The Overshoot and Overcorrection of media hype

In the Grauniad today is a report from Ofcom asserting that The Yoof are deserting Social Media because The Fogies are colonising it:

The sites, once the virtual streetcorners, pubs and clubs for millions of 15- to 24-year-olds, have now been over-run by 25- to 34-year-olds whose presence is driving their younger peers away.
Is Facebook for old fogies? The Guardian's Richard Wray investigates Link to this audio

Although their love of being online shows no sign of abating, the percentage of 15- to 24-year-olds who have a profile on a social networking site has dropped for the first time – from 55% at the start of last year to 50% this year. In contrast, 46% of 25- to 34-year-olds are now regularly checking up on sites such as Facebook compared with 40% last year.

Now - a little rant, if I may: I'm afraid the stats in the article are not well presented (produced in all too typical Journo higgledy-piggledyness that makes you think they probably flunked maths at 16), and they don't even link to the Ofcom article so I can check it. Good old MSM journalism at its finest, I am so going to pay for this sort of sh*t, oh yes.... (By the way, the Grauniad piece doesn't link to the Ofcom piece, but does self-link to other Grauniad pieces on the obscure terms "Social Networking", "Internet" and "Ofcom", and there is another piece which is about 60% the same which also self links to "broadband" and mobile")

Given what I can glean from these un-linked stats, and what I have read of Ofcom reports available on their site, I would translate this roughly as:

- The older Social Networks the Ofcom and Grauniad people know about are losing users (just ask MySpace....) and they have not picked up where the growth is occurring
- As more older people come online, the overall % of the total population that is Yoof is falling
- The Yoof are getting older - a 17 yr old in 2007 is a 19 yr old in 2009.
- Journos by and large can't read stats

In fact, there is a seemingly contradictory quote from one Jamie Thickett of Ofcom (again unlinked):

Clearly take-up among under 16-year-olds is very high … so we cannot say for certain whether this is people in a certain age group who are not setting up social networking profiles or whether it's a population shift which is reflecting people getting older and having a social networking profile that they set up two years ago,

My take, based on the observation of Real Kids, is that their behaviour hasn't really changed in the last 2 - 3 years. What has changed more is that the Media Hype Machine - New Tech Journos, Pop Academics and DotCom PR flacks - massively overegged The Yoof's reaction to SM in the early days (no doubt to Pump up Their Value) and now more sanguine research is showing the underlying reality, which requires a resetting of the overlying Hype.

In other words, they are just moving along the Hype cycle (now how about that for gratuitous self linking)

And my observation tells me that the biggest Social tool the Yoof still use, by far, is IM. But try and find an academic treatise on that rather than MySpace and Facebook etc......