Three teenage girls – white, affluent-looking, and I’m going to say 15 years old – jam their way onto the subway around 103rd St. Typical morning, except I was iPod-less. So I got to hear their conversation, which was also typical – catty popular-clique chit-chat about friends and boys. Except they were talking about what those friends and boys had put on each other’s MySpace accounts. They get off somewhere around Lincoln Center.
That’s the first time I’ve ever heard a group of teenagers weave an internet service seamlessly into their conversation. I could be wrong, but it certainly sounded like everyone these girls knew had a MySpace account, and they just took that fact for granted.
I mention this in part because the influence of MySpace has been a topic of discussion lately, and partially because MySpace is a service designed for participation – those teenagers could no more opt-out of MySpace than they could out of their own social lives. (And will likely stay comfortably locked-in until their social lives are violently disrupted by college – the next opportunity for a competing service to grab them.)
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You are so out of touch with today’s teenage girls
Great post Greg. I think you give teenagers a bit too much credit. Right now, they’re all on MySpace, but they’re also very fickle. And they’re also mind-bogglingly quick to pick things up. If something came along that was better than MySpace, I think they’d switch in a heartbeat. They’d still check their MySpaces, but as more and more people switched, they’d do so less and less.
A greater question is what are 3 white 15 year olds doing on 103rd street?
Whatever!
Now that Mysapce are going to produce the Helio device it’s going to be ubiquitous. I belive that teenagers will just not talk to one another anymore, they will just communicate via Myspace.
We may be witnesses to the end of the “eavesdropping to teenagers on the subway” era.
dude, get out more. teens talk about myspace all the time. and they talk about itunes, and yahoo mail, and mtv.com, and “googling” people, and ign.com. younger kids talk about neopets, yahooligans, turbonick, etc. myspace is wildly popular but that’ll go away as all the porn on the system envelops it…