITA. The sound quality is much better as well. Just my 2 cents.
I live in India and 90% of 15 year olds don't access the internet. They wouldn't even know Microsoft or Google, forget twitter. i and technically literate and i write a blog sometimes, but i still don't get it, why should i text tweets or update my status every few hours? twitter is just a big bubble waiting to burst when people realize its fun no more
If nobody is reading your tweets, then they fail due to one or more of the following:
1) You aren't saying anything worth reading
2) You don't know how to use retweet (RT) to publish replies to people you are following so that people can read them if they search for that person's @profilename
3) You don't participate in any hashtag groups
I'm guessing #1 is the worst problem, since teenagers usually have nothing to say that someone else hasn't already said in a more clever or amusing way, and then #2 and #3 are probably tied.
The mainstream media are parasites who try to monetize anything. They're going to fail at that with respect to twitter, because frankly twitter sucks for that purpose.
What twitter really is, though, is basically a giant 24-hour chat room filled exclusively with people you actually care to chat with. The RPG blogging community, for example, is quite active on twitter discussing things with each other, sharing links with each other, etc. And it really is a discussion-- people read each others' tweets, respond to them, useful ideas are created, evolved and exchanged.
The MSM sees a bunch of people and sees dollar signs... The problem with that idea is that you have to voluntarily elect to follow someone, so no one who's actually reading tweets is going to sign themselves up for a bunch of spam.
>I just don't understand why so many people are so addicted to these computer based types of social networks when to an outsiders perspective many of the posts seem either phony or useless.
Quick bit of pop psych, just from reading your post: you're basically an introvert. If you don't have anything to say, you don't say anything, because for you silence beats mindless conversation. She and her friends are extroverts. If they don't have anything to say, they say something to try and get a conversationg going, because for them, any conversation is more interesting than silence.
People who would rather think than talk stare at twitter and facebook and think they're pretty much incomprehensible, but that's because they have different premises for their social interaction patterns.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
analog is a combination of two poo words...just saying
I'm guessing that there are a lot of people that don't like twitter, for whatever reason. Maybe because they are this big VC company that has no business model. Maybe because the site seems to be the hip thing right now, and you despise anything that is considered hip. But really, you have no solid reason to despise it... yet you do.
So along comes a kid who gives you some reasons that he believes twitter will fail. And HAZZA! you now can feel like your distrust of twitter is well-founded because he agrees with you. Even though this is just one kid's opinion you give it more weight because it makes you feel good about your own position.
Title: How Teenagers Consume Media
http://media.ft.com/cms/c3852b2e-6f9a-11de-bfc5-00144feabdc0.pdf (That's the website of the Financial Times in case you were not sure.)
I would have considered "Impressions and preferences concerning media of one 15 year old boy growing up in the UK (London)" as an appropriate subtitle for the report.
Read the Financial Times article (the one that PCPro.co.uk refers to) here:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/035e83fe-6f18-11de-9109-00144feabdc0.html
Twitter and the vast majority of social networking communication is void of what sorely needed today
1) truth
2) meaning
3) language that conveys the 1st 2
Be it Facebook, MySpace but mostly Twitter, there is more communication but less is said and rarely, really understood universally. Its mostly inside and compartmentalized conversation of which was born of other meaningless interaction.
This is Gen N, for NARCISSCISM, as if anyone gives a rats ass what you think.
Twitter just proves what "Media Hype" can accomplish but that will only go so far.
Reach out and really touch someone, make a fucking phone call or better yet, get some face time, you witless twits!
Your mention of ad-hoc networks reminded me of the XO I got on the BO-GO program a couple of years back. Compared to the variations on wi-fi w/ Linux/OSX/Windows I've played with, the XO could *really* haul in the connections, finding hot-spots and meshes I had no idea existed near my place. I don't know how h/w dependent the OLPC Mesh/wi-fi modules are.
A nice Paranoid Linux option would be to spoof the MAC addr. After getting all encrypted and proxied up, a final and truly paranoid (and PITA to implement) feature would try to mimic the idiosyncrasies of various networking stacks.
Luke, help me take this mask off
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I like the implementation of LiveJournal - settings to easily make material non-public, and it avoids all of the Facebook confusion about who is broadcasting what information about you and who can see it.
