Teens Don't Blog?

You remember “Teens Don’t Tweet”? Turns out they don’t blog either – or they do far less than once they did, at least in the US. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8497427.stm Only 14% of 12-17 year olds are blogging, according to Pew Internet.

I’m sure the media spin on this will be “death of blogging”, but that’s not necessarily the case. Voluntary writing at length is always going to be a niche, no matter how easy it is to do, and it’s not surprising that the much faster moving and more social world of status updates is more attractive to more people. I suspect if you could find figures for, say, teens keeping diaries in the 70s and 80s, you’d find that a lot more of them had a diary than actually kept it. But the IDEA of the “Dear Diary” private confessional culture was strong and widespread.What’s interesting isn’t how many teens are writing blogs, but what they’re doing with them.

This is an analysis gap in the media: tech journalism tends to be more interested in service funding and features than in the cultures that build up around them, mainstream and marketing journalism tend to be more interested in the bulk numbers – what percentage do this? How many do that?The upshot is that rather than focus on the emergent culture around personal expression online, analysis gets caught up in distinctions between “blogging”, “micro-blogging”, and so on. Does it actually matter if a 17 year old is sharing their opinions on a blog, Facebook, or Twitter? To venture capitalists, yes. To the rest of us, perhaps not.

And when teen online culture is discussed there’s usually a sensationalist air to it – think of the media’s horrified discovery of “sexting” for instance. (When that happens, of course, the numbers become a lot less relevant: the same Pew survey that produced the blogging figures also tells us that only 4% of teens admit to sending mucky pictures via phone. 4% in media terms becomes “shockingly common” (CBS) – whereas 14% blogging is a tiny minority.)

The service-based, numbers-based and sensation-based modes of reporting online activity do provide useful information. But there’s room for culture-based discussion too, and not enough of it seems to happen.