For something (allegedly) written by a 15 year-old, Matthew Robson’s ‘report’ has gotten some serious coverage. Forget Britain’s Got Talent and its equivalents – this kid is the new teenage internet star on the block.
Matthew’s meteoric rise to fame has come on the back of widespread coverage of a report he wrote as an intern at Morgan Stanley – a report made entirely of Matthew’s own assertions about his peers’ media consumption. It turns out that young people get up to little else other than listening to music and customisable TV viewing (no reading, God forbid). Oh, and they definitely don’t twitter.
Matthew has touched me in two ways. First of all, in showing how indiscriminating audiences can be in their acceptance of ‘research’. And second, in spurring a long email debate here at FreshMinds Research about the future of social media. Yes, we still use email. No, we don’t tweet about absolutely everything. We are that old school.
I was genuinely amazed how the brains at Morgan Stanley first, and respectable British newspapers second, embraced the word of this fate-appointed representative of British teenagers as gospel without in any way questioning his ‘data’. I couldn’t be sure, but I’d chance that this guy’s ‘research’ involved sitting down with a couple of mates over a can of fizzy drink and having a bit of a chat about their media consumption. He might also have engaged in some simple observation, drawing conclusions just from watching his buddies without needing to ask them. The problem is that, as a 15 year-old who spends his summer at an investment bank, Matthew isn’t really your typical UK teenage media consumer. So his ‘evidence’ is not only of questionable robustness, but is likely to have been interpreted through a specific and a rather non-representative perspective. It’s hugely encouraging that the alpha male banking bosses at Morgan Stanley are quite so willing to take advice from a 15 year-old, but at the same time you’d think they’d ask a couple of questions about his sources. Unless poor Matt was in possession of a glowing halo above his adolescent head and a couple of white feathery wings protruding from the back of his M&S suit, such blind faith in somebody else’s word, least of all a guy who’s not even started his ‘A’ levels, comes as something of a surprise.
But let’s leave that aside and focus on one of the key ‘findings’ here. According to Matt (and now a significant proportion of the investment banking world), twittering is simply not what today’s teenagers are all about. It’s just not their thing. This notion got us thinking and talking about social media and its future – is twitter really going to die a generational death?
Ultimately, we don’t think so. Obscured by the frenzied twitterati, the current uptake of twitter might be lower than is assumed, with the media-sharing, status-updating and celebrity-following needs of many teenagers being satisfied by Facebook and MySpace. Indeed, if you’ve gone through the process of setting up a profile and network on one of these, why would you move it to (an arguably) more rudimentary service like twitter?
But whilst moving teenagers off their ‘established’ networks might prove something of a challenge, there is a constant stream of new cohorts open to getting caught up in the twitter buzz and jumping on this hot new bandwagon. They’re drawn in by the immediacy and intimacy of the celebrity-following side of twitter. And it’s not just film stars and musicians – updates from the sidelines of a Premiership football game, for example, make the follower feel privy to what otherwise would have been far more private information and allow sporting celebs to boost their marketable credentials.
Another idea mooted between the team at FreshMinds has been a convergence of technologies, with ‘bits’ of twitter and Facebook merging to create a hybrid (a la friendfeed). The likelihood is not that the ‘stronger’ of the major networking services kill off and supersede one another, but rather that they join forces. Think a mix of Facebook, twitter, Google Latitude and Spotify that lets you know pretty much everything there is to know about your mates, their whereabouts and the media they are consuming. Of course, this gives rise to some serious privacy issues, but that particular can of worms is best left closed for now…
So, what lessons might we draw from this short stream of consciousness? First, do your research properly (!) Second, question the findings of any research and the methods used, rather than taking them at face value. And finally, avoid making sweeping statements about, or imposing rigid categories on, the use and the future of social media. When my unborn (well, not yet conceived) son turns 15, I’ll expect him to live by these rules…
Read more here
on Jul 14th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
Wouldn’t it be interesting if we saw an influx of teens to twitter now they’ve read a report by another teenager about the fact they don’t use it? Maybe those who haven’t given it a thought will log in to see what all the hype is about…
on Jul 14th, 2009 at 2:16 pm
The more I think about it, the more the cynic in me starts to question the authenticity of this report. For a start, does it really sound like the work of a 15 year-old? Also, why would Morgan Stanley publish his name - he’s only (supposedly) an intern, for god’s sake! Perhaps it’s my overly suspicious mind, but could this simply be the (rather masterful) work of Morgan Stanley’s (and twitter’s) PR teams?
on Jul 14th, 2009 at 3:46 pm
Suw Charman-Anderson is good on this: the ‘research note’ is ‘more note than research’, because Robson’s sample is his friends, and ‘the plural of anecdote is not data’.
This story is particularly interesting because its success implies a belief that social media are best researched by bright young things being intuitive, rather than via rigorous analysis. But the immediacy of Twitter shouldn’t mean that our research on it should be the same.
We’ve touched on a related problem on this blog before: not how much to trust evidence about Twitter, but evidence coming from Twitter. We’ve discussed how, in Iran, social media are giving a voice to the oppressed. We’ve also seen how the story has in part been pushed by those in the traditional media who are excited to see that those Twitter accounts are paying off
I’m excited too, but again, the danger is the anecdote-data confusion, where the sample does not represent the population. (No matter how oppressed they are, these people still have the intellectual and physical access to computers and the internet, and many of the most influential speak English).
So, if we don’t want these potentially liberating new tools to drown in their own hype, then we need to draw the line more assiduously than ever between hearsay and genuine research. If you want to understand what happened there, then this, from Chatham House: http://www.chathamhouse.org.uk/files/14234_iranelection0609.pdf, is vital, even if it gets less coverage than the admirable but unreliable-when-uncontextualised Twitterers.
And if you want to know how many teens are using twitter and watching tv, don’t take Matthew’s wordx for it; follow Mike’s advice!
on Jul 14th, 2009 at 4:41 pm
Poor guy, though. If he’d known his report would draw attention of such Susan Boyle-esque scale, he might have given a little more thought to the robustness of his ’study’…!