Teens Are Turning Away from Facebook?

[ed. It doesn't take a lot of insight to realize teenagers will always need a place to hang out away from the prying eyes of adults. The question is where they'll do it. Privacy controls on FB have become too complicated (and FB too complicit in exploiting those complications). Yet, the future of social networking hardly seems (or should be) limited to 140 characters (i.e Twitter), or Tumblr blogs. Kids are smart. They'll figure out what's real and what isn't. In the mean time, one should ask whenever they read articles like this what the motives are for writing such a story (and why such a heavy emphasis on Tumblr?).]

Teenagers really are over Facebook. In February the social network warned investors that "our younger users ... are aware of and actively engaging with other products and services similar to, or as a substitute for, Facebook." And in April the investment bank Piper Jaffray reported that products and services like Tumblr and Twitter were further eroding Facebook's dominance among the Justin Bieber set. But why? In a deep report published on Tuesday, Pew Research explains that teenagers departing the social network's blue confines are looking for something more... real. More authentic. Which, ironically, was the initial draw of Facebook, one of the first social networks to require real names.

Pew shows how Facebook has been slowly colonized by the very forces teens signed up to escape: watchful parents, too-old adults, and "drama" — nasty conversations that would never arise in real life. To contend with these annoying developments, teens aren't deleting their Facebook accounts; they're just using them less and less, spending more time on Twitter and Instagram, where conservations are limited to short-form text, links, and simple photos; or Tumblr, which emphasizes content over consolidated user profiles. Here's how one (anonymous) interviewee put it to Pew during a focus group:

Female (age 15): “I have a Facebook, a Tumblr, and Twitter. I don’t use Facebook or Twitter much. I rather use Tumblr to look for interesting stories. I like Tumblr because I don’t have to present a specific or false image of myself and I don’t have to interact with people I don’t necessarily want to talk to.”  (...)

"Where people post unnecessary pictures and say unnecessary things" is probably not the slogan Facebook was hoping for, especially among such an impressionable demographic. But it's probably music to Marissa Mayer's ears — Yahoo's $1.1 billion deal for Tumblr is being seen as something of a sea change in social media from what The New York Times described in today's paper as a "passive" kind of "social directory," as opposed to, say, Tumblr, one of many sites that have "come up with ways to let people control and generate content and project identity." Because that's, you know, a little bit more real these days.

by J.K. Trotter, Atlantic Wire |  Read more:

Image: Shutterstock