Twitter is not for teens, Morgan Stanley told by 15-year-old expert | Business | guardian.co.uk

• Twitter is not for teens, Morgan Stanley told by 15-year-old expert | Business | guardian.co.uk

  
  

  • Twitter is not for teens, Morgan Stanley told by 15-year-old expert

    • What makes a 15-year-old and his peers expert over the distributed net? Representative or maybe just not grown up enough to put a sentence together or to have a long term interest in anything. - post by tellio
    
    
  • He said teenagers were using more and more media, but they were unwilling to pay for it.
  • "Teenagers do not use Twitter," he wrote. "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). They realise that no one is viewing their profile, so their tweets are pointless."
    • Assumptions here: 1. If it isn't free, forget about it. 2. If its not free on the cellphone or part of the package, forget it. 3. If it is not centered absolutely on one's own self, forget it. 4. If it doesn't get people to look at you or your "brand", forget it. - post by tellio
    
    
  • No teenager Robson knew reads a newspaper regularly since most "cannot be bothered to read pages and pages of text while they could watch the news summarised on the internet or on TV". The only newspapers that are read are the cheaper tabloids and freesheets
    • Students don't read dead trees unless they are free/cheap dead trees. Students don't read anything more than they have to. They let others summarize their text for them. Students trust their sources or simply don't question the summarizing "gatekeepers" - post by tellio
    
    
  • prefer listening to advert-free music on websites such as Last.fm to traditional radio.
    • Do not distract me from my free music unless of course it is some viral meme that it is amusing and interesting. - post by tellio
    
    
  • most had never bought a CD
    • With the advent of P2P and browsers that can function as servers, how can "theft" be stopped. What RIAA calls theft, users simply call 'behavior'. Get over it. - post by tellio
    
    
  • Money and time are instead devoted to cinema, concerts and video game consoles.
    • Kids spend money in larger f2f networking constructs as well as large gaming contexts. - post by tellio
    
    
  • Game consoles like Wii, which are now able to connect to the internet and offer free voice chat between users, have emerged as a more popular choice for chatting with friends than the phone.
    • Talk happens simultaneously with gaming. What this might mean is that multiple channels are being considered as the norm. - post by tellio

  • However, young people are the most advertised to, sometimes the most gullible and are being fed brand loyalty from the most early ages. This type of study by one of the institutions responsible for the banking crisis is not in the interests of anyone but the moneyed elite. How long will it take us to ask the question 'How much damage should a company do before we challenge its right to exist'?

    Or do we just welcome the summarised, 30 second attention span, individualistic, false conscious society that these businesses want?

    • In the comments to the article you always get what you were thinking yourself. This one sums up my fear: why is Morgan Stanley so interested in the networked world of teenagers? You can rely on them to be totally opaque to the answer to that question so we must guess. They want to sell them something. - post by tellio

  • "They realise that no one is viewing their profile, so their tweets are pointless"

    I'm not sure he understands how Twitter works...

    Maybe teens feel unnoticed on Twitter because they don't have anything interesting to say.

    • Twittering does require a little of the Biblical notion of throwing bread on the waters--a concept that eludes most narcissistic social networkers (aka 15 year old sons of MorganStanley bosses) - post by tellio

  • It's a boy view.

    My twelve year old daughter and many of her contemporaries are playing fantasy role playing games on PCs.

    It's a privileged boy view - my friends = all teenagers

    • Critique of commentor--he is a boy and therefore privileged by Morgan Stanley. Not sure this follows. - post by tellio
    
    
  • Maybe when they realise that kids this age have little cash and prefer free stuff the penny may drop. Viva la revolution.
    • This is a nice observation that leads to where companies should go. Drop the damned price and you will revolutionize the biz because there is pent up demand in the low price, but not free end. Charge pennies and you will make millions. - post by tellio

On balance the article points to possibilities among teenagers some of which generalizes in my experience and some not.  I think that teenagers are nowhere near as monolithic a group as is asserted by the author Robson yet...I think we do ourselves a disservice to not consider going out to this boundary and scouting around.  And I will.
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