Clare Townhill

Knowing Data from Cyber Babble

When I saw title of Yann Gourvennec's Futurelab post ('How Teenagers - And Adults - Consume Media' I'm not afraid to admit that my heart sank anticipating yet more bobbins about the middle class Morgan Stanley intern who somehow became the mouthpiece and oracle for his generation's tech interactions. Thank goodness it was this:

The Morgan Stanley report entitled “media and the Internet, how teenagers consume media” is one of the most striking examples of instant information circulation on a global scale. Matthew Robinson — a 15 year-old trainee who was asked to put together a report on how his peers were using the media — no longer needs to work on his online reputation. In a flash, his report was on everyone’s lips (on everyone’s desktop rather) and widely used as a perfect representation of generation Y usage of media and – especially – the Internet.

On the contrary, the fact that a survey of one might be considered a representative sample of a 60 million population is a rather tale-telling instance of how adults, and not teenagers, have become used to consume the media. Call me old-fashioned, but I think I can highlight a few issues with regard to how information is handled in this report.

1. This report is often taken at face value as in this review by the Guardian, with no analysis or questioning of anything that is said in the report,
2. Teens are different from adults, but does that mean that their tastes/behaviours won’t change?
3. Marketing has taught teenagers to behave as consumers, hence their feeling – more acquired than innate – that they are a race apart. But in fact they aren’t. Teenagers are but adults to be, and should be treated as such, not revered as if youth was meant to be eternal,
4. Generation Y – a definition so broad it means nothing – is said to be more IT and especially Internet savvy than their predecessors. As a matter of fact, an in-depth (and confidential) survey carried out by Orange amongst a sample of 15 year-olds a couple of years ago showed that this is not quite true. Teenagers are actually better at using certain technologies such as instant messaging and they practice multi-tasking heavily – not forcibly a good thing
   the Guardian says – but aren’t more au fait with IT than their elders and when they hit trouble, they tend to call … their parents to the rescue,
5. Most real bloggers aren’t teenagers, and many of them are in the 40-50+ range; I can testify,
6. As a consequence of the above, Twitter is also used by the same people who use it mostly to publicise their content and share resources with their network and also a surrogate instant messaging system between members of that network,
7. As a result too, Twitter is indeed a tool for grown-ups and in that, I do believe Matthew Robson is right. Just because teenagers don’t use it now doesn’t make it less interesting however,
8. (a mere assumption I admit but it seems) the style of this report has little to do with teenage counterculture and a lot to do with Morgan Stanley,
9. This report is assuming that enterprises should fear teenagers who will join their ranks in the coming years. However:
   1. By the time they do, they won’t be teenagers anymore, some of them will even have children,
   2. By then, most of them will have learnt how to behave in the enterprise world,
   3. When Mr Robson hits the job market, that is in approximately 10 years from now enterprises will also have evolved by dint of user pressure, young and old, who want greater freedom in the workplace and have even bought their own technology to bypass corporate rules (a concept known as BYOC),
10. Lastly, may I venture to ask who Matthew Robson is anyway? I wasn’t really able to trace him, even in facebook which I guess cannot be regarded as 19th century technology. So, despite my introductory comment, he might yet have to work on his online reputation, unless this too is an old-fashioned concept.

Phew. Thanks Yann (cue applause).

The Internet is Primarily a Content Platform

Really important chart from Silicon Alley - content has become king.

"Twitter is for Old People"

Odd piece in The Times about a 15 year old intern's report on teen media consumption that seemingly is setting investment bankers' inboxes alight:

Radio With online sites streaming music for free they do not bother, as services such as last.fm do this advert free and users can choose the songs they want instead of listening to what the radio presenter/DJ chooses

Newspapers No teenager that I know of regularly reads a newspaper, as most do not have the time and cannot be bothered to read pages and pages of text while they could watch the news summarised on the internet or on TV

Internet Facebook is the most common, with nearly everyone with an internet connection registered. On the other hand, teenagers do not use Twitter

Music They are very reluctant to pay for it (most having never bought a CD) Teenagers from higher income families use iPods and those from lower income families use mobile phones

Directories Real directories contain listings for builders and florists, which are services teenagers do not require. They can get the information free on the internet

Viral/Outdoor Marketing “Most teenagers enjoy and support viral marketing... Teenagers see adverts on websites (pop-ups, banner ads) as extremely annoying and pointless...they are portrayed in such a negative light that no one follows them.”

