Analyst, 15, Creates Storm After Trashing Twitter 381
Barence writes "A 15-year-old schoolboy has become an overnight sensation after writing a report on teenagers' media habits for analysts Morgan Stanley. Intern Matthew Robson was asked to write a report about his friends' use of technology during his work experience stint with the firm's media analysts. The report was so good the firm decided to publish it, and it generated 'five or six' times more interest than Morgan Stanley's regular reports. The schoolboy poured scorn on Twitter, claiming that teenagers 'realize that no one is viewing their profile, so their tweets are pointless.' He also claimed games consoles are replacing mobile phones as the way to chat with friends."
I've Heard This Story Before (Score:5, Insightful)
The schoolboy poured scorn on Twitter, claiming that teenagers "realize that no one is viewing their profile, so their tweets are pointless".
Sounds familiar [tonightsbedtimestory.com]:
So now the Emperor walked under his high canopy in the midst of the procession, through the streets of his capital; and all the people standing by, and those at the windows, cried out, "Oh! How beautiful are our Emperor's new clothes! What a magnificent train there is to the mantle; and how gracefully the scarf hangs!" in short, no one would allow that he could not see these much-admired clothes; because, in doing so, he would have declared himself either a simpleton or unfit for his office. Certainly, none of the Emperor's various suits, had ever made so great an impression, as these invisible ones.
"But the Emperor has nothing at all on!" said a little child.
"Listen to the voice of innocence!" exclaimed his father; and what the child had said was whispered from one to another.
"But he has nothing at all on!" at last cried out all the people. The Emperor was vexed, for he knew that the people were right; but he thought the procession must go on now! And the lords of the bedchamber took greater pains than ever, to appear holding up a train, although, in reality, there was no train to hold.
Re:I've Heard This Story Before (Score:5, Insightful)
Honestly, it's just a 15 year old kid with some views of his life. I highly doubt he's actually got anything revolutionary to say. I think it's just a case of people caught on the twitter media train suddenly realizing that twitter isn't god to everybody, despite what reports say.
Relativity (Score:5, Insightful)
If a 15-year-old "analyst" writes one of the most "clearest and most thought-provoking insights" for your publication, that says a lot more about your publication (and the state of American journalism) than the 15-year-old in question.
Why don't we ask him to write about homework ("a near-epidemic in America") early bedtimes ("a gross violation of the constitution") and girls ("icky!") while we're at it?
Fucking embarrassing.
Games consoles? (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe for 10 year olds, but certainly not for the rest of us.
Why is it... (Score:5, Insightful)
...there have been numerous articles written on the lameness of waste of bandwidth that twitter is and they get shot down as anti-pop babble. Yet a 15 year old kid writes a dismissive and somewhat rambling "analytical" report saying that twitter is lame and a waste of time and all of a sudden he's a genius with social insight in to media tools?
Tools meaning things people use to communicate, like telephones (yes, they still have those). Not tools meaning the talking heads like the ones the reported on the 15 year old's report.
Re:Games consoles? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Games consoles? (Score:4, Insightful)
Thing about 10 year olds, they don't stay that way. These kinds of reports are what people and corporations use to plan for the future.
I'm not suggesting that the report is the end-all be-all, but it does hint that maybe what people today are terribly excited about today may not be sustainable.
Re:Games consoles? (Score:4, Insightful)
One person's anecdotes (Score:5, Insightful)
It's just the echo chamber effect. A teenager knows that this is how he and his friends use technology, so he assumes it's true for everyone else. So the report might be an interesting insight into how he thinks, but totally useless for anyone who wants an actual profile of his age group.
The reason behind this report (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like Morgan Stanley feels that this point is so blatantly obvious that it even by delivering it via a virtual nobody from the demographic that twitter is supposed to be the most popular with wouldn't dilute the truth.
However, while I think twitter is pretty boring myself you do have to admit -- if you're a 15 year old kid writing research reports for Morgan Stanley odds are you don't have the pulse of social networking trends.
Where's the Report? (Score:5, Insightful)
Has anyone actually found the damn report? As another pointed out, google search is so polluted with 2nd and 3rd hand accounts that googling the report is singulary unrevealing (or perhaps more accurately: multiplicatively unrevealing). Unlike other snarky comments here, I wouldn't be surprised if this kid's observations weren't dead on. I'm unsurprised twitter is considered passe, I'm unsurprised that teenagers are finding better ways to chat than SMS messages pecked out on a cell phone number pad, and I'm unsurprised that teenagers are abandoning television and print media as primary information sources, given how often those expensive and slow media forms have been shown to be inaccurate, overtly deceptive, and (worst of all for a young person) utterly out of touch with the zeitgeist of the moment.
