Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

I came across this really interesting graph from Business Week of Internet demographics broken down by age and class of activity:

It was mostly what I expected, with my age group leading the wave of technology adoption. For us, email and IM are very mainstream, but social networking sites started just after we left college. So those of us on Facebook or MySpace tend to be either still in school or using them in conjunction with dating websites. On the other had, for my little sister and her friends, social networking sites are very mainstream.

An interesting thing from the graph is that the “critics” who comment on blogs and write reviews are older than the majority of the creators who write blogs and post to YouTube. It looks like the critics are more college aged and the creators are high school aged. It’s a minor numerical difference between the two categories, but I imagine the difference is that in college your social circle expands a lot, so you spend more time on other people’s sites.

I was also surprised that the “collectors” (people who use RSS to aggregate information) are spread out very evenly across all demographics. I would venture that this is a indication of poor adoption, as the use of RSS for Youth and Gen Y is very small relative to the general Internet usage.

The last thing that is interesting is the generalized age demographics. For the most part, if you had a particular technology available during your technological “formative years” (high school and college), you’re more likely to use it. That’s what we see right now, where the leading adoption curve is roughly matched with the age group that was in college when it was released.

We haven’t yet seen yet is if there is an age when people stop using social networking sites. I understand the advantage of staying on Facebook for a long time, since it will have your built up network. But I imagine as people get married and have a few kids, they get busy with “family” stuff and will have a lot less idle time to spend on those sites.

If that’s the case, forty years from now, the usage graph would have a similar shape. Though, instead of older user groups not ever using the services, the decreasing curve would be us kids growing up and decreasing our social network site usage.