Generational Timelines
Recently, I was struck by an odd phenomena: while using Snapchat an alias that normally belonged to my mother appeared to have added me. Inspired, I added the user back and sent a snap in reply. Perhaps unsurprisingly (or is that surprisingly?!), my mother responded.
What makes this event interesting is that my mother, as you might expect, is far and away older than most of my peers. However, when confronted about why they are not on Snapchat, work and school colleagues often give excuses that they are "too old," to use Snapchat. Now that both of my parents are on Snapchat, I feel as though I can safely reject this excuse: there is seemingly no age ceiling for social media... or at very minimum, Snapchat.
While there may not be an age ceiling to social media, there are certainly other barriers to entry. Buzzfeed contributor Ben Rosen recently wrote an article about "how to Snapchat like a teen,"[0] which, in my opinion, perfectly highlights this barrier. One of the things that surfaces during Ben's foray into teen snapchatting is that his perceived intended use of Snapchat is vastly different from that of his little sister, Brooke. Brooke claims that often she does not even see what are in the messages that people send to her—which probably explains her ability to see and respond to hundreds of snaps a day. Further, Brooke seems to place a relatively high importance on the gamified aspects of the app (e.g. "streaks," you get from snapping someone consecutively between days, or "trophies," from accomplishing certain things in the app). Personally, I couldn't care less about the trophies that Snapchat awards me, but to each their own.
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Ben, on the other hand, appears to be baffled by his sister's use of Snapchat--and for good reason, too. It denies the social norm that when you send a friend something, they will open it, examine it, and return some sort of a reply. However, this use of Snapchat—responding without viewing—seems to be even more transient than a stream of consciousness.
However, social networks, especially new ones, seem to cater to the "stream of consciousness," variety of content generation. For the longest time, Twitter had a reputation as the ideal place to post a log of your meals or bowel movements, and Peach, a new social network, encourages users to post micro-updates about what they're currently doing. Peach goes so far as to include small widgets in your status update, indicating the time, what you're listening to, where you are, etc.
One of the interesting things about social networks however, is that people use it differently. Many people do use some networks actively as a place to broadcast their current going-ons to anyone who will pay attention. Other people, such as my parents, take a more passive role on social media, instead opting to use it primarily as a consumption mechanism to assist them in keeping up-to-date with the going-ons of their family. Rarely do they post something, but they are absolutely present.
The divergence between the use cases of social networks between generations is very real. Even looking at adoption statistics of social networks between age groups highlights that the older the demographic, the more susceptible to laggard status[1]. More than the fact of "older people are slower," I think that this points to the fact that different age groups tend to use social networks differently. As spare time dwindles, young adults and middle-aged folk tend to move away from social networks as keys to fixing boredom[2]. As people age, understanding the current culture of each social network becomes intimidating and even a little alienating. Several times I have had people profess confusion to me about what Snapchat is, or what you post to it.
The difference in demographics seems to establish how people use social media, and so this affects how varying age groups assimilate social media into their lives. For young people, what goes on in their timelines can be the biggest news that happens on a day-to-day basis, whereas other people generally (though not entirely) treat social networking as an accessory to their daily lives. This becomes especially apparent when looking at a curious problem that is affecting some young snapchatters: it is increasingly causing social anxiety problems such as FOMO ("fear of missing out."), as teens advertise their current statuses, and conversely, consume others' statuses, continuously[3]. The deep embedding of social media into people's lives has a profound affect on how it impacts them.
One way to analyze the embedding of social media into people's lives is to see how they are using the network, and what sort of content they may be generating. In a study conducted by some psychology researchers in the US and the UK [4], researchers found that certain age groups were very well represented by the words in the posts that they made. Young people focus on school, homework, and non-serious friendships; college students post about partying and roommates; middle aged folks focus on work, beer, and spouses; and the oldest demographic posts about family (and, as if they had nothing at all to say for themselves: reposts). Without a doubt, different people visit different social networks for different reasons.
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What will be unsurprising then, is that different demographics use different social networks[5]. A recent survey revealed that only 4% of respondents aged 65+ used Instagram, compared to 48% on Facebook. With more young people inhabiting a social space, the variety of content often changes—as family and relatives start to join, people become more selective about the content that they share, and in doing so, effectively change the status quo of the network. While many young netizens still have Facebook accounts, they spend less time on the social network than they once did. College students, who originally founded Facebook, are more often found on moment-to-moment sharing social networks such as Snapchat and Instagram, and to a growing extent, Peach. Facebook, inhabited more densely with parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, et cetera, then becomes more a place for monumental events, or a place to share accomplishments. It seems as the demographics of a social network change, the usage of the social network, as a whole, shifts.
There's an overarching pattern in the research too: in every social network except LinkedIn, the younger you are, the more likely you were to use social networks. Or, restated, the more social networks you are actively engaged in, the better the chance of you belonging to a younger age group. This paints a telling picture of how different generations use social networks, if not only as far as volume is concerned.
[0] http://www.buzzfeed.com/benrosen/how-to-snapchat-like-the-teens#.bi8odJ2KQ
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/social-media-usage-among-people-over-65-has-tripled-2015-11
[3] http://mashable.com/2015/10/20/snapchat-teen-insecurity/#Gcq3w7Bhy5qw
[4] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0073791
[5] http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/08/19/the-demographics-of-social-media-users/