About the only surprise in the captions is that young people are using gaming consoles more than other media for chatting, but that may be down to me not being a gamer. In any event, I'd like to read the report before passing judgement, and particularly befor joining the jaded, knee-jerk reaction of "the kid's clueless, we shouldn't listen" mantra that seems to have become so common on slashdot (and makes us all sound like cranky old men, even more out of touch with the world's current trends than the Old Media).
Slurm (Score:5, Insightful)
What it says is that most people working in "business" are disconnected from reality and produce nothing of value.
The only real problem is that some moron let this kid inside to see the Slurm factory and now he knows.
Re:Why is it... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like the next Theodore Kaczynski (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Here's the real reason... (Score:5, Insightful)
Texting is hard! http://gizmodo.com/5312623/teenager-falls-into-open-manhole-while-texting [gizmodo.com] [gizmodo.com]
I love people that are so utterly self-absorbed and oblivious to their surroundings that they can do something this foolish. Wanna lay odds that when she gets her drivers license in a few years she'll be one of the asshats that flies down the road, cell phone in one hand, make-up in the other, paying absolutely no attention to the road? Then when she gets into an accident she'll say "I never saw it coming!".
I'll get yelled at for saying this but it's a pity she didn't earn herself a Darwin award. Now she's going to breed and pass on her stupidity to the next generation.
Re:Why is it... (Score:5, Insightful)
...there have been numerous articles written on the lameness of waste of bandwidth that twitter is and they get shot down as anti-pop babble. Yet a 15 year old kid writes a dismissive and somewhat rambling "analytical" report saying that twitter is lame and a waste of time and all of a sudden he's a genius with social insight in to media tools?
The issue you notice is simple. If anyone above the age of 20 wrote this report, he or she would be viewed as "old" or "not with it" and the report would be dismissed as sour grapes or get off my lawn or some such thing. Oh, but wait, we have a 15 year old telling us this? Shit, that's the demographic this is supposed to work on! Oh man, now we better listen. And suddenly, overnight, it's okay to doubt Twitter's power out loud. Amazing.
The news here is that it took the voice of an innocent to wake up business men looking for the next marketing scam to pull on young people. "MySpace didn't work for marketing, maybe this Twitter thing will work? Never mind that I think it's stupid, I don't want to out myself as technologically inept and reveal I don't even use e-mail. No, we must avoid our inadequacies instead of addressing them." That's basically what's at work, very much like The Emperor's New Clothes (see my post above).
Re:I've Heard This Story Before (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I've Heard This Story Before (Score:5, Insightful)
It's therefore very unsurprising that this teenager, with his limited world view, has decided that games consoles are better to communicate with, than an expensive phone. First there's the cost. Second, if he's a gamer, there's a good chance his friends are gamers, and since they are unlikely to be in the pub (because they are too young), they'll probably be found at home, infront of theirs consoles. It is therefore the best communication medium for *him*.
Granted the kid will grow up, start going to the pub, and have his own income that he can spend on phone credit. At that point, he'll have probably ditched consoles all together, and got himself a brand new iPhone 9, and be playing Halo 17 on the bus back from work on it.
Even though it was not that long ago, it's very easy to forget how your mind worked when you were a teenager. Every so often something like this will come along and remind you how small minded you were just a few years ago
Re:Oh, God, the Grammar (Score:1, Insightful)
This report is an unreadable mess
If you can only communicate and understand things when presented to you in a very specific structured way, you are the minority. Being thrown off because someone mixed 1 with one means you are either not very flexible, have a reading comprehension problem, just like to bitch, or trying to make yourself seem better by putting other people down. Bottom line is the teen gave his opinion on some topic, you don;t understand or care about the topic, you only care that it is not grammatically correct. Let me guess, if you meet an auto mechanic wearing a suit and tie, you would automatically trust him more than a second mechanic with a dirty pair of coveralls on.
Re:Nice disclaimer (Score:5, Insightful)
No kidding... It reads as if he's assuming that just because he and his five friends don't use Twitter, it follows that nobody his age uses Twitter. And then he just makes up some random reasons to support his claim. How does he know *why* teenagers don't use it; has he done any research? Or just picked the first thing that flew into his head?
