It seems the new ways of deluging the net with the interminable nuances of one’s private life have overtaken, if not yet retired, the slightly older ones. Among the young, Facebook is surging, while rival social media — in particular, blogging — lag it by an ever graver margin.
On Wednesday, the Pew Research Center released the results of a comprehensive study into the cyber-social mores of teenagers (12 – 17-year-olds), young adults (18 – 29-year-olds), and unmitigated grownups (the rest). While most of the results submerge in the standard PRC pabulum, two stand out. The first? Since 2006, the Golden Age of blogging, when 28% of 12 – 29 year-olds confessed to an active, not to say frisky, blogging regimen, that percentage has dropped by nearly half.
As the San Francisco Gate reports in its article, “Blogging is for Old People” — a title stretched tight between joie de vivre and vindictiveness — “[b]y the fall of 2009, that percentage [i.e., 28%] dropped off to only 14 percent of teens and 15 percent of young adults as blogging ‘lost its luster for many young users,’ said Amanda Lenhart, one of the report’s authors.”
In 2006, you had to prove a post-secondary affiliation to get your entrée to Facebook. At the very least, you needed a nerdy friend you could bully r blackmail into giving you his. (Were you, gentle reader, that nerdy friend?) Unlike the vortex of irony and innuendo we know today, into which all are free to plunge, Facebook, back then, was a vortex of irony and innuendo for the educated only. No longer. 73% of surveyed young-adults claimed to operate a Facebook page; and it is this more than anything else, the authors suggest, that explains the tapering-off of teen-blogging.
The other salient result of the PRC poll is that Twitter is not the raging pandemic among young that it is among the middle-aged. While 19% of polled grownups admitted to habitual Tweeting, only 8% of teens did.
The significance of all this? Enterprising grownups have long been in the habit of studying their offspring for the twinkling of a nascent trend. Since the massification of the internet, anyway, the net-mavens and web-sibyls of the world have treated these studies the way fortune-tellers treat a Tarot pack – pregnant images in which the future has been retrievably encoded. Expect, in other words, a hullabaloo – shading, in places, into outright hysteria – about the death of blogging, the transience of Twitter, the tentacular flex and scope of Facebook.
Maybe it will be justified.
The likelihood, though, is that the PRC poll indicates nothing we didn’t already know. Such studies are as apt to turn out inkblots as omens, the mirror-image of their viewers’ anxieties.
