I don’t want to burst your bubble but…
Can an Instagram hashtag tell us when you’re too old to get birthday balloons with your age on them?
Roam the endless forests of Instagram for long enough and you might pick up on an emerging birthday trend: holding large balloons shaped in the digits of your new age. It’s a popular choice among those who have reached a touchstone age like 18 or 21, but also for young children with just a single number to worry about:
At some point though, buying such balloons isn’t quite as enticing. Age hovering ominously over your shoulder becomes too crystal of a metaphor, and you worry that in the balloon’s glossy reflection you might notice some crow’s feet or a touch of gray in your coif. The question is when? At what point do people stop getting balloons with their age on them?
Searching Instagram using the hashtag #birthdayballoons puts us on the right track. It’s an imperfect solution, since the majority of people who post photos with their specialized balloons don’t use that specific hashtag and the millennial generation that dominates social media will enjoy disproportionate representation anyway. Still though, there’s no reason to believe that this method won’t provide a representative sample of what’s out there on Instagram, and the findings should be enlightening even if weighed by the site’s uneven demographics.
Twenty thousand photos is a lot to manually examine, even for a lonely blogger, so let’s just keep count until we have a sample size of 500, which spans approximately a six-month period (dataset for those who are interested). Here is the distribution of those balloons across the ages they represent:
Toddlerdom and your twenties appear to be the two major windows for buying these numbered balloons. And why not? Age is a key identifier when you’ve got just a handful of years under your belt, and it feels natural to savor one’s first decade of adulthood.
The peak at thirty, which accounted for 57 of the 500 balloons, fences off the youthful revelers from their counterparts: you’re most likely to get birthday balloons then, but they’ll also probably be your last. At least until 50, when you’ve hit a nice, round number again worth celebrating.
The data’s gender splits are interesting, too. While many of the photos (including most of the 50s) were of unassigned balloons posted by decorations businesses, in about half of the 500 you can determine the honoree’s gender. Not surprisingly, 77% of all gender-identified photos were of females. The distribution of the remaining males, however, hints at a double standard:
At ten and under, boys represent more than half of these ballooned birthday celebrations. But after a quiet teenage period during which everyone is too cool for birthdays, only women reemerge to celebrate with balloons. It’s not until age thirty that men are comfortable enough to again claim their own numbered balloons, after which point it’s a much more balanced split between the sexes. Numerically, males account for 39% of birthdays before age 11 and after age 29, but only 6% of those during the in-between years.
Without delving too far into amateur social commentary, one might contemplate why women are encouraged to explicitly celebrate their 20s, while most men aren’t so openly proud about their age until they reach 30, 40, or 50. Alternatively, you might reject the premise of the study in the first place by contending that Instagram hashtag data can’t serve as a reliable proxy for society’s more complex issues. In which case, all of this statistical talk is rather…inflated! 🎈
Thanks for reading! The data and R script used this week are available at https://github.com/PerplexCity/balloons.
Questions? Want to write a post? Email hello@perplex.city.
