Is anyone on the Internet under 30?

I gave a talk yesterday in the stellar Rosemary Armao’s upper-class undergraduate journalism class at SUNY-Albany. As an aside, Rosemary Armao is a woman of steel organs of your favorite type — an investigative journalist who works tirelessly in the Balkans (one of those many pesky world regions where knowledge is often more fear than power), she also invited Jayson Blair to her journalism class to explain to her students what in the news business or newsroom structure made it possible to lie like he did. What a move!

Anyway, Rosemary’s 30-ish students are all around 20. I polled them. None of them reads blogs. None of them uses Twitter. A few actually read the newspaper (cheer for the underdog!), but few of them really seek out news. Those who do look at it on their phones.

This reminded me of my visit to St. Mary’s, a private high school in Portland, Ore. I didn’t poll the students there — my mission was slightly different — but I did happen to find out that not one of them uses Twitter. “Ms. Pierce,” one student explained to my friend who had invited me, “Twitter is for old people.”

She was right, alas, or right-ish. The Pew Center says the median age of Twitter users is 31. Let’s pretend that in the modern, progressive world, 31 is not old, but let’s not pretend that to a 16-year-old, 31 isn’t ancient. Turns out all our social media is old:

The median age for MySpace is now 26, down from 27 in May 2008, and the median age for LinkedIn is now 39, down from 40. Facebook, however, is graying a bit: the median age for this social network site is now 33, up from 26 in May 2008.

Pew does good studies (sample of 2,253 adults age 18 and up over 4 months). The Internet is getting grey.

Let’s be clear: This is an American thing. In the countries I’ve spent time in in Africa, the Internet is very much a youth thing. It’s also an urban thing. It is, that is to say, a whole different thing.

But here, the media conversation generally says, “Young people use social networks, they don’t read papers, how do we get them?” The media has assumed “old people” — let’s assume old means that if you wanted to read a newspaper at any point in your day, you had to buy it — will stick with them. Probably in print.

I don’t know circulation numbers, but Pew makes me wonder if the old people media rely on just aren’t there. It’s not that young people don’t want to pay for content and therefore newspapers must be free. If I make a massive leap excused by the utility of its possibility, the Twitter/MySpace/LinkedIn/Facebook data make it look like former newspaper subscribers just don’t want to pay any more.

I may be reading too much into the Pew data and my recent experiences, but I wonder if the mainstream media are chasing their own tail. The “social networking” world that newspapers are trying so desperately to court these days are actually not the 18-24 year olds that I used to hear about in editorial meetings, the people newspapers wanted to “train” to want the news. My suspicion has long been that 18-24 year olds never read the news, and the digital crisis makes that a more earnest (desperate?) conversation than the one that our society has constantly had. But it does beg the question, what’s the “new new media” strategy, when 20-year-olds are only looking at headlines on their telephones?

PS: On a related note — I swear — Sherman Alexie is up for the PEN/Faulkner for his short story collection, “War Dances.” When the book came out, he insisted on Colbert that he would never, ever sell the digital rights. (God bless him that he has that negotiating power.) If you want to read one of the best books of the year, you have to buy it in paper. Hells yeah.