I could have written a report when I was that age saying that no teenager watches NASCAR or soccer because I didn't and most of my friends didn't.
I don't blame the kid for writing this way (he's not old enough to know better), but I find it bizarre that Morgan Stanley would take this seriously.
I always find it annoying when the media or a company takes the say-so of one individual and thinks that one person could possible speak for all teenagers / African-Americans / middle-aged white people / etc...
Re:Relativity (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:where is the report? (Score:4, Insightful)
I am far from a British teenager but it sounds like it was written by an adult playing a teenager.
Also, aren't there polls/surveys to get more quantitative info on teenager media use?
They hardly need one teenager's anecdotal report.
Just because his parent's won't buy him an iPhone (Score:3, Insightful)
Does anyone else get that a teenager is obviously going to use a PS3 or 360 because that's what his parents bought him?
I hate twitter as much as the next guy, but other things "passe" to a fifteen year old might include:
showing up on time
white tennis shoes
working outside
The Beatles
playing actual instruments instead of the ones with Rock Band
So, if I wanted to market a product - like a smartphone - to teenagers, I'd probably read his report with a little interest. And then I'd remember that he's not old enough to sign a contract to get one in the first place, and couldn't afford $100 a month anyway. So I'm glad he wrote a report, but let me ask the most significant question that has escaped the great minds at Morgan Stanley We-Fucked-The-Goat-When-It-Came-To-Recognizing-The-Real-Estate-Bubble: who gives a shit?
I didn't understand when I was his age, but I do now. And that is, get a job and an apartment - without mommy and daddy's help - and then we'll talk. By the way, my youngest sister, who's still a teenager, types on her non-smart phone all the time, and so do all her friends, even when they are playing video games. Why? Because it works, they don't have to be at a computer or a game console, and since their parents have somewhat of a clue, it's free with an extra $10 a month on their cell bill.
Re:I've Heard This Story Before (Score:5, Insightful)
You know why we won't see that? Because that would require the kids to leave their homes and go outside.
Other way around! We won't see that, because we would have to leave our homes and go outside to see the teens.
He's just poor (Score:4, Insightful)
If you actually read the report, you'll see that he and his friends are mainly concerned with cost. Twitter is not used because sending a text message to twitter costs money, and, since nobody reads their profiles anyway, it's better to send the message to friends directly. The rest of the report is on the same theme: teenagers don't want to spend any money. This is certainly not a new trend; when I was in high school, my allowance was certainly inadequate to subscribe to expensive services, buy computer games, or expensive gadgets. I don't see why anyone is surprized that this is all still true today.
Re:I've Heard This Story Before (Score:4, Insightful)
Look at stock performance over the past 24 months, I think it's wise to IGNORE anything any Stock adviser tells you. these guys dont know their anus from a hole in the ground lately. I've had better luck going AGAINST all their recommendations during the past 24 months..
Re:Games consoles? (Score:3, Insightful)
You're free to make that assumption, just as others are free to take note of it and see if there's anything to be learned.
First of all, he's 15 and doing an internship for a major publication. I'm going to go ahead and doubt his parents cannot afford a cell, but instead can afford a game console. He also seems to afford a computer. I'm not picturing an impoverished child here, but maybe I read it wrong.
You see those kids using cell phones because they're out and about. I highly doubt you're peering into their bedrooms when they're home, so your observation doesn't really mitigate what the kid is saying being true.
Again, you're totally caught up in portability.
I read the comment as 'when given a choice, my friends and I prefer to use the game console over a cell phone'. And I do find that interesting. You may not, and that's fine. I'd be interested in studying the perception of value using the same sets of kids and the different modes of communication.
Perhaps cell companies need to produce a game that allows/requires SMS during play...
Oh (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I've Heard This Story Before (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm trying to figure out why Morgan Stanley is the place for this kind of article.
Morgan Stanley is an investment bank. They offer investment advice. In this case, they're providing a counter-opinion to the general media "OMG Twitter is the greatest thing since sliced bread" analysis. It's a very different kind of market analysis from what we conventionally see, and something potentially interesting to someone who might be looking at tech stocks. Twitter stock isn't sold publicly, but it's still relevant to the potential future of the sector.
