social media

Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.
-Bob Dylan

Some Cleveland-area businesses, officials, and citizens were frustrated in June when what was believed to be a flash mob disrupted an arts fair in Cleveland Heights. Take a peek:

Officials estimate that nearly 1,000 youth showed up spontaneously. Apparently there were random fights (though little information about these fights is provided in either the video or the Cleveland Plain Dealer's account).

This event, along with other alleged violent flash mobs, spurred Cleveland city council member Zach Reed (pictured, right) to introduce an ordinance criminalizing the use of social media - Facebook, Twitter, etc. - to organize crowds.

Under existing law, any member of a flash mob can be charged with disorderly conduct or other offenses carrying jail if there is a disturbance. Reed's legislation would have added a misdemeanor charge for summoning a crowd through social media. A first offense carried a $100 fine.

Reed said the new measure moved beyond "antiquated legislation" that never imagined social media.

To his credit, Cleveland mayor Frank Jackson vetoed that legislation this week, noting that while he is sympathetic to it's goal, the ordinance was not narrowly tailored enough to pass constitutional muster.

Reading about this on the heels of reading an articulate post by Sam DuPont at NDN - which calls for more examination of how social media can enhance civic engagement and social capital, I'm thinking about this flash mob issue in a few ways.

First, Reed's proposal to specifically criminalize social media-induced flash mobs is ridiculous. The last thing we need is another petty law on the books that we ask police officers to enforce, especially when we already have laws that address the issue. If a large group of people convenes and is hellbent on disrupting an otherwise peaceful event with violence, then the laws should be enforced. Some comments from festival attendees actually suggest that the Cleveland Heights PD efficiently defused the mob.

But instead, Reed - while admirably looking to solve the problem - throws the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. Reed's proposed ordinance is far from being narrowly tailored. An Ohio ACLU official points out that the law could penalize innocent citizens; should two or three friends agree to meet up somewhere to talk, dance, listen to music, or whatever, and several others show up and cause problems, the two or three friends would bear the responsibility under this ordinance. In fact, what Reed proposes would have criminalized the actions of those young people abroad who used social media to gather and rally against their oppressive governments and in support of democracy. Effective government can't simply pass a broad, sweeping law and - voila! - expect results.

I'm not arguing that there isn't a problem to be solved when people congregate with the intention of disrupting a community. However, the question Cleveland and its suburbs should be asking is not "How are these youth organizing," as this legislation does, but "Why?" I wonder if it has something to do with 25 percent of teenagers in this country being unemployed? Perhaps many youth have nowhere left to gather, other than 24 hour Wal-Marts?

What is this subculture resisting? Perhaps it's not the suburban couple or family, but a society and community that seems to have forgotten about them?

I hope Zach Reed reads Sam DuPont's blog post. DuPont doesn't view social media as a menacing threat to society. Instead, he suggests that our communities and young people could benefit from a leveraging of these technological tools to increase social capital.

[I]f this generation is to rebuild American social capital, it needs fora in which to connect, build bonds, and establish the mutual obligations of social relationships. While the primary causes Putnam points to are immense, historical shifts, the secondary causes can be largely boiled down to the resultant decline of membership in general community organizations: churches, Rotary clubs, PTAs, etc. It's hard to imagine most of these organizations making a powerful comeback among the Millennial generation, and we're left with the question of where, exactly, Millennials will come together to build social bonds.

Another cause Putnam identifies as contributing an additional 10% toward the decline in social capital is "suburbanization, commuting, and sprawl." This trend has reoriented American communities away from the neighborhoods, downtown areas, corner bars, and public squares where social capital was once forged, to a landscape dominated by highways and strip malls where the closest thing to a shared public space can be found in the Caverns of Walmart. And so, in addition to the evaporation of civic groups, our shared physical spaces are also disappearing, and the question of where social capital can be created in the 21st century becomes still more confounding.

As you've no doubt guessed by now (Sorry this took so long. Actually, I'm not sorry at all. Brevity is for cowards.), the point I'm driving toward is this: with the decline of community organizations and associations, and the disappearance of shared public spaces, I look to new network technologies to bridge some of those gaps, and help create the shared public spaces of the 21st century.

