Joined Twitter? You're getting old

The old saying that "if you're not thoroughly confused you don't fully understand the situation" applies with a vengeance to our new media ecosystem.

Take the strange case of teenagers who, until the 1960s, barely existed as an interesting social category.

Then they acquired spending power and became interesting to retailers and advertisers - and therefore to the mass media - to the point where society is now obsessed with them.

This obsession is particularly neurotic whenever cyberspace is mentioned, and leads adults to project on to the younger generation all kinds of fears and fantasies.

Thus they are seen perceived as confident "digital natives" of cyberspace, whereas we are merely nervous "immigrants".

Or, to sum up adult conventional wisdom in a single ugly phrase, teenagers are more "tech savvy" than we are and, as such, the best guide to our networked future.

At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, an entire session paid homage to the myth of teenage omniscience.

A troupe of Bay Area kids were invited on to the platform and interviewed respectfully by a former investment analyst. It was not illuminating.

"It rambled and eventually degenerated to teenagers free-associating on different companies ('Google? Simple!')," wrote one observer, "but the most compelling part for me was seeing their visceral dislike of Twitter." They simply couldn't see the point of it.

At this point, your columnist sat up and blinked. Twitter, after all, is the cyber-sensation du jour. It's growing like crazy.

Yet the kids who supposedly drive every internet phenomenon have little interest in it. The statistics support this: Twitter is a preoccupation of older generations; only 11 per cent of its users are aged 17 or younger.

According to the New York Times, for example, teenagers now account for only 14 per cent of MySpace users and 9 per cent of Facebook's.

Yet it is Facebook that is growing like crazy: it now has more than 300 million users (and is adding 600,000 new users a day). Most are oldies.

A further intriguing twist was added to this story when the new chief executive of MySpace told the Financial Times the company was no longer interested in competing with Facebook, in effect conceding defeat in the race to become the largest online social network.

Instead, he said, his company aimed to become an online music and entertainment hub.

In truth, MySpace doesn't have much choice: it has to do something to arrest its decline. According to Hitwise, Facebook took more than 58 per cent of US social network traffic last month, while MySpace's share fell to 30 per cent (compared with 66 per cent a year ago).

Four years ago, Rupert Murdoch's purchase of MySpace for US$580 million was widely regarded by an awestruck media world as an inspired move. Now it's looking like an old man's punt on something he didn't really understand: teenage psychology.

And the meaning of all this? When it comes to predicting the future of cyberspace, the only certainty is that no one knows anything, least of all teenagers.

- OBSERVER