Despite headlines, when it comes to the internet, teenagers behave just like adults – some network, most don’t
ALTHOUGH COLUMN-writing requires me to cram occasionally, there are some subjects prevalent in current affairs of which I have a reasonable baseline knowledge. From a combination of life, work and academic experience, I know a fair bit about being a woman, mobile phone networks, the Massachusetts Bay Colony (1628-1640), local government, rural life and how humans communicate with each other (usually badly).
I also know stuff about the internet. Because I know a lot about these subjects I find myself alarmed, on more occasions than one would prefer, to read news articles in newspapers and on websites that I know are completely wrong.
If the topics I know about are being reported incorrectly, then presumably so is everything else. From a position of ignorance, how am I supposed to know what is true and what is not? I was struck by this when reading an article in Monday's Irish Independent, which had been taken from the Times(of London), which was lifted (although credited) by the Daily Telegraphand then linked to repeatedly by dozens of other websites.
The Irish Independent'sheadline read: "Twittering teens are changing the dictionary." The Telegraphsaid: "Twittering teens add hundreds of words to dictionary." Several of the blogs talked about the new words that have been added to this year's Collins English Dictionary,"all thanks to teenagers who use such words on social networking websites like Twitter".
The story was about 267 words that had been invented and used so frequently by teenagers on Twitter that they merited inclusion in the updated Collins dictionary.
One half of this story is correct and the other false. Collins has added 267 new words to the dictionary because they have come into common usage on social networking sites. Most of them are “words” that express noises we might make in a “live” conversation such as “meh”, which is the onomatopoeic equivalent of shrugging your shoulders with indifference, or “LOL”, for “laughing out loud”.
But neither Twitter nor teenagers merit scapegoating in this phase of the evolution of the English language because neither comes anywhere near dominating social networking.
You might be confused because if you read the papers you’ll be convinced of two things. One is that the whole world (except you) is on Twitter (and you’re not even entirely sure what Twitter is). The other is that teenagers are obsessive internet users in constant danger of meeting paedophiles, publishing dodgy photographs of themselves in between cyber-bullying each other. It might come as a shock to learn that Twitter has a fraction of the users of other social networking sites, and as for teenagers, they comprise a small minority of users of the entire statusphere.
Twitter’s spectacular growth since it was launched in 2006 has inspired considerable hype. But its popularity in the media is simply not matched online.
Analysts are pretty sure that Twitter broke through the 25 million user barrier this year. A generous estimate might put its user base at 30-35 million today. More importantly though, web security company Purewire analysed Twitter accounts back in June and estimated that 40 per cent could be dormant.
What that means is that lots of people set up a Twitter account to see what all the fuss is about and then realising its sheer uselessness to them, promptly abandon it.
I set up an account to help Ashton Kutcher beat CNN in a race to become the first Twitterer to have one million followers. Ashton Kutcher is Demi Moore’s cute husband and I know this doesn’t show me in the best light. What is relevant is that since Ashton won and proved I’m not entirely sure what, I’ve ignored the account.
In comparison, Facebook has about 250 million users, half of whom log in at least once a day to their accounts. Further, Facebook makes a practice of deleting dormant accounts so they don’t use up precious space on their servers.
What about the kids then? Teenagers account for 11 per cent of users on Twitter, 14 per cent on MySpace, and on Facebook just 9 per cent. If you’re wondering about Bebo, don’t. Figures issued just a few weeks ago by Comscore showed that Bebo is losing significant market share to Facebook, which has gained critical mass and therefore is the site around which teenagers are congregating.
Meanwhile, half of Facebook users are over 26 and the fastest growth is in users over 35. Analysts reckon that grannies love Facebook because it’s a handy way to keep in touch with their grandchildren.
So, far from dominating social networking, teenagers are actually a small minority of users. It’s not that teenagers are against social networking, just that they use it in similar proportions to the rest of the population. Despite the headlines, when it comes to the internet, teenagers behave just like adults. Some social network, most don’t.
This means a lot of things – principally that moral panic about teenagers is yet again shown to be void of logic. Also, if the English language is evolving or being debased, depending on your perspective, you can blame the internet but you can’t blame the kids.