Perhaps instead of fearing and resisting social media and flash mobs, the local government in Cleveland and its suburbs could make an effort to learn about and embrace these phenomena, while also trying to understand how to improve youth quality of life in the area? Yes, cities like Cleveland and the suburbs have lots going on and many priorities in these tough times, but ignoring youth issues and rejecting their culture is not effective problem-solving, it's sinking like a stone.

With the new information out about Facebook allowing data and access to it's users for advertisers and the new and improved privacy settings, the recent Pew Survey about youth attitudes toward privacy couldn't be more timely.

"Some 71 percent of social networking users aged 18 to 29 have changed the privacy settings on their profile to limit what they share with others online"

This compares to just 55 percent of users who are 50 to 64. I'm sure there's a crack I could make here about it being because they just haven't signed on in six months...

Further

"44 percent of young adult Web users limit the amount of personal info available about themselves online."

I frequently hear reporters talk about the accessibility of information on individuals who are members of the Millennial Generation. Whether naughty photos on facebook or drunken tweets, the talking point has been that young people are free and open to exposure. I think these numbers show that while young people are open to accessibility to some extent, they have a larger amount of control over the information that they are giving than perhaps previously assumed.

After all - one doesn't have to fill out the entire facebook profile page, right?

"Contrary to the popular perception that younger users embrace a laissez-faire attitude about their online reputations, young adults are often more vigilant than older adults when it comes to managing their online identities," Madden wrote in her May 26 report."

I had a conversation with a guy at an event last week who wondered what election cycle we'd start to see photos from facebook and twitter from their college days or high school being used against them as they're running for office. More specifically when we would begin to see photos surface or "controversial" tweets that suddenly became part of the standard for opposition research and used in campaign commercials.

I think we've started seeing some of that with campaigns that try to go after staffers of candidates. We've see Obama staffer photos from facebook and incoming White House staffers back in 2008 were asked to provide their facebook links and answer questions about any embarrassing emails they might have sent.

I think this is probably up to begin in the next 5-10 years but it might be 15 before we see it at the Presidential level. But my spin to the guy I was talking to was that our generation is accustom to the concept of accessibility to information about ourselves and the increased lack of privacy. As the Greatest Generation and Baby Boomers begin to die off and Millennials take the lead in the electorate, I predict we'll see a rejection of this kind of information to be a valid form of attack against a candidate.

With such a huge majority of young people on social networking sites there is surly a deeper level of understanding and solidarity with tagged photos and profanity in tweets among Millennials. I can't imagine that in the Millennial Congress politicians will be able to get very far using this for attacks. There will probably be a period of transition where shocking things will surface and older generations will naturally be aghast and horrified - but realistically they weren't voting for a progressive candidate anyway.

What is interesting is the level of privacy control that youth seem to have over their own data. Meaning - as long as they are the ones posting the embarrassing photo it's fine, but Facebook better not allow advertisers to find my demographic info for the purposes of market research and targeting. For that - 71% alter their settings on the site. As long as there is a possibility of control, users all seem to be cool on the facebook front.

With these new settings and concerns I found this fancy Top 10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know guide. I will make a plea, however, please, don't think your facebook and twitter pages disqualify you for seeking higher office. We need more young candidates, not less.

This past weekend I served on a panel and as a judge for a campaign training school called NEW Leadership at the Carl Albert Center for Congressional Research Studies in Norman, Oklahoma. One of the moderators commented that it's pretty difficult to quantify results from new media on an electorate, which is a discussion I feel like I often have with candidates or potential clients... heck even existing clients at least once a month!

Most people in professional politics accept that a presence online must be the norm for a serious candidate today, although many campaigns still don't believe that a professional presence is needed judging from the obscene website design and atrocious fundraising emails that I am cursed to see each week.

Depending on where you are in the country and when your primary election is being held, most candidates probably aren't on television with their advertising just yet but probably all of them have done their benchmark poll and possibly one or two tracking polls. One such candidate I'm working with has seen an eight point jump in numbers in the course of a few months. The only thing that is different is that the new media operation stepped up a notch.

