Reading Red Light Politics this morning, I discovered that

Your parents dominate Social Media

Brian Solis did some data crunching on The Age of Social Networks, analyzing the demographics of 19 different social media sites and surprisingly, what came up is not what most of us would have imagined. Two examples (I am just picking the two most popular ones, the complete list, with more graphics and commentary at the link above):

Twitter – More than 25% of users are 35-44, trailed by the 45-54 group at less than 20% (65% of all users are over the age of 35 with less than 20% representing the 24 and under age groups)

Facebook - ~25% of users are 45-54 with the 35-44 group at just 20% (61% are 35 or older)

Tumblr was not included in the study, but I suspect it would show a younger demographic than all the others.

Let’s leave aside two points:

1. I’m getting precariously close to the age range that would qualify me as “your parents,” at least according to my friend over at Red Light Politics;
2. I’m not entirely convinced that including Tumblr would bring down the average age of social networking users. While it might be the case that the average Tumblr user is younger than the average Twitter user — for example, several hundred teenage girls from the Philippines follow my blog on Tumblr but very few teenage girls from the Philippines follow me on Twitter — I suspect that there are enough Tumblr users in the 25-54 age ranges to balance things out.

Instead, what I’m incredibly curious about is why college-aged people seem not to be doing a whole lot of online social networking. Like the 65+ group, they’re strikingly underrespresented here … but, unlike the 65+ group, my sense is that they should be naturally more adept at and more interested in making use of social networking.

See here:

I suppose the easy answer is that they’re all too busy studying all the time. Or, perhaps more realistically, they spend their free time on real-world social networking: they’re going to bars, clubs, concerts, or simply meeting one another in the dorms and classrooms of their universities.

But I want to know why they aren’t also making use of online social networking; it doesn’t take up a whole lot of time; it can be done on the go with a smartphone or iPod; and it seems to line up nicely with the texting-rather-than-talking shift that we’ve seen over the past few years. Why, then, don’t people in their late teens and early twenties see the same value in connecting with people online — those they know personally and also those they do not — that people a few years younger and a few years older seem to see?

Apart from intellectual curiosity, answering these questions matters a great deal to me because I use Twitter in some of my classes — with generally mixed results, as some students feel that using social networking is a terrible hardship and so they opt not to participate — and because I’ve been thinking about trying to use Tumblr for a class blogging exercise in the future. Basically, I’ve been holding onto the belief that this age group can and should be using social networking — and that using it as part of a class might demonstrate the general benefit of having information at hand on topics of one’s choosing and on sharing that information with others — but perhaps these graphs should make me reconsider.