In Response to a Report by Matthew Robson, Teenage Morgan Stanley Intern

This bit of hysterical reporting is something you’ll see around the Internet today if you read technology sites. (I don’t mean to single out Bloomberg; it was the handiest link I had.) It details a 15-year-old Morgan Stanley intern’s report on all things at the intersection of youth and technology, and will no doubt cause some hand-wringing: The intern apparently says that teens don’t use Twitter, and that newspapers are “irrelevant.”

But there are fundamental misunderstandings and oversights of a few things at play here that make that anxiety at least premature. First, on Twitter, another reporting, from the Guardian, has a more complete reasoning for why teens don’t use the site.

“Teenagers do not use Twitter,” (Robson) wrote. “Most have signed up to the service, but then just leave it as they realise that they are not going to update it (mostly because texting Twitter uses up credit, and they would rather text friends with that credit). They realise that no one is viewing their profile, so their tweets are pointless.”

This is not surprising: 60 percent of U.S. users fail to return a month after signing up, and the lion’s share of tweets are authored by a small percentage of Twitter users. So teens in the U.K. aren’t far off from what people in the U.S. do with Twitter, and, without the interaction Twitter provides with a group of friends, it loses its appeal quickly.

But the credit and texting claim seems to confuse the issue. Though Twitter can be used by texting an SMS message from a mobile device, it is a small percentage that uses that medium. And, besides the monetary cost of a text, it’s cognitively difficult to text 140-character updates to Twitter for a generation chatting with itself in 160-character SMS missives; that Twitter sends back a message when mobile updates are too long probably turns more cost-conscious teens off as well.

Robson also writes what appears to me, a contemporary, to be obvious truths: Teens prefer online, bite-sized news to print sources they “can’t be bothered” to read; teens dislike intrusive advertising, finding it “extremely annoying,” but can deal with viral marketing if it’s funny; teens are “reluctant” to spend money on music when it can be accessed freely on the Internet, downloading much of their music from illegal sources; teens dislike wired and immobile forms of communication and like touch screens.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with that, except for the frightening quote it elicits:

The schoolboy was asked by the bank’s European media analysts to report on what he and his peers look for in the information-entertainment industries. What they got was one of the “clearest and most thought-provoking insights we have seen,” the analysts said.

This is clear and thought-provoking and worthy of media buzz? Do these analysts not have children? Do they not talk to them? Is this really not obvious to people in these industries?

I implore you, Morgan Stanley: If you’re going to commission a report from a 15-year-old (which, frankly, I will keep a level of skepticism about until I read it), at least don’t act like he reinvented the wheel. You’re going to look bad for being clueless rather than clairvoyant for hiring a young intern.

These aren’t revelations, and that they should be treated as such seems to indicate a significant disconnect between my generation and the people trying to sell things to them.

Update: The link to the full paper is here.

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