It’s past prime time

It seems that blogs themselves have aged significantly, having gone the telephone and email way, and are no longer ‘sexy’ enough to entice the young.

Are you quickly hurtling towards a mid-life crisis and don’t have any spare cash lying around to splurge on that flashy Ferrari? Despair not, for there’s now a safe and cheap refuge for the more, um, ‘mature’ among us: blogs and, of course, Twitter. More and more adults, it seems, are being bitten by the blogging bug, even as the fresh-faced are choosing to snuggle back into the privacy of text messaging and Facebook. A study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project has found a significant drop in blogging in the age groups 12-17 and 18-29, while the percentage of bloggers aged 30 and above increased from 7 per cent in 2007 to 11 per cent in 2009.

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It seems that blogs themselves have aged significantly, having gone the telephone and email way, and are no longer ‘sexy’ enough to entice the young. Social networking sites, with their short and snappy ‘status updates’, are fast replacing the moody musings of a virtual ‘Dear Diary’, as well as all that trespassing on Twitter. Still, if you’re either middle-aged — or a schoolgirl — chances are you’re likely to succumb to the tantalising charms of those 140 characters. Well, this should come as no surprise, given the short attention spans of the young. But definitely more worrying than easily-distracted teenagers are the attention-grabbing tactics of the not-so-young, given the explosion of tweets from men and women in their prime, documenting everything from the upward strokes of their toothbrush to their pet’s bowel movements.

Now, brevity might be the soul of a tweet; gravity is certainly not among its finer points. So, on behalf of all those at the receiving end of all that bite-sized wisdom, may we please ask our prolific précis-writers to go back and bare their souls to that secret diary of their youth? Better still, go flash that red Ferrari.