You’d better believe it, says Matthew Robson, a 15-year-old British lad whose paper on how young people devour media is being read by online marketers around the world. Robson wrote the report, How Teenagers Consume Media, while on a two week summer internship at Morgan Stanley.
After reading the young Brit’s report, most of the information is obvious: Kids don’t read newspapers, boys play video games, and no one uses the yellow pages anymore. But his comments about Twitter are what are making headlines.
In his own words:
Facebook is popular as one can interact with friends on a wide scale. On the other hand, teenagers do not use twitter. Most have signed up to the service, but then just leave it as they realise that they are not going to update it (mostly because texting twitter uses up credit, and they would rather text friends with that credit). In addition, they realise that no one is viewing their profile, so their ‘tweets’ are pointless.
Coincidentally, I just left a fascinating panel discussion put on by Campus Progress in which blogger Latoya Peterson touched on this very thing: The under-21 crowd just isn’t into Twitter. But, she explained, people 23-35 are really into it. Go figure.
And if you think you’re not old, you’re fooling yourself. (But I’m only 23! you say) To a 15-year-old, you may as well be knocking on death’s door.
Despite how relevant the boy’s comments are, they do leave us with a few questions to chew on: Is Twitter really the future? Is this kid just not with the times? Maybe he’ll grow into it? Has this child turned our world upside-down?
Discuss.
