Why are good bloggers old?
June 27, 2007 12:42 pmIf the information economy is driven by the young, and it’s millenials who are saturated with the share-your-life-with-everyone world of the internet, why are most of the blogs I read written by old people, either Boomers or late Gen-Xers? Some hypotheses:
- Young people aren’t very good writers yet, so nobody wants to read them. Older bloggers have had decades to refine their writing, and practice makes it better. It doesn’t matter how good your ideas are if you can’t communicate them well.
- Older people have more to say. They’ve spent decades accumulating experience, usually in a specific area (economics, human resources, technology), and that makes their opinions more valuable. It also gives them a greater bank of stories to share from, tempers their ideas with a knowledge of what works and what doesn’t in the real world, and most importantly, lends them credibility on an internet that’s something pretty scarce.
- Good blogs have focus, and young people don’t. Millennials are still trying to figure out what they want to do with their lives through some magical personal quest that nobody cares about. It makes their blogs tough to follow. Boomer blogs have a single cohesive idea that attracts those who are interested and keeps them tuning in.
After the recent lapse in posting, prepare for some changes in this blog. Cohesive idea: making better decisions.
Categories: Generations, Social Software, Technology
5 Responses to “Why are good bloggers old?”
Maybe straight blogging is just too stifling for the Millennials. That’s sort of related to #3, but not so much that their blogs don’t have focus, but that their information-creating isn’t just focused on blogs. They’re twittering and facebooking and myspacing and flickring all over the place rather than having one central location for their creativity. Maybe?
That certainly makes sense. Millenials don’t blog because it requires too much focus. You also point out another difference, though. Most of the information-creation you discussed is telling other people about yourself. It’s very surface. In contrast, blogging involves the creation of more complicated ideas. It requires more refinement and thought. Looking at the time costs of information-creation on twitter or facebook, I can’t imagine that’s what is consuming people’s time. More likely it’s information consumption on those media.
I do have to admit, though, that as a “cusper” (the tail end of Generation X bordering in Millennial) I consumed a lot more information than I created in college.
I’ve been thinking a lot about generational differences lately and one problem I have is that we have a whole lot of data about traditionalists and baby-boomers in the workplace, but less on genXers and millennials. I noticed this when I went to a conference session about generational differences in the workplace and they said that while baby-boomers may get a new job every 7-10 years, it was more like 2-3 for GenX and millennials were constantly changing. But it’s also possible that genXers (or millennials) will settle into jobs as they get older and bring those averages up for their generation later. I would like to see a study on “traditionalists at 20 vs. baby-boomers at 20 vs. genXers at 20 vs. millennials at 20″ rather than comparing them across their entire lives.
That’s what I think is so fascinating - while the internet has allowed lots of people to become producers, very few are, and those producers are usually older and more focused. Younger people are more rabid consumers of information, but most of the information they produce is just about themselves.
I think that’s a great point about generation differences. Someone I work with did some research into generational differences in the workplace, but it’s hard to discern the difference between what is a generational difference and what’s just an age difference without time series data. Many things people say about Millenials they also said about Gen-Xers and Boomers when they were young. If you’ve been thinking about generational differences a lot lately, you’re going to want to stick around this blog over the next few weeks, it’s going to be an emerging theme. There has been a bit of time series research, and if I can find it, I’m going to try and post it.
Great!
Care to comment?