Another candidate I work with put a question in his/her benchmark poll asking where the person being polled had met or heard of the candidate. This is a pretty standard question generally used to gauge the effectiveness of the media or campaign outreach. The highest number is generally something like "from TV" or "from radio" or "From the newspaper" - but because the campaign hadn't started any of these forms of outreach yet, the highest percentage was "from the internet."

When I was speaking to these young women at NEW Leadership I said that "New Media" is not a replacement for traditional media its part of a building block that campaigns should use early on to develop relationships with the electorate in a cheaper and more effective way. I told them to treat it like an online field campaign that you can eventually use to push message as well as do fundraising on.

And a big reason for all of this, couldn't have been better stated by the New York Times in a piece they posted today about the generational divide in the Columbia elections.

"Mr. Mockus “represents something totally different, something that’s not traditional,” Ms. Pacheco said. “Older people are not used to having politicians thinking outside the box.”

Using tools that are familiar to them — a Facebook page, instant messages, videos on YouTube — Mr. Mockus’s followers in New York strive to drum up support for their candidate and organize events. It is a strategy that proved successful before, they said, when a certain senator from Illinois used social-networking media to mobilize young voters and ended up in the White House."

In a close election every edge you can get is important, and an online media campaign began in October is a joke. The earlier a campaign starts online outreach the better. The the less the chance a campaign will encounter someone like me writing a blog about how bad your fundraising emails are or how embarrassing your website looks or functions.

If you have followed Future Majority over the last couple years, you will recognize that Thomas Friedman's hit piece on Millennials, labeling them "Generation Q" for being too quiet, serves as the foundation for many a post. His Boomer paradigm interferes with his ability to understand how Millennial activism differs.

Friedman argues that Millennials may be "too quiet, too online, for its own good, and for the country's own good." The problem most of us had with Friedman's writing was that he was unable to see that one could be mad, could be online, and could be productive all at once. Another issue was the power Friedman ascribed to symbolic and yet meaningless acts. What good is chaining one's self to a bulldozer actually going to accomplish long-term? Very little.

With that in mind, we now have some more information regarding college students' heavy use of social media, and it is easy to see how our activism has changed course. The International Center for Media and the Public Agenda (ICMPA) at the University of Maryland released a study revealing the considerable depth of students' connections to social media.

200 University of Maryland (College Park) students, as part of a class assignment, were asked to abstain from all media for 24 hours straight. Following this time window, they were then asked to describe their experiences in private blogs. Perhaps the most interesting nugget of information this study yielded was just how interwoven social media has become in 18-21 year olds' lives.

"The students did complain about how boring it was go anywhere and do anything without being plugged into music on their MP3 players," said Moeller. "And many commented that it was almost impossible to avoid the TVs on in the background at all times in their friends' rooms. But what they spoke about in the strongest terms was how their lack of access to text messaging, phone calling, instant messaging, email and Facebook, meant that they couldn't connect with friends who lived close by, much less those far away."

"Texting and IM-ing my friends gives me a constant feeling of comfort," wrote one student. "When I did not have those two luxuries, I felt quite alone and secluded from my life. Although I go to a school with thousands of students, the fact that I was not able to communicate with anyone via technology was almost unbearable."

The student responses to the assignment showed not just that 18-21 year old college students are constantly texting and on Facebook -- with calling and email distant seconds as ways of staying in touch, especially with friends -- but that students' lives are wired together in such ways that opting out of that communication pattern would be tantamount to renouncing a social life.

Bringing this back to the Friedman contention that students should cut out the online crap and do something meaningful with their lives, this survey points to how misguided Friedman actually was in his writing. Social media is so pervasive and such a large part of our world that it is rewiring our brains. As the piece argues above, there is no exiting the social media world to "act" in the real world. To the wide majority of young people, social media is reality. If one had to renounce his or her social life in order to please Friedman, the activism would not mean anything.

Another enlightening conclusion was the impact the abstention from media had on these students' information-gathering capabilities. Participants in the study reported that they normally do not read the newspaper, watch mainstream television news, or listen to radio news, yet they were informed enough to discuss specific news stories. During the study, though, participants remarked on how uninformed they felt.

..."To be entirely honest I am glad I failed the assignment," wrote one student, "because if I hadn't opened my computer when I did I would not have known about the violent earthquake in Chile from an informal blog post on Tumblr."

