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.
Here is a copy
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!
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
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" :-)
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.
...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?
The issue you notice is simple. If anyone above the age of 20 wrote this report, he or she would be viewed as "old" or "not with it" and the report would be dismissed as sour grapes or get off my lawn or some such thing. Oh, but wait, we have a 15 year old telling us this? Shit, that's the demographic this is supposed to work on! Oh man, now we better listen. And suddenly, overnight, it's okay to doubt Twitter's power out loud. Amazing.
The news here is that it took the voice of an innocent to wake up business men looking for the next marketing scam to pull on young people. "MySpace didn't work for marketing, maybe this Twitter thing will work? Never mind that I think it's stupid, I don't want to out myself as technologically inept and reveal I don't even use e-mail. No, we must avoid our inadequacies instead of addressing them." That's basically what's at work, very much like The Emperor's New Clothes (see my post above).
My work here is dung.
Murphry's Law explodes!
And yuo mananged to misspeel "Muphry's". Bravo!
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...