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
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.
Here is a copy
...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!
or that the parents will sue because there daughter is a dolt.
Says the one who can't use the proper from of 'their'.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Thing about 10 year olds, they don't stay that way. These kinds of reports are what people and corporations use to plan for the future.
I'm not suggesting that the report is the end-all be-all, but it does hint that maybe what people today are terribly excited about today may not be sustainable.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
The point being that 10-year-olds will be "the rest of us" soon enough.
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.
Says the one who can't use the proper from of 'their'.
Says the one who's sentence doesn't parse.
Says the one who doesn't know when to use "who's" or "whose" :-)
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.
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.
Murphry's Law explodes!
And yuo mananged to misspeel "Muphry's". Bravo!
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 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.
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 love people that are so utterly self-absorbed and oblivious to their surroundings that they can do something this foolish.
Ya know, I'm not sure it's being self-absorbed that's the problem. I know people who just can't multitask, like the old saw about people who can't walk and chew gum at the same time. My grandfather and aunt are/were like this: they just couldn't do two things at once. It wasn't for lack of smarts, either: he was a self-taught organic chemist with a dozen patents, some quite successful, and she's a graphic designer in high demand. But they were/are what you'd call oblivious unless you know them, and then you realize that some people seem to be mentally incapable of rapid task switching even after (in granddad's case) 90 years of trying. My aunt stopped using her cellphone after months of running into doors while trying to talk and walk at the same time, and on the rare occasions where she drives, she says at the beginning of the drive "I cannot talk while I'm driving or I'm likely to have a crash, so please don't talk." She's learned this from experience (and a couple of wrecked cars) after 40 years of trying. Maybe the woman who fell into the manhole just hasn't figured this out about herself yet.
For that matter, I've seen half a dozen guys walk straight into walls or trip over chairs because they were too busy checking out my gf's butt to watch where they were going. Smart people can realize when their priorities have shifted and they're about to do something stupid, but even smart people need some experience to develop the skill to notice when they're about to do something stupid.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.