Over the past few days, I’ve seen a few blog posts referencing various “studies” that claim that young people don’t use Twitter. Apparently, this is a problem.
As reported on CNET, “99 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds have profiles on social networks, only 22 percent use Twitter, according to a new survey from Pace University and the Participatory Media Network.” Never mind that it’s not particularly fair to compare a sector to a single product, what does the study’s methodology look like? More bad news – the question was posed to 200 members of a volunteer panel. A small, convenience sample provides very little inferential power; it is just as likely that this survey’s statistics looked like Pew’s numbers by chance occurrence. However, my main goal here isn’t to rail against small or convenience samples being reported as representative – this is a pervasive problem and there’s not much that Unit Structures can do.
Rather, I’d like to question this problematization of the “fact” that Twitter’s users aren’t young. The inherent bias in media coverage of social software is that social software is for “the young.” If we look at the history of social networking websites, we find mixed evidence to support this theory. For example, danah boyd’s ethnography (and my personal recollection) of Friendster was that it was a place for the late-twenties and thirty-something set. If it weren’t for bonehead moves on behalf of Friendster’s staff, we might still be using the service. LinkedIn, a popular and pervasive social network, has existed with an older skew for years. Facebook’s growth after opening up? It has been primarily dominated by older users.
This is not to say that young people aren’t important. They are the lifeblood of a number of popular social networks, including large communities and countless smaller ones you’ll never hear about. But why do we accept youth adoption as social fact ensuring community success? One reason is surely that young people are trendsetters. However, this theory of “trending” is an artifact of a pre-digital age, in which exclusivity and first-mover capitalization were required in the context of a production cycle. What is a trend in the digital age, if I can have a perfect replica of what the kids have, streamed via cable modem? Another reason is that young people are more connected. There is truth here; young people are disproportionately more connected than older people, but this is also changing.
It might help to think of connectivity in two ways. The first is traditional connectivity – the ability to access the internet. If you look at Pew’s numbers[1], you’ll see that older users are less connected. However, if you cut off the tail of the distribution, and consider users 60 and younger – you still find that 71% of those age 60 or younger have connectivity. Users in their 40’s report connectivity rates in the 80’s, about 10% less than teenagers. For a large segment of users, we actually find that teens aren’t that much more connected.
Lets consider a second notion of connectivity, which is the saturation of your online connections with friends or contacts. Here, teens have old people beat hands down. Teens interact more with their friends online, they manage their lives online – overall, they are more connected to their personal networks through computers. Revisiting our first definition of connectivity, we can see that the explanation for the second definition must be heavily cultural, and not only technical. That is, this high saturation of connectivity is because of norms within younger users, and not just because they’re so much more connected than adults.
So what does this mean for Twitter? If Twitter’s users truly do skew older (and the difference between youngsters ‘18-24′ and oldsters ‘24-35′ was ns in Pew’s study), then Twitter benefits from what I think of as an identity-participation shift. 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. Put another way, as it becomes more OK to share (it stops being weird to use your real name on your Facebook profile), and more of your friends do it, you’re more likely to extend this type of participation to other parts of the web. Notably, the driving force of this theory is simple connectivity, which establishes the preconditions for the social shifts. For Twitter, there is a whole new old generation of web users coming online and embracing social software – because it is now socially OK to do so, because they have the connectivity and connections they need to feel worthwhile sharing, etc. And it just so happens that a lot of these people seem to have found Twitter.
The core problem here is that we’re treating older users as second-class citizens on the social web. I think that Twitter, and Facebook are going to serve as very useful testbeds to bat down this stereotype. In fact, I think we may see the older user emerge as the truly first-class citizen on the social web. As these users tend to be more settled, and going through less transitions that lead to upheval of the personal social networks, they may be more long-time users, less prone to “delete and move on” from one social site to the next. Of course, these ideas need to be tested, and I’m right now embarking on a long-term project to explore questions like these. If you are an older user of social software and might like to participate in my research interviews, keep watching this space for announcements.
[1] Jones, S. and Fox, S. (January 28, 2009). Generations Online in 2009. Pew Internet and American Life Project. Retrieved January 28, 2009 from http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/275/source/rss/report_display.asp.
Fred Stutzman is a doctoral student, researcher and teaching fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science. He studies how people use social media.
