Non-tweeting teens? No fear!

by Greg McDonald

City investors are tweeting and texting in shocked horror today at the revelation – in a research note written by a 15-year-old Morgan Stanley intern and splashed across the front of the Financial Times – that teenagers don’t use Twitter!

Those of us old enough to throw up a bottle of super-strength cider without first sourcing a fake ID on Bebo can breathe a sigh of relief: today’s kids, who hate adverts and paying for stuff and like concerts and freebies, are just like us after all.

So if you signed up for Twitter, spent a weekend being updated on which of your work colleagues had recently made cups of tea, painted their garage doors or – most vitally – decided they might watch the EastEnders repeat, and promptly given up on being hip, it turns you’re more down with the kids than you thought.

As the old world of record companies and teen magazines goes up in smoke, you can forgive the money men for looking to an Actual Teenage Boy for what makes this generation tick.

But we should remember that as the crusade for the teenage pound sees City investors throwing mouth-watering sums at internet projects they little understand, advertisers bombarding insecure kids with endless airbrushed images of unobtainable perfection, and the press scaring parents with horror stories of skunk-addled hoodies roaming the streets, we risk alienating today’s teenagers as never before.

The truth, to put it in a tweet, is that today’s kids are no different from us when we were that age – all that’s changed is the world they face.

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