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.
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
...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.
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.
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.
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.
Texting is hard! http://gizmodo.com/5312623/teenager-falls-into-open-manhole-while-texting [gizmodo.com]
I love people that are so utterly self-absorbed and oblivious to their surroundings that they can do something this foolish. Wanna lay odds that when she gets her drivers license in a few years she'll be one of the asshats that flies down the road, cell phone in one hand, make-up in the other, paying absolutely no attention to the road? Then when she gets into an accident she'll say "I never saw it coming!".
I'll get yelled at for saying this but it's a pity she didn't earn herself a Darwin award. Now she's going to breed and pass on her stupidity to the next generation.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
This report is an unreadable mess
If you can only communicate and understand things when presented to you in a very specific structured way, you are the minority. Being thrown off because someone mixed 1 with one means you are either not very flexible, have a reading comprehension problem, just like to bitch, or trying to make yourself seem better by putting other people down. Bottom line is the teen gave his opinion on some topic, you don;t understand or care about the topic, you only care that it is not grammatically correct. Let me guess, if you meet an auto mechanic wearing a suit and tie, you would automatically trust him more than a second mechanic with a dirty pair of coveralls on.
No kidding... It reads as if he's assuming that just because he and his five friends don't use Twitter, it follows that nobody his age uses Twitter. And then he just makes up some random reasons to support his claim. How does he know *why* teenagers don't use it; has he done any research? Or just picked the first thing that flew into his head?
I could have written a report when I was that age saying that no teenager watches NASCAR or soccer because I didn't and most of my friends didn't.
I don't blame the kid for writing this way (he's not old enough to know better), but I find it bizarre that Morgan Stanley would take this seriously.
I always find it annoying when the media or a company takes the say-so of one individual and thinks that one person could possible speak for all teenagers / African-Americans / middle-aged white people / etc...
I am far from a British teenager but it sounds like it was written by an adult playing a teenager.
Also, aren't there polls/surveys to get more quantitative info on teenager media use?
They hardly need one teenager's anecdotal report.
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.
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.
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 left out Twitter and Facebook suckered large numbers of Iranian and Guatemalan young people in to posting anti government rants on them, thinking they were going to overthrow their government with Twitter. Now that's a laugh. It was a stellar part of the Twitter hype to make everyone think Twitter would lead to an instantaneous outbreak of Democracy across the globe. CNN was a leading purveyor of this myth. Since CNN has pretty much ceased to function as a news network all they have left to do is grasp at straws in the form of Twitter, Facebook and iReport. They kind of missed the fact its nearly impossible to verify anything you get from the anonymous public, or to have any confidence in the source. Howard Stern pranks proved this.
Note to wanna be young Iranian rebels, Iran monitors all Internet traffic so using Twitter in the clear provides the Basij with an instantaneous mechanism to identify, arrest and track you and your rabble-rouser friends. Note to all future young wanna be rebels, all your internet activities are probably being watched. Your Twitter and Facebook pages aren't a good place to organize a revolution unless you really know what you are doing. Don't use them unless you are using anonymous WiFi stolen from your neighbor so they get busted instead, or a very good anonymizer like Tor. Try reading Cory Doctorow's Little Brother so you will at least be in the correct mind set for interacting with authoritarian governments who use computers to oppress their people, like Iran, Russia... and the U.S.
"Little Brother" is a somewhat flawed work but at least it teaches paranoia. Note to Linux community, someone really needs to put together Paranoid Linux and XNet with Tor, gnupg, WiFi sniffers, security tools, etc. and make sure computer noobs who want to overthrow their out of control governments have it, and can use it out of the box even if they are noobs.
There is a reason the NSA is building two giant new data centers in Utah and San Antonio and expanding the one in Maryland. They appear to be preparing to spy on a whole lot more communications traffic than they already are. Anyone who think America's bout with Big Brother ended when Obama replaced Bush are sadly mistaken. The Democrats are just as eager to spy on everyone and destroy all our civil liberties as the Cheneyists were.
A burning question of the 21st century is if computers will liberate us or enslave us. The paradoxical answer is they will probably do both at the same time.
@de_machina
just like to bitch, or trying to make yourself seem better by putting other people down.
Oh, one of those, probably. That sounds like me.
It's possible, if you don't mind a hypothetical, that I believe that standardization of language is one of the greatest boons to communication and education that the world has ever devised. The degeneration of language hurts a society's future generations, who will have difficulty comprehending what's written today. I (hypothetically) weep at the thought that our grandchildren will never appreciate the great writers of the past century, because corruption of language will make them as inaccessible as Chaucer or Shakespeare are today.
An argument could also be made that I believe that well-structured and grammatical writing improve the comprehension of readers, and that the ability to write correctly is an important skill to anyone who wishes to communicate with the written word, a belief based on faith in my heart, plus the umpteen-thousand empirical studies that have shown this to be true. That is, poor communication communicates poorly, which in modern America seems to be a shockingly radical position to (hypothetically) take.
Another man might even put forth the idea that heaping praise upon mediocrity is unwise.
But the truth is that I'm just a bit of a dick about it.
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!