Upwardly mobile - the youth of a social media age
March 10th, 2009 by Tim Greenhalgh
The innovative spirit is bright and light over at Futurelab, which has just gently announced that an exceptional mobile education tool, ShoutBox, has been nominated for a top regional media innovation award.
I really like the idea of ShoutBox, a joint effort between Futurelab and Mobile Pie. It’s a cross-platform tool that young people can use to recognise, capture and showcase their informal out-of-school learning experiences. Young people generate and collate different forms of content using their mobile phone and then share this online, tagging their learning as sports, work, art, music and so on.
I mention this in the context of several pieces of youth and mobile-oriented news this week, topped by the merger of social network Piczo and fashion virtual world Stardoll. Here is the power of social media writ large and underlines again that the network revolution is only just beginning.
The merger will give young people – the tweens and teens – resources to build their own sites and engage with buddies as well as create and develop virtual fashion lines. Brands that connect successfully in these spaces will be building relationships with more than 20 million young people a month. There’s power.
Both entities are working to build out their mobile offering, surely the next logical step as network speed and browser improvements (see the new Bolt) deliver the anywhere, anytime web.
The news comes as Coventry University researchers show the positive side of mobile youth – a welcome contrast to recent moral panics around the way young people play and learn. The researchers studied 88 children aged between 10 and 12 to understand the impact of text messaging on their language skills.
Their study indicates that text speak, rather than harming literacy, could have a positive effect on the way children interact with language. “Textisms” could be having a positive impact on reading development.
The study, published in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology suggests that children’s use of textisms can have positive effect on word reading ability, as well as contributing to reading development. Who’d have thought?…
All this dovetails well with a Nielsen Online report this week showing that one in every six minutes spent by UK users online is on social media and blogging sites. The research group said the member-community category is fourth most popular vertical globally, ahead of personal email.
The time spent on these categories is growing three times faster than the overall internet rate, accounting for almost 10 per cent of all internet time globally. Nielsen find that more than 65 per cent of web users regularly visit and update social media or member community sites, including blogs and social networks.
Welcome to the future, led in greater part by the young – just as it should be. They’ll be teaching us a thing or two about honestry, transparency and integrity in social networks - surely this will help us guide brands into the complex terrain of engagement over the next generation.
Tags: Bolt Browser, British Journal of Developmental Psychology, Coventry University, Futurelab, Mobile Pie, Nielsen Online, Piczo, ShoutBox, Stardoll
