The Rise Of The Status Update & How Teen Communication Is Evolving Online
- February 4th, 2010
- 5 Comments
The Pew Internet & American Life Project just released a slew of updated statistics about how teens and young adults are using the web (and mobile). The headline that’s getting picked up from this research is the decline in teen “blogging,” i.e. “14% of online teens now say they blog, down from 28% of teen internet users in 2006.” I’m not sure if the researchers used the word “blog” when they asked this question, but most teens I speak don’t really embrace “blog” as a term for continuing their offline conversations with friends online, which is what most teens have previously used LiveJournals or MySpace journals to do. “Blogs” are more dedicated personal journals or topical sites, which your average super busy teen doesn’t have time to keep regularly updated. So while the research found teens commenting less on their friend’s “blogs,” my guess is that this has simply shifted to commenting on status updates or “walls.”
What I found interesting about this research is how teens are sending less private messages and group messages or bulletins on social networking sites. My theory is that social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook are becoming more of a place to share status updates with all of your friends (and maybe the world depending on a teen’s privacy settings) and less “the new email.” The rise of texting since ‘06 with this population has made sending group texts or communicating with friends via text or IM on a phone a much more gratifying form of instant communication than sending a private message on Facebook or a MySpace bulletin.
The non-shocker (to us at least) was that teens are really not tweeting, though more young adults are. The teens who are on Twitter? High school girls, most likely following some celeb, musician or other pop culture phenomenon (i.e. Twilight or Miley before she signed off). When you look at the decline in blogging for young adults, you have to wonder if the shift has really been to Twitter in addition to mobile SNS status updates (and soon to services like Foursquare). Not sure if the researchers included short form “blogs” like Tumblr in that question to young adults either, but the reality is that being able to post a photo, quote or just a few words has probably overtaken the traditional blog for busy youth in general.
[...] read for anyone working with or parenting youth.Over at Ypulse, Anastasia Goodstein has a helpful post in response, discussing alternative ways to interpret what’s going on in shifting communication [...]
[...] The Rise Of The Status Update & How Teen Communication Is Evolving Online (ypulse.com) [...]
[...] using social media. It’s packed with interesting statistics — and Anastasia Goodwin at YPulse summarized some of the most interesting findings from the Gen Y lens. From our perspective at [...]
[...] long and short of young adults & social media As we posted lat week, The Pew Internet & American Life Project report on Young Adults & Social Media [...]
[...] finds less teens creating and maintaining blogs. Some of this might be due to the factors Anastasia noted earlier, as well as the growing numbers of collaborative creative platforms like Figment.com [...]