I'm a great big slobbering fan of Choire Sicha and his brainchild, The Awl. Between his Twitter feed, his awesome Awl posts and his daily Awl emails, I can't get any work done: He keeps pointing to all these articles I have to drop everything to read and sites I need to explore and bookmark.
Like this post today about a 15-year-old Matthew Robson, a Morgan Stanely intern in the UK (yep, they start 'em young over there, Oliver Twist–style), who wrote a memo that basically blew all the myths about teen media consumption clear out of the Atlantic.
Among his observations:
• Most teenagers watch television, but usually there are points in the year where they watch more than average.
• Most teenagers are heavily active on a combination of social networking sites. Facebook is the most common, with nearly everyone with an internet connection registered and visiting >4 times a week. Facebook is popular as one can interact with friends on a wide scale. On the other hand, teenagers do not use twitter. Most have signed up to the service, but then just leave it as they realise that they are not going to update it (mostly because texting twitter uses up credit, and they would rather text friends with that credit). In addition, they realise that no one is viewing their profile, so their 'tweets' are pointless.
• Most teenagers enjoy and support viral marketing, as often it creates humorous and interesting content. Teenagers see adverts on websites (pop ups, banner ads) as extremely annoying and pointless, as they have never paid any attention to them and they are portrayed in such a negative light that no one follows them.
Predictably, mediaworld has gone nuts over this. Even better, Matthew's report prompted two he-said, she-said responses that pooh-poohed one or two things, which are equally illuminating—and pretty damn hilarious.
Like this:
...any teenager could tell you that paying for things is unpopular and Facebook has infinite importance over Twitter. After all, the only people that use Twitter are celebrities with nothing else to do and bored old people who think they're connecting with the younger generation. Does anyone care that Miley Cyrus is "eatin' an apple".
And this:
Our generation has become near-on obsessed with soaps ranging from the sickeningly American lives of those in The Hills to the gritty social problems discussed in Skins, girls and boys alike.
British teens are obsessed with our sickeningly American lives! Bless their worn sooty socks.
This, however, is the most insightful perspective on news-consumption habits of any generation I've seen yet:
Robson seems to feel that all teenagers read freesheets. However, he seems to have forgotten that these are only available to those living in towns and cities, leaving the majority of teenagers forced to get their news fix either from the school library, a self bought paper (which, I must agree, are usually tabloids) or may catch the front page story when their parents are reading it. Reading a quality newspaper seems to be a case of nurture and varies with each family's political persuasion and perception of the mass media, rather than be a case of not having the time to do so.
None of these pronouncements is exactly earth-shattering, of course. But with isn't it refreshing to hear them from actual members of this obsessively analyzed demographic for a change?
The Guardian: How Teenagers Consume Media: The report that shook the City
The Guardian: Teenage Media Habits: Was the whiz-kid correct?
