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Well, it appears that Morgan Stanley in the UK has done the unthinkable…they have actually gone to a teenager to find out how teenagers use and view media and media access tools. The views of a summer intern at Morgan Stanley, Matthew Robson (age 15 years and 7 months) have rocked popular wisdom to the core over the last few days and made Robson into an instant meme. It would seem that so many of the assumptions of the media moguls were all wrong…at least as far as 15 year olds in the UK are concerned. What a surprise.

Robson’s viewpoint seems spot on to me, not just regarding the UK but for teenagers globally. The following paragraph from the Executive Summary of Morgan Stanley’s reports puts it pretty clearly…

There are several issues that immediately jump out from the piece. Teenagers are consuming more media, but in entirely different ways and are almost certainly not prepared to pay for it. They resent intrusive advertising on billboards, TV and the Internet. They are happy to chase content and music across platforms and devices (iPods, mobiles, streaming sites). Print media (newspapers, directories) are viewed as irrelevant but events (cinema, concerts etc.) remain popular and one of the few beneficiaries of payment. The convergence of gaming, TV, mobile and Internet is accelerating with huge implications for pay-TV.

As far as internet tools and social media, Robson had this to say…

Most teenagers are heavily active on a combination of social networking sites. Facebook is the most common, with nearly everyone with an internet connection registered and visiting >4 times a week. Facebook is popular as one can interact with friends on a wide scale. On the other hand, teenagers do not use twitter. Most have signed up to the service, but then just leave it as they release that they are not going to update it (mostly because texting twitter uses up credit, and they would rather text friends with that credit). In addition, they realise that no one is viewing their profile, so their ‘tweets’ are pointless.

From these views we could say that Twitter is a transition media, used by us post Baby Boomers and Generation X’ers but soon to be abandoned by the first wave of adults who were born in the internet age. On the other hand perhaps it is just that tools like Twitter, which don’t require a lot of time spent creating profiles and pages and can be accessed in short bursts on the fly, is more suited to older, working people with less free time on their hands.

As I read the report, I couldn’t help thinking of the classic scene from A Hard Day’s Night (see the clip below) as the late George Harrison gives his views on the “Teenager Industry”.

Ta, Sonny Jim.

(Picture Credit- Corbis)

Zealot (473 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook

By day a department manager and writer for a major network device vendor...by night Zealot stalks the mean magnetic streets, striking fear into the hearts of bandwidth abusers and theme park mascots. Zealot has been involved with mobile devices for more than a decade now, starting off with dumb phones, moving to PDAs and then to smartphones, notebooks and netbooks with the odd PMP thrown in. Most of his mobile time currently is spent on a Treo Pro, Zune HD, Thinkpad T61, Gigabyte M912M or a Hackintoshed Compaq Mini 704. He proudly groks the Geek community and considers himself a Neo Maxi Zune Dweebie (thanks Will Wheaton!).