"Students expressed tremendous anxiety about being cut-off from information," observed Ph.D. student Raymond McCaffrey, a former writer and editor at The Washington Post, and a current researcher on the study. "One student said he realized that he suddenly 'had less information than everyone else, whether it be news, class information, scores, or what happened on Family Guy."

"They care about what is going on among their friends and families and even in the world at large," said McCaffrey. " But most of all they care about being cut off from that instantaneous flow of information that comes from all sides and does not seemed tied to any single device or application or news outlet."

Students clearly rely on social media for information. Given our knowledge -- going clear back to Thomas Jefferson -- that information is vital in managing our country's affairs, dispensing with internet-based activism would be foolish and regressive, breeding even more disengagement and misinformation.

Friedman's Boomer lens assumes that we still have a critical mass of institutions that need tearing down, and that it needs to happen quickly. These Millennial college students, as Morley Winograd and Michael Hais point out, understand how decentralized our lives are, and, in role-modeling their "civic" archetype, they must rely on these anything-but-linear connections and the decentralized flow of information to reconstruct society.

Because idealist generations are unwilling to compromise on moral issues, they've always failed to solve the major social and economic problems of their eras. In the decades after the 1828 election, the country was pulled apart over slavery, ultimately leading to the Civil War. After the 1896 campaign, the United States couldn't find a way to help blue-collar workers and farmers to share fully in the wealth generated by the Industrial Revolution. It took the Great Depression to usher in the sense of urgency that led to Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. Today, issues such as affordable health care or quality education or climate change are endlessly debated but never resolved by two sides unwilling to set aside their ideological agendas for the common good.

But now, with another civic generation emerging, the times, as boomer troubadour Bob Dylan sang, they are a-changin'. Civic generations react against the idealist generations' efforts to use politics to advance their own moral causes and focus instead on reenergizing social, political and government institutions to solve pressing national issues. Previous civic realignments occurred in 1860, with the election of Abraham Lincoln, and in 1932, when the GI generation put Roosevelt in office. It's no coincidence that these "civic" presidents, along with George Washington, top all lists of our greatest presidents. All three led the country in resolving great crises by inspiring and guiding new generations and revitalizing and expanding the federal government.

In their book Millennial Makeover, Winograd and Hais describe technology as "[enabling] these changes by creating powerful new ways to reach new generations of voters with messages that relate directly to their concerns" (p. 24). Yes, face-to-face interaction continues to have its place in our society. However, if we were to scrap our reliance on social media, we would be willfully ignoring the new generations of voters Winograd and Hais mention. This study's results underscore how vital social media is to our generation's civic health. If we were to purge ourselves of our internet activism, only then could we legitimately be considered "quiet."

Yesterday on Mashable there was an article titled "Why Social Media Means Big Opportunities for Women". The article brings up some very compelling points as to why social media is opening more doors for women in many ways.

Women have firmly established their presence on the social web, and account for the majority of users on many popular social media sites. But what does this mean for the future of women in social media?

One word: Opportunity.

Companies looking to reach women — whether as consumers, entrepreneurs, employees, or advocates — have an unprecedented opportunity through social media to engage them. For women, social media presents abundant opportunities to lead, effect change, innovate, and build relationships across sectors, locally, nationally, and globally.

Not to take away from the point being made but I believe the arguments provided can apply to youth in general. The article argues that companies, through the usage of social media, are gathering real time feedback from female consumers about products, ideas, marketing, etc. Companies are starting to use social media to do their product testing and aiming directly at women (and youth).

Conversations between companies and female consumers are moving beyond “what do you want?” types of questions. Companies are starting to use social media to secure real-time feedback from women on products, services, and marketing campaigns—sometimes before they go to market.

Unilever used social media to launch their new Pond’s Age Miracle moisturizer in China, recruiting bloggers to try the product and share their findings. The strategy was risky because of the heavy usage of social media there, but it came with a huge upside: If the bloggers liked the product, word of mouth could lead to major success. If not, the poor publicity from blogs would make the launch difficult to salvage. The risk paid off and the moisturizer was a hit, leading to the adoption of social media strategies by other Unilever offices in Asia.

