Surprise Fame: Andrew Watts
Andrew Watts is the author of the critically acclaimed article “A Teenager’s View on Social Media, Written by an actual teen”. This blog is shared across the internet by marketers and tech company professionals alike. According to another blogger who has been recommended the article dozens of times, it’s very annoying having a young person’s voice brought up over and over again, especially when he is a self proclaimed amateur.
Watts is a 19 year old at UT Austin interested in social networking. He decided to offer his opinion about social media because he believes that the things being published are all statistic based and offer no perspective from the actual marketable community. With a system of companies so focused on the teen group, one would think we would be listening to more of their opinions, but it seems they have been largely undervalued.
Watts offers his authority regarding the websites as a user with friends who also use the sites. As a young person, everything he said was spot on, about every single social media platform-in regards to how much people actually use it, who uses it, what it’s pitfalls are and why people bother.
Watts writes about once a month and mainly publishes on Backchannel. He posts about virality and technology and how it all effects the world young people are living in. He explores subjects close to our age groups’ hearts and always offers a clinical but personalized analysis of the subjects. He’s written on the virality of Pokemon Go, of the video game quality to this years presidential race, articles furthering his discussion of social media networks and articles talking about what has happened to him since his article went viral.
In his initial blog about social media, he talked about the significance (or lack thereof) of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Tumblr, Yik Yak, and Medium. He describes each one as he uses them and as his friends use them, reflecting the opinions of many young people I know. The blog itself is set up very cleanly. Watts attaches a picture on the left side for each site he talks about-the icon for the site. He’s got the white ‘f’, the tan camera lens, the blue bird, and he wraps the text on each one. This makes for a very accessible piece with easy cognitive access. As soon as you see the icon, you know what the paragraph is going to be about and it’s never misleading. The whole thing is very well organized.
In another article written a year later, he talks about how the whole article and its sequel changed his whole life. He describes the good and the bad in his article “A Teenager’s View on Life and Virality.” Again we see a very personalized look at what has happened in his young life. He gives a play by play of all the opportunities that came along with his viral success, like interviews at major tech companies, consulting gigs, and public interviews with experts in the field that were televised and frequently retweeted. He also talks abou the negative reactions he faced. His initial article doesn’t speak from any perspective except his own which is a privileged, college-educated, white male dominant one. He is unable to offer opinions of anyone on social media except his own and kids who come from a similar demographic. Watts says nothing racist or politically charged in the article but still people were angry that his opinion was validated so much. Because he was 19 when he wrote the article, commentors expressed anger, saying they were mislead by someone who wasn’t ‘really’ a teenager. He was too old to express his opinion apparently, even though he is still techinally a teen. This in itself was baffling to Watts and he expressed himself as such.
The fact that there was a discourse surrounding his article is probably the most important part about it. He offered an article well researched enough to have some holes in it left open for argument. There was a backlash which made the article even more popular and the points made in the counter arguments were just as important as the initial article itself. Watts created a large discussion without planning it at all. Everybody who posts blogs must be hoping for a readership of some sort but Watts hit the big time in internet terms very quickly and easily, and realized the repercussions of that just as fast.
