Comments on: Second Class Citizens on the social web

By: Unit Structures – Teens Don’t Tweet, or, How to Read a Web Panel

Unit Structures – Teens Don’t Tweet, or, How to Read a Web Panel — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 19:39:53 +0000

[...] Twitter gender study; another study asserted that because only one out of every five teens tweet, that teens don’t use the service (wouldn’t you like one out of every five teens to use your product?). Nielsen joins this [...]

By: Second Class Citizens on the social web « Cyber Presence

Second Class Citizens on the social web « Cyber Presence — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 23:12:59 +0000

[...] by Robert Frittmann on 17 June 2009 In this blog post, Fred Stutzman examines further the issue of whether Twitter has become the hangout of the 20-plus [...]

By: Robert Frittmann

Robert Frittmann — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 13:57:31 +0000

I definitely identify with what you are saying about the older generation “coming out”, as it were, on social networks.

“My basic theory argues that as social norms and personal networks reward non-deceptive identities, people are more likely to share and participate in online communities.”

This is so true. I have been connected to the Internet since the FIDOnet days, I remember Gopher, Archie, and Eudora. But you won’t find much about me online prior to 2009, as I was very protective of my online identity.

I’m keen to be part of your study. Count me in.

By: links for 2009-06-02 « innovations in higher education

links for 2009-06-02 « innovations in higher education — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 03:08:59 +0000

[...] Second class citizens on the social web (tags: socialmedia socialnetworking twitter research science generations millennials) [...]

By: Andrew

Andrew — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 02:14:07 +0000

Great discussion regarding these articles that I’ve also stumbled across. Anecdotally, when I talk with students (under-grad and post-grad) about twitter and social media in general, it seems to start-and-end at Facebook – as least from their perspective (BTW: this might be a New Zealand thing, e.g., Bebo was the most popular SNS here a mere two years ago).

The younger demographic will jump onto Twitter on-
mass when the time is right or not Twitter directly, a service leveraging Twitter data.

BTW: PNM (http://thepmn.org/) stands for the “Participatory *Marketing* Network” so this may or may not explain a few things.

By: fred

fred — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 22:38:27 +0000

@Ishmael – Twitter is a unique case due to its dispersion to various devices and third-party programs. I remember hearing that half of Twitter’s traffic goes to the API server. This is where traditional web tracking panels fall apart on their data analysis of Twitter (unless they do deep packet inspection, which I’m fairly sure they don’t).

@Katrina – It wasn’t my intention to imply that young people can’t be first-class citizens. I’m using the term without baggage (power issues, fields, capital) to put a wrapper around the generic concept that we have certain expectations about who is the “right” user for a software. I’d argue that for most of these technologies with great interpretive flexibility, there isn’t a deterministic “right user.”

@Bertil, you have to share!!! Email me!

By: Bertil Hatt

Bertil Hatt — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 22:22:25 +0000

Well, I’ve been working for the last two months on a very ambitious project arond elderly people and a web community; I think we are still in stealth mode (I’d have to check with the boss) so I won’t be able to tell you much on-line, but I’m the “Chief Innovation Officier” and I was encouraged to have academics explore our (future) data.

By: katrina

katrina — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 21:54:50 +0000

I’m not sure that mobile access points to an age gap – I know many, many iPhone and Blackberry users (as well as other smartphones) who are under 24, the magic number in this case.

I’m additionally wondering why young people can’t be first-class citizens online. Most of society is still disrespectful to younger people and so why is it an issue that part of culture could be skewed toward those who lack, for instance, political power?

By: Robert Morrison

Robert Morrison — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 19:11:06 +0000

I’m right in your target demographic, and at 53 years of age I’m in the top 500 on Twitter in terms of followers, with more than 56,500 as of this writing. So, yeah, I tend to agree with that last paragraph about the older user emerging as the truly first-class citizen on the social web :-) http://twitter.com/praguebob

By: ismael

ismael — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 17:37:07 +0000

Besides what you’ve already said about the different kinds of socialization that imply different levels of saturation of connectivity, I think there’s here an important issue related with hardware.

I’ve no data, but it is my guess that Twitter is accessed through mobile devices on a much greater ratio (compared with all the range of access devices) than most social networking sites.

In other words: I think that many users (especially the most intensive ones) twit through iPhones, Blackberries and 3G smartphones. Which are usually out of (economic) reach for most youngsters.

I’d be waiting for more info of yours in this subject :)

All the best,