Honestly, it's just a 15 year old kid with some views of his life. I highly doubt he's actually got anything revolutionary to say.
I'm normally as disparaging of teenagers as they come, having recently left that "I know everything there is to know" stage of my life (I'm 22). But whereas the average teenager is working retail or ogling bikinis at the local pool, this kid's interning at one of the most powerful companies in the world, and wrote something that sufficiently impressed them that they published it under their name. Sounds like a smart kid.
Re:Nice disclaimer (Score:5, Insightful)
You left out Twitter and Facebook suckered large numbers of Iranian and Guatemalan young people in to posting anti government rants on them, thinking they were going to overthrow their government with Twitter. Now that's a laugh. It was a stellar part of the Twitter hype to make everyone think Twitter would lead to an instantaneous outbreak of Democracy across the globe. CNN was a leading purveyor of this myth. Since CNN has pretty much ceased to function as a news network all they have left to do is grasp at straws in the form of Twitter, Facebook and iReport. They kind of missed the fact its nearly impossible to verify anything you get from the anonymous public, or to have any confidence in the source. Howard Stern pranks proved this.
Note to wanna be young Iranian rebels, Iran monitors all Internet traffic so using Twitter in the clear provides the Basij with an instantaneous mechanism to identify, arrest and track you and your rabble-rouser friends. Note to all future young wanna be rebels, all your internet activities are probably being watched. Your Twitter and Facebook pages aren't a good place to organize a revolution unless you really know what you are doing. Don't use them unless you are using anonymous WiFi stolen from your neighbor so they get busted instead, or a very good anonymizer like Tor. Try reading Cory Doctorow's Little Brother so you will at least be in the correct mind set for interacting with authoritarian governments who use computers to oppress their people, like Iran, Russia... and the U.S.
"Little Brother" is a somewhat flawed work but at least it teaches paranoia. Note to Linux community, someone really needs to put together Paranoid Linux and XNet with Tor, gnupg, WiFi sniffers, security tools, etc. and make sure computer noobs who want to overthrow their out of control governments have it, and can use it out of the box even if they are noobs.
There is a reason the NSA is building two giant new data centers in Utah and San Antonio and expanding the one in Maryland. They appear to be preparing to spy on a whole lot more communications traffic than they already are. Anyone who think America's bout with Big Brother ended when Obama replaced Bush are sadly mistaken. The Democrats are just as eager to spy on everyone and destroy all our civil liberties as the Cheneyists were.
A burning question of the 21st century is if computers will liberate us or enslave us. The paradoxical answer is they will probably do both at the same time.
Re:Why is it... (Score:4, Insightful)
Most people should have known that Twitter's days were numbered when CNN and The View started harping on people to follow them on Twitter. That's generally a sign that it's over, not that it's the next big thing.
Re:Why is it... (Score:2, Insightful)
The real problem here is people making business decisions based on reading a fucking report instead of hiring someone who actually knows what's going on. A report written by people who do not, themselves, know what is going on.
Twitter is not used for what people imagine it is used for. Period. No one has the time or inclination to actually send status updates constantly, and frankly that was a little idiotic to start with. It's sometimes used as a sort of broadband instant messages for you you need to do that, like if you're at a concert with a dozen friends and everyone's wandering around, but it's not that useful.
It's real funny to watch 'serious' people jump on the bandwagon that never actually existed, that normal human being got bored with after four days and just hooked up to their facebook status and now update both twice a day.
It's exceptionally funny that anyone ever bought Twitter's premise. People do not want to narrate their life in real time, unless they are somewhere very boring and have nothing else to do, at which point they will MST3k their life. They don't even want to narrate it retroactively unless they did something very interesting like go on vacation. Anyone with the slightest bit of intelligence could have told investors this.
And I don't know in what world this kid lives in, but I'm around teenagers a lot, and let me tell you, they use SMS all the time. I volunteer at a local theatre. We're doing Music Man. A dozen teenagers, all with cell phones. At intermission, half of them rush to get their phones and return messages.(1)
And no one chats over 'console games'. First of all, it requires everyone to be at their game console at the same time. (I'm assuming that there's some sort of global chat for newer systems that operates independent of games, and in all games...if not this is even stupider, as they'd have to be in the same game.)
And a lot of houses have their game consoles in, you know, the living room, which means they'd be chatting in public. In front of their parents. So yeah...
