A Teenager’s View on Social Media

This. I mean, I can understand obsessing about the teen / YA demographic if that's who you're selling to, but the idea that what they do represents some ground-shaking historical shift, and not just a (fairly well-understood) phase in normal human lives is just ridiculous.

For me, one of the most interesting things about this piece was the total bafflement with Twitter. Not that they didn't like it, they just didn't get it. At the same time, concerns about professional life were largely restricted to "Who will be the first to hire me and will my social life be used against me?"

In other words, the way that a lot of Twitter users treat the service as a huge and never-ending professional conference (with frequent flurries from actual conferences) is totally lost on people too young to have reached this stage in their working lives.

My takeaway from this is not "Kids don't use Twitter, Twitter must be doomed". It's that Twitter is for grownups (mostly), and that it's normal for people to age out of some networks and into others, just like they age into and out of music, cars, clothes, jobs, neighborhoods, and pretty much every other aspect of cultural life.

Just shows how shrewd Zuck was in acquiring Instagram.

This post is exactly in line with what I see my daughter and her peers doing.

For teenagers in Europe, WhatsApp is #1. As FB is used by their parents and grandparents, it got uncool.

But recently Snapchat is heading to get #1 as now their parents are using WhatsApp too.

The same happened with MySpace. FB is like the late MySpace, everyone is on it, mainly some late adopters still regularly post new baby & cat pics - the difference is FB might be too big to fail, and can innovate or buy new services (Instagram, WhatsApp).

Okay, I'm 22, that's not much older than this guy. I know a lot of 18 and 19 year olds. How does it look to me?

Facebook: most people use this primarily, but about 1 in 5 people does not because they object to pervasive surveillance/got frustrated by the newsfeed reordering/dislike Zuckerburg personally/are just asocial. Facebook Messenger is the main way of communicating with people who have it. You also use it to communicate with people who don't have Facebook Messenger by the indirection of using Facebook Messenger to talk to someone who might have their phone number. Instagram: I know a total of maybe two people that use this at all, and they have their content copying to Facebook which is where most people see it I think. Twitter: Not a lot of people use this, with the curious exception of the Facebook objectors, who mostly use this. Snapchat: I know a few people who use Snapchat but I don't think anyone takes it seriously. Of course that's kind of the point. General assumption is that snapchat users are trading dickpics and just not sharing with the rest of us. Tumblr: A lot of people are tumblr users but in sort of a "guilty pleasure" way, you don't discuss it with people you're trying to win the respect of. Perception is that it's mostly [furry]porn and SJWs. Admittedly this is roughly correct. Yik Yak: Took the campus by storm. Most people use it exclusively to either complain about faculty, ineffectively try to find a date, or to make fun of the former two. Openly mocked, but in the way that makes other people install the app just to see what's being joked about, so I guess that's a social strategy. Medium: Maybe a handful of CS majors even know what it is.

Yeah, I go to a small engineering school and my social group is primarily in CS. I'm sure this impacts my experience a lot. This is exactly my point: I think social media/application/etc usage is far too specific to social groups, institutions, and even geographical areas for it to be remotely useful to work off of anecdotes. Here Facebook is absolutely king, but I can imagine a "trendier" population (not Engineering students) might have a certain ire for it. I think Instagram isn't widely used just for lack of having achieved critical mass in this particular student body, there may (and probably will) come a day when that changes.

This is probably part of why "what teens are into" reporting seems so ridiculous. It's based on a shallow look at one group of people, and behavior varies far too much between groups. Broad statistical data would be far more useful for marketing purposes, but the results would still ring hollow for many specific peer groups.

What did you replace it with?