If companies use targeting like Unilever did they can be just as successful, regardless if they are targeting and gathering feedback from women or youth. However women are dominating the usage of social media sites, and they are gaining the lead in mobile web usage too.

A significant opportunity exists for companies to connect with women using mobile technologies. Women comprise 47% of current mobile web users, and between 2008 and 2009, the number of women using the mobile web increased by 43%, compared with a 26% increase in the number of men.

While women's influence is growing in the world of social networking and technology the article does provide some insight to where it isn't exactly the most inclusive.

not all conferences are women-friendly. At some, sexualized images of women are still included in presentations. Others feature scantily clad women as props or for entertainment. Stone, Page, and Jardins observed that “the organizers of many conferences, especially tech conferences, don’t seem to appreciate that women don’t want to sit through presentations — PowerPoint, video and otherwise — that depict women as porn stars and/or sex objects.”

However there is optimism that it will change, as women continue to become even more influential in the world of social media we will hopefully see a move that way.

The number of women programmers, entrepreneurs, bloggers, consultants, community managers, and social media users continues to grow. It’s only a matter of time before these numbers translate into greater visibility and influence in the social space.

Trapani, too, is optimistic: “Ladies, now is not the time to be timid. Step up, take chances, push yourself beyond your comfort zone, use your powers and influence for good, and let your expertise shine.”

A listserv I'm on has had a very interesting thread about Tweeting recently beginning with a piece from Politico that says more GOP electeds are on Twitter than are Democratic Elected Officials almost 2:1 - 100 to 56 according to Tweet Congress.

"A total of 261 Dems are ignoring the new technology (Claire McCaskill ain't one 'em) compared to 119 non-Tweet R's."

This broke into a discussion that questioned the demographic of Twitter and its usefulness to the political youth movement as well as its effectiveness for advocacy and/or outreach.

According to the Nielson Wire

"Twitter’s footprint has expanded impressively in the first half of 2009, reaching 10.7 percent of all active Internet users in June. Perhaps even more impressively, this growth has come despite a lack of widespread adoption by children, teens, and young adults. In June 2009, only 16 percent of Twitter.com website users were under the age of 25. Bear in mind persons under 25 make up nearly one quarter of the active US Internet universe, which means that Twitter.com effectively under-indexes on the youth market by 36 percent."

What Jason Pollock from The Youngest Candidate remarked was that early adoptors of Twitter were already middle aged, where early adopters of Facebook and MySpace were in their teens and 20's. Twitter was more of a technology phenomenon when I began using it, but it has grown from there to become more of the social network people see it as today.

The major focus for me has been with search engine optimization. You hear this thrown around a lot but, essentially it means that the more sites you promote your blog posts to, the more ways people are able to find it, and the higher it will climb in a google search.

My example to the list was something we orchestrated earlier this year during the Kansas Legislative Session. A number of my friends were early Twitter adopters, and have talked it up so significantly that everyone we know is now on Twitter, creating a predominantly progressive following on the site in Kansas. So while nationally there might be more GOP elected officials on Twitter than democrats, in our state, progressives dominate the pool and use it constantly to promote progressive blogs and bloggers, causes, and candidates, while also waging major hits online to GOP electeds at the federal and state level.

We suffer from a profound lack of transparency in our state Capitol. There are no video or recording devices allowed inside the chamber or committee rooms. If you want audio you have to go get the day's tape and search for the quote you want. Then basically put the audio into a video that just features the member's photo. It sucks. But, this past session we had progressive lobbyists and bloggers live tweeting the legislature and committees with our offensive network of retweeters prepared to spread the word.

Early in the session then Governor Kathleen Sebelius (now Secretary of Health and Human Services) had proposed solutions to the budget difficulties Kansas, like many other states, was having. The GOP lead legislature wasn't interested in pushing the Governor's plan and as such threatened to shut down the government. We knew there was going to be a throw-down throughout the day and had primed our group to be prepared to Tweet and drive traffic all day about how the GOP didn't care about regular people in Kansas.

It began early with a few blog posts on Kansas Jackass , and a clever name PayCheck Gate. Then the tweet storm began. For a few hours we tweeted and encouraged other to do so about the controversy, we encouraged people to call elected officials, we crossposted blogs, and everything had the tag #ksgop.