Seriously, this is why you don't rely on one person's experience. That might be how he and his friends chat, but it probably totally irrelevant to society at large.
Which, of course, makes it perfect for a Morgan Stanley report.
1) However, the crazy 'people IMing people who are room with each other' report that we got a few months ago is also bogus.
Re:I've Heard This Story Before (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm normally as disparaging of teenagers as they come, having recently left that "I know everything there is to know" stage of my life (I'm 22).
I think you may still have some more more moments in the future where you realize how little you knew as a teenager and how, at 22, you vastly underestimated the amount you didn't know as a teen. :)
This isn't a flame at you, I just think it's what happens as we learn more and reflect.
Re:Why is it... (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a massive and explicit difference between the reports. Others said "Twitter is stupid." This kid said "Twitter isn't bad, but the uses of it are driving away long-term users and leaving those that follow personalities." Twitter itself is a good idea. It's a convenient place for a mass-IM to subscribers. If people only sent tweets on important things, it would be permanent. However, when people get bathroom updates, it's all crap. I'm not on. I don't want to be that connected. But if I were on, I'd have sent out something like one per month or less (and they'd be big things, like one narcisist one about my vacation to California, one about my wife being pregnant, and one about getting New Zealand permanent residency, with the next one being the date that we are leaving the country, once known). But with multiple per day, I don't care when someone's going to the mall so I can run into them there. I may be old, but if I wanted to run into someone, I'd text them, not announce it to masses.
And that's why twitter will fail. To promote themselves, they promoted the "tweet everything" attitude, and people do. And that drives off those that want medium connectivity, not webcam-in-the-bathroom connectivity. And that's the idea behind why this kid said it is going to fail. Not any problem with the technology or the general idea, but the current usage and its lack of sustainability.
Re:Oh, God, the Grammar (Score:4, Insightful)
just like to bitch, or trying to make yourself seem better by putting other people down.
Oh, one of those, probably. That sounds like me.
It's possible, if you don't mind a hypothetical, that I believe that standardization of language is one of the greatest boons to communication and education that the world has ever devised. The degeneration of language hurts a society's future generations, who will have difficulty comprehending what's written today. I (hypothetically) weep at the thought that our grandchildren will never appreciate the great writers of the past century, because corruption of language will make them as inaccessible as Chaucer or Shakespeare are today.
An argument could also be made that I believe that well-structured and grammatical writing improve the comprehension of readers, and that the ability to write correctly is an important skill to anyone who wishes to communicate with the written word, a belief based on faith in my heart, plus the umpteen-thousand empirical studies that have shown this to be true. That is, poor communication communicates poorly, which in modern America seems to be a shockingly radical position to (hypothetically) take.
Another man might even put forth the idea that heaping praise upon mediocrity is unwise.
But the truth is that I'm just a bit of a dick about it.
Re:I've Heard This Story Before (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm normally as disparaging of teenagers as they come, having recently left that "I know everything there is to know" stage of my life (I'm 22).
I think you may still have some more more moments in the future where you realize how little you knew as a teenager and how, at 22, you vastly underestimated the amount you didn't know as a teen. :)
And doubtless someday in the future I'll realize how little I knew and understood at 22. If you don't have that feeling every so often, it's a sign that you haven't learned a lot recently, so having that feeling is a very good thing, even if it makes you face-palm at your younger self. :)
TWITS (Score:1, Insightful)
Twitter and the vast majority of social networking communication is void of what sorely needed today
1) truth
2) meaning
3) language that conveys the 1st 2
Be it Facebook, MySpace but mostly Twitter, there is more communication but less is said and rarely, really understood universally. Its mostly inside and compartmentalized conversation of which was born of other meaningless interaction.
This is Gen N, for NARCISSCISM, as if anyone gives a rats ass what you think.
Twitter just proves what "Media Hype" can accomplish but that will only go so far.
Reach out and really touch someone, make a fucking phone call or better yet, get some face time, you witless twits!
Re:Games consoles? (Score:3, Insightful)
I also thought it was interesting how he referred to a copy of a music file on his hard drive as a "hard copy". It seems to indicate to me a pretty big change in the perceived transience of digital data.
Re:I've Heard This Story Before (Score:3, Insightful)
Every so often, I'll find something I wrote 25 years ago, and be just a little startled at how perceptive I was.
The can be interpreted as you hope, or it can be interpreted that you are still an obtuse, selfish dipshit after 25 years.