Anna Cooban: Why teenagers don't like Twitter

Jul 14 2009 by Anna Cooban, Birmingham Post

A recent report by a 15-year-old intern at Morgan Stanley about how young people access their media sent consternation through the Twittersphere. Here Solihull teenager Anna Cooban gives her take on what’s hot and what’s not in the media world.

Deemed too ‘adult’, social networking site Twitter has a battle on its hands if it wants to charm users of a younger generation.

The problem is, it is perceived by us as a platform for celebrities to divulge uninteresting information concerning their private lives – quite hypocritical really considering many of these perpetrators will readily complain over an ‘intrusion of privacy’ when the media publish intimate details they haven’t Twittered. Instead, websites such as MySpace and Facebook have proved extremely popular within our teenage society.

With more than 200 millions active users, Facebook allows teenagers to share details and form friendships. However, it is MySpace which has unintentionally cultivated a virtual community obsessed with the amount of friends and picture comments belonging to each member. No longer are our profiles an innocent ploy to instigate new relationships, they are now a social veneer used to portray a false representation of our popularity.

We feel under immense pressure to appear appreciated within our peer group, and so are consequently fixated with obtaining a high number of comments to adorn our already over-stylized profiles. Some would argue that it is both natural and expected for teenagers to feel a certain degree of constraint to conform, although others would say these social networking sites only promote unhealthy competition and have become nothing more than a indication of an ability to be accepted. Nevertheless, we are using the internet now more than ever.

This is a stark contrast to the ever-depleting teenage readership of newspapers. The traditional newspaper struggles in comparison to the introduction of online newspapers and 24-hour televised news, as these are both readily available free of cost. We will only buy a newspaper if it is presented to us with a headline of interest, as opposed to the unconditional relationship the papers have historically enjoyed with their readerships.