Social networks
Unfriending mum and dad
Fears that teenagers are deserting Facebook are overblown
NOT long after being snapped up by News Corporation in 2005, MySpace became a much emptier space when many teenagers who had used the social network to share music and photos of themselves in various states of undress decided it was no longer the cool place to be online. A recent blog post has sparked a debate about whether Facebook, which has 1.2 billion users, is suffering a similar exodus.
The fuss matters because investors have been very bullish about Facebook’s prospects. Its share price more than doubled in 2013, ending the year above $54. This partly reflects the market’s insatiable appetite for social-media stocks, but it is also a sign of investors’ conviction that Facebook’s users will not tire of it.
Hence the interest in an article on The Conversation, a website showcasing academic research. Published by Daniel Miller, a professor at University College London, it said young people were “turning away in their droves” from Facebook and that the social network “is not just on the slide, it is basically dead and buried”. Teenagers now prefer to hang out on new photo-sharing and messaging services such as Snapchat (reportedly attacked by hackers this week), WhatsApp and Instagram, where mums and dads don’t lurk.
Mr Miller said he concluded that Facebook was losing its attraction to teenagers after interviewing 16- to 18-year-olds in Britain as part of a European Union-funded study of social networks. But critics were quick to point out that his sample—just 40 students—was tiny and that it was therefore rash to extrapolate from it. In a subsequent blog post, the academic defended his work, saying he had based his observations on a broader set of discussions. He also revealed that his original post had been crafted by a journalist and said he would be more careful about allowing his work to be “sexed up” in future.


So Facebook is not facing a MySpace moment. However, it should not be complacent. Like many other big networks, it has been vacuuming up older customers (see chart). And its growing reputation as a sort of parental NSA may explain why some youngsters are more wary of it. In October 2013 David Ebersman, Facebook’s chief financial officer, admitted that daily visits by younger teenagers had decreased.
But there is no mass defection under way. Instead, teenagers are using different social networks for different things, says Lee Rainie of the Pew Research Centre’s Internet and American Life project. They post less intimate stuff to Facebook and more risqué material to networks not yet gatecrashed by their parents. Mr Miller’s research has also highlighted this habit.
The danger for Facebook is that one of these newer places starts to attract parents. That is why the firm swallowed Instagram in 2012 and recently tried to snap up Snapchat. The teenagers on Facebook may not be rebelling, but keep an eye on them.

Write a text answering questions:
• Who is addressed?
• What kind of reader?
• Why the reader is interested by the article?
• What kind of language is used?

The article "unfriending mum and dad" is an article on social networks, in particular of the most commonly used today: facebook. Indeed it is a social network used by people of all ages, that enables anyone to keep contact friends or relatives. On facebook people can publish their photos, express their ideas about a topic or look for brands or celebrities that interest to them.
At the same time, however, it is a social network that makes fears to a lot of parents just like any website because the teenagers may be deceived by people with fake profiles or can put pictures on the net that everyone can watch. These images also can be downloaded by other users who can create fake profiles with their photos. Facebook is a social network that have created big problems to some teenager. Indeed in some cases the social networks had become sites where people can share photos or videos of naked people, weak people or people considered freak which have also led to suicide. Moreover the article is about the worries that the founders of Facebook have because they fear a decrease of young users that recalls the case happened to the social network Myspace.
Therefore, this article concerns to readers of all ages, but particularly interest parents who feel involved in this text (from the title are nominated mum and dad), especially if you do not know the world of the internet and if you are not enrolled in facebook so you do not keep checking the profile of the children. From the title readers can deduce that the article informs especially adult people of the risks of social networking that has reduced the younger users who now prefer other sites like instagram, where they only publish photos, and messaging sites.
Indeed parents may be interested to read up more the article: they would like to be more informed on this social network because their children are signed up and then they want to give to their children greater security. For this reason sometimes parents concerned about the facebook profile of the son and of what he might happen, they are hidden behind other profiles to control them. In the article this problem is treated: the blame of the decline of the young users through excessive control and for this reason that the teenagers prefer other social networks where parents can not hide.
The other reader who might feel called into question in the article is the son / daughter. Indeed, he might interest the article to stay informed on a social network to which they are writing to be more aware of what he is doing and publishing. In addition, the child can understand the worries of parents to avoid some possible problem. Although many young people most vulnerable or unaware of the great power of the Internet many times do not realize and underestimate the problems derived from the internet. And that is why they should be informed of the dangers that can meet directly from facebook.
So the article having a wide audience so it must have a medium language, not too high because the public would be limited and the social networks are open to all people, but also not too low because it ridicules the problem that it would be severe in some cases. To better reflect the increase in enrollment of parents and adults the writer uses a graph that shows the number of entries of adult users in some social networks in 2012 and 2013; so as to point out the increase. Also the reader can notices that the most popular social network is Facebook.