This is the website of Alex White, in Melbourne Australia, a campaigns and communications professional working in the trade union movement.

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Young people don’t blog

For my Project 52 post, I thought I’d comment about a recent Pew report has come to my attention via DownloadSquad that says that young people are blogging less:

Pew Internet released a report yesterday called Social Media and Young Adults that shows teen blogging down by 50% over the past four years, even as blogging increased among those over 30 years old.

The report also shows that teens are not very likely to be Twitter users (only 8% of internet users between the ages of 12 and 17 report using the service), even though they are heavy users of almost all other online applications; in fact, 73% of “wired American teens” are social networking website users. Twitter seems to stick out as a service that younger people are not as interested in.

The report is really talking about teens – 12 to 17 year olds – and I have to say that the conclusions follow my observations. While I grew up before the Internet and social networks became ubiquitous, I remember MSN and ICQ were used widely. With Facebook and MySpace (and their in-house chats), it seems to me that most young people are more interested in talking with each other.

DownloadSquad also concludes that young people aren’t “content creators”. I’m not sure I agree with that. Rather, I think young people only share their content – photos and videos – with their friends, rather than putting them on Flickr or a blog.

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