The Rich Kids Of Instagram feed is known for inspiring moderate to severe feelings of jealousy with pictures of gilded, one-percenter teens pouring champagne on each-other and lounging around on boats.
In years to come, however, it might also be viewed as an important sociological document, and a record of our times.
The Pew Research Centre’s Teens, Social Media And Technology Overview 2015, released this week, shows that, the more affluent teenagers are, the more likely they are to gravitate towards Instagram as their social media platform of choice.
The study polled American teens aged between 13 and 17 – aka the most powerful and influential people in the universe – about their crippling internet addictions daily internet usage habits, and the social networks they favour.
In spite of all those think pieces about how Facebook is dying / dead / something only parents use to spy on their kids, it remains popular, with 71% of teens surveyed still using it.
The figures get more interesting when broken down by overall household income.
For instance, in houses with an income of less than US $30,000, 51% of teens say that Facebook is the social network they use the most often, with Snapchat at 7%, and Instagram at 19%.
At the other end of the spectrum, in houses with an income of more than US $100,000, the figures change, with just 31% using Facebook as their primary social network, versus 15% on Snapchat and 25% on Instagram.
What does this all mean? The research don’t provide any obvious reason why rich kids prefer Instagram, but it seems logical that if you have a lot of stuff, it’s fun to show it off, and even more fun if you do it using the Valencia filter.
Elsewhere, in the ‘Things That Will Surprise Absolutely Nobody’ section of the report, 92% of teens surveyed said that that they go online daily, while 24% say they are online “almost constantly.”
Those numbers seem low, but then again, we haven’t left the internet in years, and are actually terrified to go outside.
#PrayForUs
