Luke Alexander's blog

A fantastic piece of non-news reported widely today was Pear Analytics’ report which claimed that around forty percent of content on Twitter is ‘pointless babble’.  A scientific definition if ever I heard one, and one already enthusiastically adopted by the Twitter community in the time-honoured fashion.

The report, which inspired headlines truly worthy of The Onion, also somewhat scornfully pointed out that almost as many tweets were ‘conversational’.  Ignoring for a second the relatively small sample size and the selective US work-day only timings, this in itself is interesting.  One of the benefits of microblogging media like Twitter is that it is fundamentally conversational, designed with replies and mentions built-in.

Many have already reacted to the report, and – in the UK – to Janet Street-Porter’s comically superficial analysis of the service.  Of these, the majority offer good rebuttals and analyses of the issue – and I won’t spend any time defending Twitter.  Indeed, even these responses often go too far in over-stating the importance of the service, which I am confident will in a relatively short period evolve into a distributed, potentially open source, system with multiple ‘suppliers’ (more on this another day, perhaps).

One point which did interest me in its persistence, however, is the ‘fact’ that teenagers don’t use Twitter.

Some important caveats even at this stage.  Firstly, teenagers’ use of Twitter is extremely difficult to analyse, particularly across different territories, and actual evidence is scarce, comprised mostly of a single Nielsen survey which lumps teenagers in the 2-24 age group and anecdotal reports like the (again, Onion-inspired) Morgan Stanley report written by a 15 year old.

Secondly, as pointed out in this excellent response (along with plenty of other good points) the results actually show that the proportion of different ages on Twitter is closer to real-life population splits than we would normally expect from online media, not some wholehearted back-turning by under 19s.

And of course, thirdly, there is the question of whether we should care if teenagers use Twitter anyway.  My first reaction on seeing the news was that Twitter had somehow ensured an early maturity: much like usenet and IRC in the 90s, where the relative complexity of the medium tended towards a slightly older community than modern social networks like facebook.  That the service’s popularity is increasing so rapidly despite the apparent absence of teenagers makes it more interesting as a phenomenon, not less, and certainly doesn’t devalue its worth.

But even if we ignore these points, and assume that the most extreme case is correct and that teens and tweets don’t mix, I wonder if this is the start of evidence of a generation shift in internet use.  Those who are currently 13-19 are quite possibly the first generation for whom use of the internet is completely normal, in the sense that TV use and widespread availability of telecoms is for my own generation (say, 21-29 year olds).

To this generation, what is the value in being an early adopter?  Most of my contemporaries remember having to configure IRQs and DMAs explicitly just to play a computer game, and a time when they would run multiple searchs on AltaVista and Yahoo to get a decent crop of results, before Google.  The difficulty of using these computer systems (and the relative simplicity of the hardware and software at the time) effectively made early adoption the only option in many situations.

A culture of experimentation and community learning lies at the heart of the open source movement, of peer to peer file distribution, of ‘hacker’ culture, all of which have led directly to the majority of the software platforms we use today.  Aside from professionals or academics, many of those with the time and energy to contribute were young people: teenagers playing with the box in the corner of the room their parents were too scared to do much with, or students procrastinating between essays and lab work.

I certainly owe any technical ability and experience I possess to this phenomenon.  Do current teenagers gain anything from such experimentation?  I honestly don’t know – but if not, this might suggest why we would start to see new channels (particularly those which are arguably less user-friendly than facebook et al) receive less attention from this age group.