Cinema Teenagers visit the cinema more often when they are in the lower end of teendom but as they approach 15 they go to the cinema a lot less. This is because of the pricing; at 15 they have to pay the adult price. Also it is possible to buy a pirated DVD of the film at the time of release, and these cost much less than a cinema ticket

Mobile phones The general view is that Sony Ericsson phones are superior, because of their long list of features, built-in Walkman capacity and value

Whilst it's tempting to scoff at such seemingly obvious observations (apart from his view on cinema which doesn't seem to ring true) perhaps we should reflect on the kind of thing that a media agency might have produced if asked the same question. Interestingly he doesn't offer an opinion on TV - doesn't he consider TV to be media?

The Times: Twitter is for old people, work experience whiz-kid tells bankers

Guardian API

Nice new toys to play with from The Guardian. Good talk on this by Simon Williams at BarCamp6. Alas falling down a deep dark pitch hole means I'm a bit tardy with posting the details. The API was launched at the beginning of March and currently has two components:

1. The Content API is a mechanism for getting Guardian content. You can query our content database for articles and get them back in formats that are geared toward integration with other internet applications.

2. The Data Store is a collection of important and high quality data sets curated by Guardian journalists. You can find useful data here, download it, and integrate it with other internet applications.

The Data Store is just genius, enables some great uses and insight via blogs like Ouseful and bawdy yet no less interesting guest posts like this:

'Towards the end of last week, a sleepness night led me to indulge a childish sense of humour with 15 minutes of tomfoolery, the output of which was a graph comparing the decline and fall of various swear-words in the pages of the Guardian over the last decade. In a bid to retain some sense of self-respect, I'll for now ignore the fact that this graph has achieved a readership that dwarfs anything else I've written in my career to date, and focus instead on how I did it.'

The Guardian Open Platform

The Daily Fail

see more pwn and owned pictures

Motherly Fail

Apparently the text in the red box says 'My sons are supporting me in spirit'. Dear God. Failblog.org a panacea of pity.

The UK's Digital Obsession

Our digital addiction: 727 hours surfing, 27 phoning and 972 texts
We love camera phones, digital TVs and recorders more than anyone else

'In the heyday of rock music, no stadium gig was complete without a slow number that prompted the crowd to hold aloft their cigarette lighters to create hundreds of flickering points of light. Now the same effect is created by hundreds of people holding up their mobile phones as the audience takes photo after photo to prove they were there.'

Here's the Guardian's opening paragraph on the results of Ofcom's International Communications Audit. Findings reveal that this 'digital-lighter' effect is more likely to occur amongst a British crowd than amongst any other nation. We use our phones as cameras more than any other nation in the world, including Japan.

Here's a link to the key points.

(The picture was taken by me last Thursday at a gig; the little blue lights towards the bottom of the image are digital-lighters/camera-phones)

American Apparel Bashing

Quite the done thing of late:

An artist in New York has taken to producing some close to the bone artwork of his own to complement the neo-teen pornographic style of the official campaign:

It's the latest wonderful piece by the fake American Apparel ad artist, this time featuring the head man himself looking even creepier than Woody Allen did. For the uninitiated, over the past few months, a NYC prankster has created several bawdy two-color parodies of AA ads complete with real ad headlines. Here, the artist commemorates Lovey Dov Charney being named "retailer of the year" at the recent Michael Awards for the fashion industry—time to get wet! Dildos have featured prominently in Dov's business success; he apparently pays off some of his models with them in lieu of a decent day rate. How's that for figuratively fucking the talent? 

Copyranter: Dildo-holding-sextoy