Twitter mania? Young people flock to Twitter grudgingly
By siliconindia   |   Friday, 23 October 2009, 22:40 IST
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Twitter mania? Young people flock to Twitter grudgingly
Chicago: Some think it is pointless, narcissistic and some call it senseless blabbering. And some don't even know what it is. Even then more young adults and teens, normally at the cutting edge of technology, are finally coming around to Twitter, using it for class or work, monitoring minute to minute details of their favorite celebrities' lives. It's not perpetually the love at first tweet, as many of them do it grudgingly, perhaps because a friend pressures them or a teacher or boss makes them try the 140 character microblogging site. "I still find no point to using it. I'm the type of person who likes to talk to someone," said Austyn Gabig, a second year student at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) who joined Twitter this month because she heard Ellen DeGeneres was going to use tweets as a way to give tickets to her talk show. Gabig was left furious on the UCSD campus when DeGeneres promised the tickets to those who, within 15 minutes of the tweet, e-mailed her cell phone photos of themselves wearing a red towel and standing with someone in a uniform. Gabig got the tweet, found a towel, and won tickets. Now she might think she will not tweet again, but social networking Expert David Silver predicts she will change her mind. "Every semester, Twitter is the one technology that students are most resistant to," says Silver, a Media Studies Professor at the University of San Francisco, where he regularly takes a class on how to use various internet applications. "But it's also the one they end up using the most." Silver and others say that this is a rare instance; of young people adopting an internet application after many of their older counterparts have already done so. Their slowness to go to Twitter comes from a fondness for the ease and directness of text messaging and other social networking services that many of their friends already use. Many also are under the wrong impression that their Twitter pages have to be public, which is unappealing to a generation for whom privacy is an important issue. "In some ways, what we're seeing here is a kind of closing of that generational gap as it relates to technology," says Craig Watkins, a University of Texas Professor and Author of the book 'The Young and the Digital.' For instance, the median age of a Facebook user is now 33, despite the social-networking site's roots as a college hangout, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project. The median age for a Twitter user is 31. While the Facebook users are aging, users of Twitter are getting younger. Internet tracker comScore found that 18-24 of age made 18 percent of unique visitors to Twitter in September, compared to 11 percent a year earlier. The kids from ages 12-17 accounted for 12 percent of Twitter visitors last month, about double the proportion of a year earlier. The Pew researchers in a new report say that the user's base of 18-24 ages that use some type of status-update service is also growing quickly. They attribute much of the growth to Twitter. "So much of this is driven by community. I'd even call it a tribe," says Susannah Fox, a Pew Researcher, and Author of the new report. Susannah said that the survey also found that wireless devices are increasingly a factor in Twitter involvement, as in the more the people have laptops and mobile phones, more likely is one to tweet. Alex Lifschitz, a third year student at the Rochester Institute of Technology, New York, uses Twitter as a tight-knit circle, he keeps his contacts more limited than on Facebook. By his cell phone or laptop, he tweets to let his professors know if he can make it to class or to ask questions about assignments. He also uses it for something as basic as organizing a food run with friends on campus. "I can simply tweet and ask who wants to go somewhere with me, and I'll have a few takers at any given time," says Lifschitz. A recent graduate, Mallory Wood, Saint Michael's College in Vermont, is another Twitter convert, primarily for work. She's now an Admissions Counselor there, in charge of getting more people to follow her department on Twitter. She uses Twitter to offer application fee waivers to prospective students and points them to links to student blogs, even some with complaints about campus life. "You have to be real with them," says Mallory. But that's still not enough to persuade some young people to get on board. "Quite frankly, I don't need to hear if someone stepped in dog poo on the way to class or how annoyed they are that they lost their favorite pen," says Carolyn Wald, a University of Chicago junior who has not joined Twitter and rarely posts status updates on Facebook because "I don't want to assume that people want to hear those things about me, either." Teen pop star Miley Cyrus stopped tweeting recently, griping in a rap song she posted on YouTube that, among other things, she'd grown weary of making constant, meaningless updates about what she was doing. Silver, Professor from the University of San Francisco is showing his students how a simple status update can become a more sophisticated way to show their creative sides and, who knows, maybe land a job. "It's just another tool in your tool kit. The question is, how do you engage someone just long enough to get them to click on a link?" Silver tells his students. Scott Testa, a Business Administration Professor who teaches marketing at Cabrini College in suburban Philadelphia, encourages his students to use Twitter to follow companies they would like to work for. Renee Robinson, an Associate Professor of Communication at Saint Xavier University in Chicago, says her students still feel overwhelmed by Twitter. "They often see it as another level of information that they don't want," she says.

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