Why teens don’t use Twitter
“Drinking beers with logicians: One argument on the axiom of choice, another on whether zero exists.”
– @fortnow Tweet, 9:04 PM Feb 19th
Northwestern computer science professor Lance Fortnow posts to Twitter regularly. His @fortnow account updates over 500 followers about his whereabouts, research and beer drinking habits.
“I use twitter for academic stuff, not really for personal or social connections,” Fortnow said. “Anyone can read my twitter so I stick to academic, computer science stuff.”
Fortnow may be one of the few (but rapidly growing), members of the entire Northwestern community to actually use the Post It Note-length blogging site. Last July, the Nielsen Company released a study complete with a simple graph: “Teens Don’t Tweet.” The world — or old people who just didn’t know any better — panicked. In February 2010, Google Ad Planner determined that the average Twitter user is 37. Suddenly, the hip new social media device wasn’t dominated by the young.
“My followers are similar to the Nielsen rating with a mix of students, grad students and older academics,” Fortnow said. “A lot of the students who follow me tend to be in their mid 20s or older. Few children would be interested in my stuff.”
Only a year ago, the Pew Internet and American Life Project released a report on online social networking, citing college-aged adults as the driving force behind rapidly growing sites like Twitter. According to this February 2009 study, Twitter was “most avidly embraced by young adults.”
So where did mainstream media go wrong? In the past decade since social networking exploded and crash-landed onto college campuses, workplaces and rural Indonesia, teens and young adults have trumpeted new forms of online communication. Older people not used to this whole “double-u, double-u, double-u” thing, including major media outlets, have learned to automatically look to us for guidance. When Twitter first entered our vocabulary, they just assumed that younger people pioneered it, like everything else. We suddenly got the credit, good or bad, for something many of us knew nothing about.
“The average college student who’s not looking to promote themselves is not using Twitter,” says Medill freshman Alex Rudansky. “Unless you have something to market, like a brand, or some kind of content that you produce, there’s really no other practical use for it.”
Rudansky has had Twitter for over a year but has never posted a tweet. She originally signed up to promote articles she wrote, but never ended up using it.
Fortnow doesn’t use Twitter to follow friends but to gather information and stay up to date with his colleagues’ research. “I don’t follow my students because they don’t tend to be on twitter as much,” he said. “I follow professors, companies such as Google, organizations I deal with, fellow academics.”
For students, micro-blogging just doesn’t seem to have an appeal. Stripped of the ability to post multiple pictures, favorite quotes and become a fan of “I hate when you’re trying to make a speech and Kanye interrupts you” and 247 other pages, many of us don’t know what to do with just 140 characters.
“I don’t really see the point,” said McCormick sophomore Adam Evans. “I have a Facebook. If I really want to let people know what I’m doing I’ll just put it as my status.”
College kids and older adults alike have embraced Facebook’s status updates as a component to the site’s experience as a whole.
“As there is with any social media, there’s a level of vanity,” Medill senior Elaine Williams said. “You want to look good to everyone who’s going to see this.”
Williams has been on Twitter since her sophomore year of college. Back when it was just she and her friends, Twitter was a quick, easy way to keep in touch with “followers” with whom she had relationships with offline. Now, as a journalism major, her main reason for being on Twitter is to follow news outlets like the New York Times and Romanesko to instantly know what’s going on in the world and to keep abreast of current events.
But she still follows celebrities like Lady Gaga, and businesses like Whole Foods.
“They always tell me what sales they have and what sort of samples they’re having this week,” Williams said. “Apparently today they had challah bread.”
Used to its full potential, Twitter is a powerful resource for immediate diffusion of news and information. A 140-character cap guarantees brevity for the reader’s sake and automatic readership for the person or organization tweeting. But without the support of our generation, it’s all for naught.
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Twitter is kinda like Google Buzz. See why. Or you can return home.
Nice article. Don’t really understand understand the conclusion though. Al for naught? Isn’t the point here that Twitter’s doing just fine without you?
Peter Jacobson
March 6, 2010 at 8:00 am
I’m a teen (15 to be exact) and I’m a hardcore Twitter user (20+ tweets per day). I’m a minority in Twitter and I have long been aware of it (all you really have to do is click on a trending topic to figure it out). I have only three other teen friends who tweet regularly and another three who tweeted only because I encouraged them to give it a try. The latter three didn’t get the point and, like many of my classmates, responded by saying Twitter was “useless.”
To that I respond that a tool is only as good as its user. I don’t mean to go against my own kind but most teenagers usually don’t have much else to say other than the social updates they already give on Facebook. I do. I have a lot to say and it rages from observations to commentary to introspection to what I did to what I think others should see. As one of my friends and fellow twitterer wrote in one of our snail mail correspondences, my Twitter is “an addendum to my working mind”.
What I twitter is very intimate, though not set as private, and I would find it very impossible to post the same things on Facebook. For one, 20+ updates a day on Faceboo would get you unfriended. Another inhibitor would be that although I don’t have my account set to private (because a lot of my content is globally relevant and I often tweet minute by minute reactions to major events like The State of the Union address or the Olympics), I wouldn’t want everyone I know to see it automatically. They could, if they looked for it or clicked on the link I have in my Facebook. Facebook is limiting also because you only update to your social circle whereas in Twitter you are updating to the world.
Unlike most of my age group, I find Twitter to be extremely useful. Its myriad uses, beyond all that you can do with the “post-it length” updates, range from keeping you aware of global news (in a way nothing else does) to directing you to similar thinkers (my preference being creative/innovative/active people who redirect my thoughts to what I wouldn’t have found otherwise) to getting a total stranger’s opinion on an idea to seeing who else is out there, outside your social circle, and what they’re thinking. Twitter is amazing and I can’t get over that. My only explanation for why most other teenagers don’t use Twitter is because they don’t care for what else it can offer and they aren’t perhaps developed or substances enough to use it without being bored by their own updates (I’ve seen the extent of the potential banality of one such teen twitter
Yadira
March 6, 2010 at 11:15 am
I apologize for the spelling error (*Facebook) and the punctuation error at the end, the iTouch keyboard is treacherous and I’ve come to rely on the automatic write-in to my evident doom.
I’m @DecadentQuest on Twitter.
Yadira
March 6, 2010 at 11:28 am
You probably won’t become conservative until you have something to conserve, and you probably won’t tweet until you have content to share that’s relevant to other people.
There are many different groups of people, all using twitter in different ways. For most professionals, it’s a way to keep up with new ideas and changes within one’s industry, a “business to business” tool that helps promote longer content elsewhere on the web.
As teenagers and college students, your life is focused on maintaining your circle of friends, learning about the world, and making new social connections—thus, facebook is the ideal platform for your interests and age group.
That said, there are numerous young people on twitter who actually use the service to _socialize_. Look around on the site and you’ll see just as many young (15-25) people as olds and corporate types who are using the service to connect, meet new people, plan events, and share their lives.
When you are ready for Twitter, Twitter will be ready for you. So for now, stick to foursquare and facebook until you grow up, have kids, lose all your friends (and possibly your hair) and become a shill for the man.
Come on kids, sing along, OK?
Q
March 7, 2010 at 7:06 pm
Yadira,
you’re really nerdy. Come to Northwestern!
PS. Rebecca, super cool article!
Love,
Andrew
Umm
March 12, 2010 at 11:51 am
“Romenesko” not “Romanesko”
L
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Digital Download
April 22, 2010 at 8:13 am