TumblTweetFace by Maria

Much like Dana Boyd, I was astonished at the initial statement in Mashables’ report of Nielsens’s latest Twitter stats, under the headline, “Teens Don’t Tweet.” After Boyd goes into a bit more depth about how the study was conducted, she asserts that there are problems in presentation, representation, and interpretation with the study. Her most striking revelation on the study was the problem of representation. She brings to our attention that age is not the right way to measure who uses Twitter—the study looks at the wrong demographic, they focus on age while they should focus on the category of person (“Geeks are WAY over-represented on Twitter. Celebs and celeb-lovers are WAY over-represented on Twitter”).

I definitely agree with Dana Boyd’s alternative way of looking at the Twitter stats. She makes a good point that because the majority of the population does not use Twitter, it’s hard to draw any conclusions because Twitter users are “not a representative percentage of the population.” I found Boyd’s alternative method much more interesting and helpful to drawing conclusions about the Twitter users as a whole.