A Social Media Age Divide

Timothy B. Lee (no, not that Tim B. Lee) is one of my favorite pundits bloggers thinkers writers these days. In a recent blog post for Forbes (The Social Media Singularity), he wrote the following great paragraphs:

Like any skill, the ability to find good Internet content gets better with practice. Intellectuals under about 35 have had access to the Web for their entire adult lives. Most of us rely on the Internet as our primary source of information about the world. We’ve all been practicing finding interesting content and sharing it with our friends for over a decade. Many of us are quite good at it.

In contrast, intellectuals over about 45 had already gotten used to a print-centric media diet by the time the Internet arrived. As a result, they didn’t adopt online reading habits with the same enthusiasm. When social media arrived, few of their peers were using it so they didn’t either. And as a consequence, they never developed the kind of Internet-filtering prowess that comes naturally to many people in my cohort.

There are certainly exceptions to both cases, but I think it is a great way to sum up part of what's happening online today.

Read his whole article here.

-Parker