People made fun of us, asking why we were promoting progressive values like getting paid all while labeling it with KSGOP? It seemed silly. Until about three o'clock that afternoon when a google search for KSGOP reveled our blogs as the #1 search. Second, was the thread on search.twitter.com for our hashtag, and third was the KSGOP's website, which by the way, is www.ksgop.com.

So, while I agree that there are limits and flaws to organizing with Twitter, you can build a powerful social media advocacy movement that young people can participate in via smart phones and sometimes while at work or in class. Further, it doesn't require youth to give money, write a letter or email, or make a call. You can create the movement, activate it, then do a process story about it followed by fundraising around it's success. You can use it to tear down and build up, depending on your agenda or your org's strategy and goals.

Best Practices

Many of you have heard me say that my real job at Mixed Media is to just cause trouble on the internet all day. But its something everyone can learn, develop, and foster if they have the time and energy to do so.

My suggestion, particularly to those organizations or campaigns working in the states or in specific cities that are smaller (like Atlanta vs Chicago and NYC) is to do a workshop for your members on Twitter. Show them the practical applications, how they can use it to help, and network them in with your movement. Use it to promote small things first like blogs or news pieces. Watch via search.twitter.com or BackTweets how the branches of the tree work, if it's not working build your base with more workshops, or consider doing blast emails or facebook messages asking folks to RT @Whoever or change their status update.

Your result will be a following much more powerful than someone who has 40,000 friends - it will be hundreds of people that will retweet and advocate for your causes.

You can build local and regional movements quickly and easily then use them to promote your organization, have friends help cultivate small donors, promote online outreach, and give your members some form of consistent participation that they feel is meaningful without having to donate money all the time.

Twitter - USE IT! If you ever have any questions feel free to email me - my information is on the about page.

Progressive Exchange is one of the largest - if not the largest - email groups for progressive activists. It's a public list run by M+R Strategic Services, a progressive communications consulting firm, and has over 4,200 members. If you are not on it, you should be.

A discussion arose this week on the topic of "Slacktivism." In short, slacktivism is a short-hand, derogatory term used by some in the organizing community to mischaracterize online organizing. The discussion arose in response to two pieces: a short blog post at the Global Fund for Children blog questioning the effectiveness of social media in organizing for change, as well as this piece in Foreign Policy.

This is a huge topic, and one that we've addressed before here on Future Majority. I don't think I'm going to change any of your minds here by writing out a laundry list of problems with the term and the corresponding reasons that online organizing can be effective. But I did want to repost what I wrote at Progressive Exchange as I think it's worth repeating:

First, I'm super uncomfortable with the term "slacktivist." Along with Tom Friedman's "Generation Q," it's a term that has primarily been used to tar and feather Millennials for not conforming to a Baby-Boomer view of activism, and it implicitly ignores all the real-world activism that today's young people do in their communities (see high volunteering rates, Teach for America, etc.), as well as in the political realm (see all Jon's examples plus a group like Energy Action Coalition/Power Shift/Power Vote). You are not convincing anyone or doing anything constructive by painting with such a broad-brush term for a generation or a style of activism (and to be clear I'm talking in generalities here and not pointing a finger at anyone on this list in particular).

Second, it's not at all clear to me that people who do engage in "slacktivism" would have become involved AT ALL absent the opportunities presented by the magic of the interwebs. Looked at in that light, isn't it the job of the people on this list to figure out how you convert that new-found pool of loosely/active connected individuals into a project that does accomplish real change? So rather than say "this is bullshit activism and these people suck," maybe it would be a bit more productive to put a greater onus on ourselves to figure out what to do with this giant new pool of potential supporters rather than deride them for taking a step in the direction of positive action for social change.

A (relatively) new report by Nielsen (pdf) gives us a look into how teens are using media, and the results are a little surprising:

The notion that teens are too busy texting and Twittering to be engaged with traditional media is exciting, but false.

To develop the best strategy around teens and media, start by challenging popular assumptions about teens. Don’t focus on the outliers, but on the macro-level trends of media and preferences for the segment. The averages will show you that teens can often be reached by the same means as their parents.

