Serendipity35

I got a nice email from Slideshare this week saying that one of my presentations - "Using Student Blogs As Reflective Practice" was "being tweeted [on Twitter] more than any other document on SlideShare right now. So we've put it on the homepage of SlideShare.net (in the "Hot on Twitter" section)."

Pretty cool. But then today, I was reading a new report from the Pew Internet Project on "Social Media and Young Adults" that says that particular group of online users are no longer interested in consuming "long-form" content like blogs. (I know some educators would have trouble accepting blog posts as long-form content, but read on...)

Communication among teens tends to involve brief bursts of information - status updates and text messages. 14% of online teens (ages 12-17) now say they blog and that's down from 28% of teen internet users in 2006. There has even been a drop in just commenting on blogs within social networking websites - 52% of teen social network users report commenting on friends’ blogs, down from the 76% who did so in 2006.

By comparison, the prevalence of blogging within the overall adult internet population has remained steady in recent years. Pew Internet surveys since 2005 have consistently found that roughly one in ten online adults maintain a personal online journal or blog.

73% of wired teens now use social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace, a big jump from the 55% who did so back in 2006. (Only 40% of those 30 and older do the same.)

What killed blogging? Facebook. Updates take seconds to read, and seconds to write. Blog posts take time. I probably average about an hour per post and that doesn't include the research that some posts require. Teens don't have any interest in spending that kind of time.

I notice that many of my short posts here get more hits than the longer and "more thoughtful" ones. It's not that no one is willing to read. My weekend posts on the blog Weekends in Paradelle have found an audience in the past six months and they tend to be longer and more thoughtful, and I suspect the readers are not teens.

It's not hard to conjecture that teens are overloaded with information online. If I check in only once a day to my Facebook account, I'll probably find about 500 unread updates in my "News Feed." Too many "friends"; too much updating. Who has time to read a blog post, let alone write one?

Perhaps, blog posting will become an activity for the classroom like the five-paragraph essay, and for professionals and adults.