NO OLD PEOPLE ON FACEBOOK!

Some big news from Facebook's earnings report: Teens don't want to spend their time on Facebook anymore. 

Many don't want to be on the same media source as their mothers.  One teen mentioned the irksome curse of her aunt (in her 30's) tagging every one of her photos with "Isn't she cute?"

Another teen said there should be an age limit for Facebook: No old people on Facebook!!

A teen surveyed, Aidan, says that he created his Facebook account before he had a cell phone. On a computer, FB was his best choice, but now that he has a phone, he would rather check out other cooler options, like Snapchat, Vine, and Instagram.

(Have you ever heard of Snapchat and Vine by the way?)

" Facebook takes more time to create and read," he said. "And words are less important than images and videos."

Did you get that last? 

Even with eBooks, are we the last generation to be reading for pleasure?

Lucas, another teen surveyed, says that although pretty much everyone he knows has an account, only about 25% of them still use Facebook regularly. 

He likes Vine and Instagram because you can just scroll through quickly when you're bored, looking for funny or interesting stuff but not having full conversations.

 

He sees Facebook more for communicating personally with friends, but even then it's not his first choice. 

"You’d probably just text them, or a lot of people use Kik," he said. " You can use it with an iPod."

Kik is a messaging service like WhatsApp. It's by no means new, but both Lucas and Aidan said it's very popular with their age-group right now. (Interestingly, neither mentioned Twitter .)

 

In fact, teens' mobile-first habits actually threaten to topple tech's legacy platforms.

 

The fragmentation of social media may have started with teens but it will soon climb up the "age chain." (I don't know about you, my link on the age chain is beginning to rust!)

 

WhatsApp, the messaging service with 300 million users, which has been able to collect paid download and annual subscription revenue, provides an alternative to Facebook chat without any intrusive marketing getting in the way.

 

How exactly does the technology we use to read change the way we read?

Technology codes our minds.  How does social media code ours?

Psychologist Jean Twenge is the author of a study showing that the tendency toward narcissism in students is up 30 percent in the last thirty-odd years.

On Facebook, young people can fool themselves into thinking they have hundreds or thousands of “friends.” They can delete unflattering comments.

They can block anyone who disagrees with them or pokes holes in their inflated self-esteem.

They can choose to show the world only flattering, sexy or funny photographs of themselves (dozens of albums full, by the way),

“speak” in pithy short posts and publicly connect to movie stars and professional athletes and musicians they “like.”

Using Twitter, young people can pretend they are worth “following,” as though they have real-life fans, when all that is really happening is the mutual fanning of false love and false fame.

All the while, these adolescents, teens and young adults are watching a Congress that can’t control its manic, euphoric, narcissistic spending,

a president that can’t see his way through to applauding genuine and extraordinary achievements in business,

a society that blames mass killings on guns, not the psychotic people who wield them, and—

here no surprise—

a stock market that keeps rising and falling like a roller coaster as bubbles inflate and then, inevitably, burst.

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT ALL OF THIS?

 

Here is what Neil Gaiman thinks:

 

'We have an obligation to imagine' … Neil Gaiman gives The Reading Agency annual lecture on the future of reading and libraries. Photograph: Robin Mayes

    

 I'm going to tell you that libraries are important. I'm going to suggest that reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is one of the most important things one can do.

 

Fiction has two uses.

 

Firstly, it's a gateway drug to reading. The drive to know what happens next, to want to turn the page, the need to keep going, even if it's hard, because someone's in trouble and you have to know how it's all going to end …

 

that's a very real drive.

 

And it forces you to learn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going. To discover that reading per se is pleasurable. Once you learn that, you're on the road to reading everything.

 

And reading is key.

 

Words are more important than they ever were: we navigate the world with words, and as the world slips onto the web,

 

we need to follow, to communicate and to comprehend what we are reading.

 

People who cannot understand each other cannot exchange ideas, cannot communicate, and translation programs only go so far.

 

The second thing fiction does is to build empathy.

 When you watch TV or see a film, you are looking at things happening to other people.

Prose fiction is something you build up from 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks,

and you, and you alone, using your imagination,

create a world and people it and look out through other eyes.

You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know.

You learn that everyone else out there is a me, as well.

You're being someone else, and when you return to your own world, you're going to be slightly changed.

Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.

You're also finding out something as you read vitally important for making your way in the world. And it's this:

The world doesn't have to be like this. Things can be different.  {For the rest of his talk go to:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/15/neil-gaiman-future-libraries-reading-daydreaming }

What do you think of all of this?