Rainbox

A recent entry on Rex is Excited got me thinking about how people my age are using technology.

Rex writes:

I’m riding the bus down from school right now, heading home. I’m wearing my headphones, listening to a podcast on my iPod from O’Reilly, a discussion panel of non-techies about their experiences on the web. What I’d like to be able to do is to talk about this with someone here on the bus, but the problem is that the people here at UCSC are largely not ‘web people.’

I find this to be true with the students here at Chapman as well. Most of the people involved in the cool new (and often overhyped) stuff on the web are all out of school. So what about my generation?

I find, at least in my surroundings of young middle to upper class students, that computer literacy is generally pretty high. Most students at Chapman have laptops. Everyone has, and uses Facebook. (When I was in high school, the same was true for MySpace, though things may change now that Facebook doesn’t require a university e-mail address.)

People have webmail and IM. AIM is dominant here. I’ve seen people using the university webmail system, MSN Hotmail, and Yahoo; the savvier ones use Gmail. People send text messages all the time. Even in class, which is one of the reasons it’s so attractive.

I think there is growing awareness for stuff like podcasting, and of course everyone and their mom knows about blogging.

As far as I’ve observed, people don’t seem interested in:

1. “Web 2.0″ - whatever that means. Most people don’t know what RSS/news feeds are, and if they do they rarely use them.
2. Supposedly popular “social networks” and social news/bookmarks/photo sharing/etc. Sites such as digg, del.icio.us, flickr, or even the constantly hyped twitter are largely ignored. This excludes Facebook.
3. “Contributing” to the web, e.g. writing blogs, posting stuff to Youtube, etc. (with notable exceptions.) I do recall a rather disappointing LiveJournal/Xanga trend where high schoolers would talk about stupid stuff like parties, angst, whatnot. I believe this has been largely superseded by notes on Facebook and the MySpace equivalent.

Number three is called participation inequality and has been studied by Jakob Neilsen and others. Guy Kawasaki conducted a teen panel on technology and advertising last year that suggests these trends hold even for silicon valley kids. Other than that, I haven’t done any research; this is just my general impression from being around high school and college age kids and seeing what technologies they use.

The overwhelming trend I see is that technology is used heavily among young people when it enables communication and further interaction with their real-life friends. Facebook makes it easier to organize events, get contact info, and stay in touch with old friends and even acquaintances who are far away (I have friends on Facebook from as far back as elementary school!) IM makes contacting people almost effortless and is what I like to call low-bandwidth.

Digression: I speak of bandwidth in terms of communication richness. A large part of communication has to do with tone of voice/inflection as well as facial gestures and body language. All of this subtext is absent in IM and other written forms of communication, which is why it’s much easier to misinterperet someone over IM or email (and difficult to detect sarcasm.) Emoticons developed as a way to supplement text by indicating what the speaker’s face would look like. [End digression.]

My main point is that, since the “blogosphere” (who came up with that word? on second thought, I don’t want to know) is more or less dominated by white and asian middle to upper class technology nerds, so things that are regarded as hugely popular (read: twitter) might not be in the grand scheme of things- even in the tech-savvy middle to upper class body of high school and college students.

Here’s a test: what’s the most popular photo sharing site on the web? If you ask a web nerd, chances are that they would answer flickr. However, according to Ezra Callahan, it’s actually Facebook. Callahan, a Facebook employee, reported this during a presentation he gave on “The Facebook Phonomenon” at Chapman which I attended. I’m not exactly sure what metrics they used to determine this, but I can believe it. (Yes, the definition of “popular” is a bit vague. I’ll post an update if I locate any sources on this.)

Of course, there are plenty of exceptions to this trend including myself. Obviously I blog, and I also use services like del.icio.us, flickr, and Google Reader. I’ve also maintained a personal homepage since I was a kid- something rare, especially after the brain death of crappy but free hosting sites like geocities, tripod, and angelfire. And I’m not alone. I can count four or five people I know who have websites- although this includes film production house websites (mine is Catman do Films.) The number of bloggers is higher. See the links section of my personal blog for artifacts of the short burst of blogging many of my friends engaged in during high school. There are also communities of active teen bloggers, such as the classy Random Shapes Blog Network (figured I’d plug ‘em before I apply!)

However, I have no reason to believe that we are anything but exceptions.

I’d love to hear comments on this, but I don’t have what you might call a readership yet so I’m not expecting much. But suprises are nice.