In this report, “How Teens Use Media,” we debunk the myths and give you the hard facts.

• Teens are NOT abandoning TV for new media: In fact, they watch more TV than ever, up 6% over the past five years in the U.S.
• Teens love the Internet…but spend far less time browsing than adults: Teens spend 11 hours and 32 minutes
  per month online—far below the average of 29 hours and 15 minutes.
• Teens watch less online video than most adults, but the ads are highly engaging to them: Teens spend 35% less time watching online video than adults 25–34, but recall ads better when watching TV shows online than they do on television.
• Teens read newspapers, listen to the radio and even like advertising more than most: Teens who recall TV ads are 44% more likely to say they liked the ad.
• Teens play video games, but are as excited about play-along music games and car-racing games as they are about violent ones: Just two of their top five most-anticipated games since 2005 are rated “Mature.”
• Teens’ favorite TV shows, top websites and genre preferences across media are mostly the same as those of their parents: For U.S. teens, American Idol was the top show in 2008, Google the top website and general dramas are a preferred TV genre for teens around the world.

This all sounds very counterintuitive - and one might like to doubt the veracity of stats promoting the television industry distributed by Nielsen - but the report is actually quite evenhanded and makes a point very similar to what we've been saying at Future Majority for years: young people are just like older people, and if you target them, they will respond. Whereas we're talking about voter engagement tactics, they are talking purely about media consumption habits (though to be sure there is overlap between the two categories).

Perhaps the biggest takeaway for me is this: teens embrace new media not at the cost of traditional media, but in supplement it.

Here's what that looks like in chart form:

Also interesting - but less a focus of the study - is the extent to which the data points to the 18 - 29 age window as the time in which many of the media habits normally associated with teens kick in, and in fact, when it comes to internet usage, it is people over 35 who are the heaviest users. The one new media category in which stereotypes seem to hold true is in text messaging, in which teens are by far the most prolific users.

Interesting stuff that I'm sure will help campaigns and nonprofits better target teens in the future.

Bill Maher's recent comment that "Twitter didn't save Iran. Iran saved Twitter" has sparked some debate about the use of social media and its relevance to important issues and events.

Personally, I don't think Maher's comment hits the mark. Twitter wasn't a service that needed saving, nor is it alone responsible for helping promote Iranian protests. It would be more accurate to say that Iran helped the general public realize Twitter's potential, and that Twitter is one component of a new media toolset that is enabling activists in oppressive regimes to communicate where state-run media dominates.

The situation in Iran shows the world that the communications game has changed. It isn't Twitter or Facebook specifically, but the general principle of online and mobile communication.

Mashable created a social media timeline of the Iran Election crisis. It shows how a wide range of online tools have played a role in getting the stories of Iranian protesters to the outside world. These tools range from Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to Flickr and even Wikipedia.

The essence of the matter is that previously if a country expelled all foreign journalists and had a state-run media, the world would have no way of knowing what was happening within its borders. The emergence of online and mobile technology has turned every person with a camera, cell phone, or computer into an amateur journalist; on location and with unfiltered access journalists have never truly enjoyed.

While it may be a while before these new media tools can change the game everywhere (Africa is still largely left behind, and they could use it the most), the Iran election protests have shown the world what online organizers have known for some time now: social media has fundamentally advanced the way we communicate and coordinate.

• After helping to orchestrate a DDOS attack on Iranian state media, Matthew Burton ponders the ethics of weaponizing the social web.
• Peter Levine announces that on July 24th, Tufts University will sponsor a conference to assess the Obama Administration's civic engagement agenda.
• Bozeman, MT is now requiring that city job applicants submit their social network usernames and logins to comply with background checks. WTF?
• We all know young people vote. WireTap wonders if they can advocate and mobilize?
• The White House wants your ideas on how technology can increase participation in government.
• Has the Iranian elections opened a generational fissure?
• Win or lose, Bloomberg News wonders if the Iranian protests are the beginnings of a movement that will outlast Ahmadinejad.
• US News thinks Republicans still have a chance with the youth vote.
• Writing for The Hill, Markos Moulitsas sees an "empathy gap" standing in the way of that chance.