Here's a quick summary of the breakdown of social activity by age in the United States.
Percentage of adults in the United States who use social networks as of January 2018, by age group
It shows that with age comes lower activity, but even among the 50-64-year-old consumers it's still at a whopping 64%.
As a comparison, the percentage of Americans between the ages of 50-64 who regularly take surveys is less than 5%.
Next, take a look at the graphic below, which outlines where consumers spend their time when on the internet.
Most popular daily online activities of adult internet users in the United States as of February 2017, by age group.
Again, this is divided by age: light blue is 18-29. Dark blue is 30-59. And Grey is anything over 59.
If we focus on the 60 or younger crowd, we can see that the distribution of internet activities is relatively even. The younger group tends to use instant messaging, social networking, and video content more, while the older crowd over-indexes on news sites and web searches (which often lead to blogs, news portals, and forums). Even for platforms that are popular among younger audiences, such as social media, the divide between the 18-29 and 30-59 age groups is not as significant as it used to be. (Note that this data is from 2017 and the divide has likely lessened further, partly due to increased smartphone use.)
<aside> ❗ Culture is culture. There's no difference between online and offline.
</aside>
We have a terrible habit as human beings to dismiss things that seem unfamiliar or uncomfortable to us. So, if we're not comfortable with the study of culture on the internet, we tend to brand it as something only relevant to the internet. That argument might have held up in the early 90s when a significantly smaller and highly educated and tech-savvy audience was online. But in today's world, that argument does not stand.
We are now hyper-connected through our cellphones. There isn't a single cohort of consumers that one cannot find or study on the internet. Why? Because through pseudonyms and text-based engagement, consumers feel they can open up on the internet in ways that they cannot in person. They can truly express their beliefs, values, fears, without fear of backlash from their loved ones. They may experience backlash from strangers, but there's a level of personal separation that creates honesty in online discourse and makes it by far THE RICHEST source of information on human beings and their beliefs about pretty much anything and everything.
When we conduct a survey, we don't say ”oh that represents survey culture.” We are more than happy extrapolating the data from 1024 respondents to the entire population, but we struggle with a study that observes tens of thousands of online consumers. Why? Because it's new or different and that makes us uncomfortable. The more we recognize that, the easier it will become to accept the hard facts about the value of the internet to research in the modern world.
[PS: We're not even going into the merits of observational data vs. respondent data here because that is a whole other set of advantages that the internet serves up.]