Among many heavy social media users (read: bloggers) it's easy to detect a feign of dismissal about social networks like Facebook, and a strong belief that the future of social media is all in pure conversational tools, such as Twitter. Before I go any further, I would like to point out:
1. I'm a blogger
2. I love Twitter
3. I spend lots of time on Facebook
However, the fact that these tools get a lot of use from hard-core social media bloggers doesn't mean they're going to switch over to the mainstream. There's a reason for this: THE KIDS AREN'T USING THEM!
Look at most of the major technology-focused changes in society, and what do you see? First the early-movers use tools, then this 'crosses the chasm' into the mainstream. But this is almost always powered by new products/tools becoming 'cool' among the young early movers. Online forums; social networks; iPods; P2P; Computer Games; all of these went/are in the process of going from 'early adopters ---> kids/teens ---> mainstream'.
This seems to be a clear trend to me (maybe it's even the key to the chasm). I was there as a kid on some of the first social networks, on the first graphical MMORPGs (before they were 3d), along with older early-adopters, and it was us that took it mainstream. Partly because a lot of the kids grew up to be 'mainstream', and took their new behaviors with them (I have lots of friends who had the same online behaviour as me when younger, and have carried that with them - e.g moving to Facebook and World of Warcraft - without moving to blogs or Twitter. In fact, most of them).
This isn't rocket science, or revolutionary. Change almost always comes from the younger generations. If an older generation changes its behaviour, the only way this will survive or grow is if it passes down to the younger generation. Conversely, change in the younger generation is more likely to pass to the even younger generations - and grow up with the users.
If we get to Twitter, I see a lot of heavy social media types using it, generally people who are very heavy public communicators. However, if we look at the growth in social networks, the biggest mainstream growth has been from Facebook making it easy to communicate easily with people you KNOW, and made privacy and real user information a big deal. The fact that people are heavy communicators in this semi-private/controlled space simply doesn't translate to normal Twitter/micro-blogging usage, which is highly public. And this seems to be held up by the fact that I've seen no evidence of Twitter or micro-blogging in use by kids/teens, neither statistically or anecdotally.
SO - either Twitter will never cross the chasm, or it's just yet to be picked up by the younger generation. If so, they're being slower than usual.
What do you think?
1 comments:
I think I agree with you and also believe that, from a fancy sort of ethnography standpoint, early adopters, by their very nature, generally occupy the unique nooks and crannies of culture. And when they adopt a new technology, they develop strange new behaviors. It's the speed at which those new behaviors become culturally and socially acceptable that dictate the penetration of something like Twitter. The mere act of taking out a phone to take a picture went mainstream so quickly, because that set of behaviors has been accepted my the mainstream for decades. I think that if Twitter fully propagates itself, it will have to thank the concept of "profile status messages" on facebook, or "mood" on MySpace for helping us "fast-followers" (admittedly so) to equate the idea of micro-blogging to something we've grown accustomed to as part of our "profile routines."
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