|
| |
::TECHNOLOGY NEWS::
LE Newsletter - February 2, 2012
|
| |
Teens Join Twitter To Escape Parents On Facebook: Survey
Source:
www.globeandmail.com - Martha Irvine, The Associated Press
(Jan 30, 2012) Chicago— Teens don't tweet, will never
tweet – too
public, too many older users. Not cool.
That's been the prediction for a while now, born of numbers
showing that fewer than one in 10 teens were using
Twitter
early on.
But then their parents, grandparents, neighbours, parents'
friends and anyone in-between started friending them on Facebook,
the social networking site of choice for many — and a curious
thing began to happen.
Suddenly, their space wasn't just theirs anymore. So more young
people have started shifting to Twitter, almost hiding in plain
sight.
“I love twitter, it's the only thing I have to myself cause my
parents don't have one,” Britteny Praznik, a 17-year-old who
lives outside Milwaukee, gleefully tweeted recently.
While she still has a Facebook account, she joined Twitter last
summer, after more people at her high school did the same. “It
just sort of caught on,” she says.
Teens tout the ease of use and the ability to send the
equivalent of a text message to a circle of friends, often a
smaller one than they have on crowded Facebook accounts. They
can have multiple accounts and don't have to use their real
names. They also can follow their favourite celebrities and, for
those interested in doing so, use Twitter as a soapbox.
The growing popularity teens report fits with findings from the
Pew Internet & American Life
Project, a non-profit organization that monitors
people's tech-based habits. The migration has been slow, but
steady. A Pew survey last July found that 16 per cent of young
people, ages 12 to 17, said they used Twitter. Two years
earlier, that percentage was just eight per cent.
“That doubling is definitely a significant increase,” says Mary
Madden, a senior research specialist at Pew. And she suspects
it's even higher now.
Meanwhile, a Pew survey found that nearly one in five 18- to
29-year-olds have taken a liking to the micro-blogging service,
which allows them to tweet, or post, their thoughts 140
characters at a time.
Early on, Twitter had a reputation that many didn't think fit
the online habits of teens — well over half of whom were already
using Facebook or other social networking services in 2006, when
Twitter launched.
“The first group to colonize Twitter were people in the
technology industry — consummate self-promoters,” says Alice
Marwick, a post-doctoral researcher at Microsoft Research, who
tracks young people's online habits.
For teens, self-promotion isn't usually the goal. At least until
they go to college and start thinking about careers, social
networking is, well, social.
But as Twitter has grown, so have the ways people, and
communities, use it.
For one, though some don't realize it, tweets don't have to be
public. A lot of teens like using locked, private accounts. And
whether they lock them or not, many also use pseudonyms, so that
only their friends know who they are.
“Facebook is like shouting into a crowd. Twitter is like
speaking into a room” — that's what one teen said when he was
participating in a focus group at Microsoft Research, Ms.
Marwick says.
Other teens have told Pew researchers that they feel “social
pressure,” to friend people on Facebook — “for instance,
friending everyone in your school or that friend of a friend you
met at a football game,” Pew researcher Ms. Madden says.
Twitter's more fluid and anonymous setup, teens say, gives them
more freedom to avoid friends of friends of friends — not that
they're saying anything particularly earth-shattering. They just
don't want everyone to see it.
Ms. Praznik, for instance, tweets anything from complaints and
random thoughts to angst and longing.
“i hate snow i hate winter. Moving to California as soon as i
can,” one recent post from the Wisconsin teen read.
“Don’t add me as a friend for a day just to check up on me and
then delete me again and then you wonder why I’m mad at you.
duhhh,” read another.
And one more: “I wish you were mine but you don't know what you
want. Till you figure out what you want I'm going to do my own
thing.”
Different teenagers use Twitter for different reasons.
Some monitor celebrities.
“Twitter is like a backstage pass to a concert,” says Jason
Hennessey, CEO of Everspark Interactive, a tech-based marketing
agency in Atlanta. “You could send a tweet to Justin Bieber 10
minutes before the concert, and there's a chance he might tweet
you back.”
A few teens use it as a platform to share opinions, keeping
their accounts public for all the world to see, as many adults
do.
Taylor Smith, a 14-year-old in St. Louis, is one who uses
Twitter to monitor the news and to get her own “small points
across.” Recently, that has included her dislike for strawberry
Pop Tarts and her admiration for a video that features the
accomplishments of young female scientists.
She started tweeting 18 months ago after her dad opened his own
account. He gave her his blessing, though he watches her account
closely.
“Once or twice I used bad language and he never let me hear the
end of it,” Ms. Smith says. Even so, she appreciates the chance
to vent and to be heard and thinks it's only a matter of time
before her friends realize that Twitter is the cool place to be
— always an important factor with teens.
They need to “realize it's time to get in the game,” Ms. Smith
say, though she notes that some don't have smart phones or their
own laptops — or their parents don't want them to tweet, feeling
they're too young.
Pam Praznik, Britteny's mother, keeps track of her daughter's
Facebook accounts. But Britteny asked that she not follow her on
Twitter — and her mom is fine with that, as long as the tweets
remain between friends.
“She could text her friends anyway, without me knowing,” mom
says.
Ms. Marwick at Microsoft thinks that's a good call.
“Parents should kind of chill and give them that space,” she
says.
Still, teens and parents shouldn't assume that even locked
accounts are completely private, says Ananda Mitra, a professor
of communication at Wake Forest University in North Carolina.
Online privacy, he says, is “mythical privacy.”
Certainly, parents are always concerned about online predators —
and experts say they should use the same common sense online as
they do in the outside world when it comes to dealing with
strangers and providing too much personal information.
But there are other privacy issues to consider, Mr. Mitra says.
Someone with a public Twitter account might, for instance,
retweet a posting made on a friend's locked account, allowing
anyone to see it. It happens all the time.
And on a deeper level, he says those who use Twitter and
Facebook — publicly or privately — leave a trail of “digital
DNA” that could be mined by universities or employers, law
enforcement or advertisers because it is provided voluntarily.
Mr. Mitra has coined the term “narb” to describe the narrative
bits people reveal about themselves online — age, gender,
location and opinions, based on interactions with their friends.
So true privacy, he says, would “literally means withdrawing”
from textual communication online or on phones — in essence,
using this technology in very limited ways.
He realizes that's not very likely, the way things are going —
but he says it is something to think about when interacting with
friends, expressing opinions or even “liking” or following a
corporation or public figure.
But Ms. Marwick at Microsoft still thinks private accounts pose
little risk when you consider the content of the average
teenager's Twitter account.
“They just want someplace they can express themselves and talk
with their friends without everyone watching,” she says.
Much like teens always have. |
|
| |
|
::ENTERTAINMENT NEWS WITH A CANADAN TWIST::
