Leslie Bradshaw on The Ron Reagan Show: Discussion of Age Demographics in Social Media

On August 6th, I was a guest on Air America Media’s Ron Reagan Show (you may know his father).  I spent 11 minutes on the air talking with Ron (Jr.) about the shifting age demographics on social media platforms based on a news peg out of the United Kingdom: “It’s SO over: cool cyberkids abandon social networking sites,” where Ofcom‘s research showed a “5% drop in 15 to 24-year-olds using social networking sites” (Guardian UK).

Given another few minutes, I would have also emphasized two economic principles involved.  Specifically:

1) Macroeconomics: Eventually, rapid growth on any network and of any population reaches an outer limit. Said another way: growing at double and triple (and, in Twitter’s case some months, quadruple) percentage points is not sustainable indefinitely.  Therefore, a hockey stick will eventually become a small mountain (or even a flat-lined mesa).  You can always get creative with the production-possibility frontier, just as long as you stay within it when your resources are constrained; the number of young adults that are not on social media sites is certainly a small enough number at this point that the PPF would be hard to shift without an influx of more young people from, in Brittan’s case, another (non-Internet-hampered) country (image credit: Wikipedia; think of “Food” and “Computers” as “Young People” and “Internet Access”):

2) Microeconomics: I briefly addressed this, but it should not be underestimated — the concept of substitute goods is one that is certainly at play here.  As more devices, websites, TV channels and modes through which media can be consumed (think Hulu), the more competition social networking receives.  And, as an offshoot, how social networking is defined makes a difference, too.  Finally, I would argue that most media is social at some level these days (namely, that which is found online and that which you have a contact database around [e.g., text messaging, instant messaging "IMing" and BlackBerry Messaging "BBMing"]).

I want to also give full credit to:

• Brian Devine for originating the “Facebook is the new front porch” statement (~3:05).
• Geoff Livingston for introducing me to the “nano famous” concept (~ 6:05).
• My mom, who just joined Facebook (shout-out~2:45).
• Bill Beutler for schooling me on the ins and outs of Wikipedia (~8:15).
• BlogHer for being such an awesome community for women (shout-out ~8:30).
• danah boyd for reminding me to look critically at population migration, namely, MySpace / to / Facebook (~9:20).
• JESS3 for helping me understand things like Facebook Connect and OpenID (~10:20).
• Jen Nedeau for helping me connect with The Ron Reagan Show producers.