I look at her page, and see 3-4 updates from some of her friends on a daily basis, and we're not talking high school or college kids here. And half of them are lame attempts at introspective comments like - "can't wait to go drinking", "feeling lonely", "two days until the weekend", "my life is like xxx song lyric", etc.
I think this is a particular problem with Facebook, as it encourages people to type in whatever random thing they're doing or feeling write now. So it means that the feed is mostly boring, and anything important gets lost in the noise. LiveJournal is meant as a blog/journal, so people are more likely to write something worthwhile, every single time they post (and if you have a friend who still writes crap all the time, well, don't read them).
(It's not all bad though, I think Facebook does do organising "Events" better - as the information gets tagged separate, as well as being emailed to you.)
And I love SMS because I hate talking on phones. Also it has the advantage that you don't both need to be there and ready to take a call. You could probably say the same thing about email, "it's quicker to phone them", but email has its advantages, and some people simply prefer it to phones.
I just don't understand why so many people are so addicted to these computer based types of social networks when to an outsiders perspective many of the posts seem either phony or useless.
I bet conversation snippets between you and a friend chatting to a pub are completely phony or useless if heard by a complete stranger. Same with most phone calls, come to that. And how do you think a random selection of Slashdot comments would look to an outsider?
My 10 yr old daughter communicates with her friends using her DS or a llama sim website or a virtual penguin community, depending on which is most convenient at the time - all are free of charge. If necessary she uses the phone - which is not. Youngsters are not as hidebound as oldsters, and will simply use the most suitable tool for the job - ie the cheapest system their friends are likely to be on the other end of. Twitter seems best suited to celebrities of the sort who hold court at parties in order to hear their own voices. Not of much interest to the average Teen who just wants to chat to his mates, I suspect.
just like to bitch, or trying to make yourself seem better by putting other people down.
Just like to bitch, or slagging off other things? He should write a report for Morgan Stanley...
Or maybe she might learn something. Teenagers do that all the time, even though many of them would hate to admit it.
Perhaps she had better die, and decrease the surplus population? Seriously, Scrooge, there is an important difference between "some idiot needs to learn to watch where she's going" and "someone kill this idiot".
I've never really hopped on board the Twitter is the next big thing bandwagon myself. To me, it's just a new version of IM with an open API and a couple new features. Of course, IM has never been a big deal to me either, since my "oooh,ahhh!" real-time chat stage finished in the '80s with VAX/VMS phone and UN*X talk.
That said, I do have a Twitter account, and see it as having some good uses beyond following the blather of some celebrity. For me, it's a news feed (Sun, DeveloperWorks, new publications, etc); it's a way to be an active participant in a conference--whether it's 1000 miles away (like last Friday's Crunchup), or going on around me (like a BarCamp); or to advertise my current personal projects and blog entries.
The biggest hype I have for Twitter is that it's perfect for conference participation and conversation material for Q&A panels.
I don't know abot 15 year olds, but in the group of 20-30 year olds around me, it's MSN, Skype, Ventrillo, TeamSpeak and forums that are used for communication. Everyone has a headset nowadays and talks to friends while doing something else on the computer. They don't want to type and then read what others wrote. I think I spend 10+ hours a week behind a computer talking to friends while doing other things.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
My best friends send me letters in the post.
I piss off bigots.
Didn't everyone already know Twitter was a joke to eat up time + bandwidth? I mean, what is the point of publishing your personal life to the net for trolls and anon's to read? If you really want to throw away your privacy or your mysterious lifestyle, just open up your spam folder and start responding to the spammers with legitimate data.
I think you're actually right. That's exactly what I was looking for. I'm never going to get it because even though I'm only 30 and have lived and breathed tech for my whole life, I have no desire to talk to people without actually having something useful to talk about. As they said on a certain chick flick "That's not exactly a soup question".
I'll never call myself a true introvert - there were plenty of those at my college. Typical computer nerd style, and my friends and I were definitely not like them. But, your point is valid. I don't go out of my way to talk to people I have no reason to talk to right then.
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People keep saying that this article doesn't apply to the whole age group and how dare he assume he knows anything about anything outside his friends. Ok. I read the article and it's pretty fucking on target. I am in the sameish age group and I live on the other side of the world and the only thing that differs from California's middle class teen are the specific services and websites he says he uses.