Just before the "kids not down with Twitter daddy-o" news broke, I asked my Goddaughter Cherry, the original one-girl focus group, what she thought of Twitter.
I never got round to posting her response, which was:
Slightly bored/disgusted look, then - "Twitter is boring. It's just status updates." Followed by a "that's a really dumb question that anyone could work out." look, and she went back to MSN.
because she made it clear that it was indeed a bit, like, obvious, whatever!
If you live on SMS and MSN (and games I guess if you are a lad), what would you need Twitter for?
But I wonder if she'll grow into it?
If Twitter is in a different part of the private/public map of social media spaces* than she needs at the moment, but that she will do when her identity has other public aspects, not least work-related?
And maybe she'll just find it useful as a tool, in A Levels, for example. One of her square old teachers in his Twenties might say "for homework, follow person X on Twitter, they are a good source of information on topic Y"
If she does grow into Twitter, I'll need a new one-person focus group though, because it'll mark the point where her media life is just the same as mine, but with a different soundtrack.
And I've got a bit of a wait to find one, because my nephew is only 3!
*I still don't think it's clear yet whether Twitter is in a necessary space or not. My guess is that it is, but that it's fully public, up towards the "broadcast" corner of the map, and a sub cultural not a universal space that it seemed to be heading towards.
So true, though perhaps by the time she grows into Twitter you'll have grown into something else, to preserve the appropriate generational distance. To my three-boy focus group blogging is already a perjorative term, as in "grown-ups are always blogging on about stuff".
Posted by: Matt | July 21, 2009 at 15:33