Using Dan Farber, however, would be a TERRIBLE example. ;)

Interesting study from Third Age / JWT Boom, which shows how people over the age of 40 (presumably in North America, although there’s no mention that I can find of where they’re from) are engaged with social media on the Internets: the bottom line is that they’ve embraced email (in spite of the cacophony of cries that “email is dead“), but only a minority, about 20% were actively using social networking sites to keep in touch.

While another 20% might be interested, it seems like the vast majority just aren’t interested; furthermore, amongst the 50% who were neither using, nor interested, they gave reasons around privacy, time, and lack of benefit to using such services.

It seems like there was only one more thing that boomers were even LESS interested in and that was actively blogging (i.e. “writing blogging”).

In an interesting finding, boomers were *more* likely than younger users to participate in viral marketing campaigns, and more likely to share information about products or services with friends and family.

The interesting thing to me, actually, is that all of the above behaviours *perfectly* describe older members of my family of my parents generation.  They *still* find value and worth in forwarding email jokes and lists; they pretty much *only* do email; and, they question the worth of something like Facebook, while cautioning me about its privacy issues.  The only thing they “get” even less, of course, is blogging (and *me* blogging).

Does this sound at all familiar to any of you?  Or is it merely ageist nonesense?

// via marketing charts