|  It
should come as no surprise that technology plays
a daily role in the education, communication,
commerce and entertainment activities of most
youth living in the United States. According
to a report published by the Pew Internet &
American Life Project last July, close to nine
in 10 teens are users of the Internet. Social
change groups that include youth as stakeholders
would do well to consult Teens and Technology,
which examines the communications habits of
youth ages 12-17. Below are a few excerpts from
the study that KLCC Bridge editors thought would
be of interest to practitioners in the youth
leadership development field. A copy of this
and other reports about the role technology
is playing in American life can be found on
the Project’s Web site at http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/162/report_display.asp
By: Amanda
Lenhart, Mary
Madden and Paul Hitlin
Teens are technology rich and
enveloped by a wired world.
An overwhelming majority of all
teenagers, 84 percent, report owning at least
one personal media device: a desktop or laptop
computer, a cell phone or a Personal Digital
Assistant (PDA). Forty-four percent say they
have two or more devices, while 12 percent have
three and 2 percent report having all four of
those types of devices. Only 16 percent of all
teens report that they do not have any of these
devices at all.
- 83 percent of all the teenagers we surveyed
state that "most" of the people
they know use the Internet.
- 10 percent say that "some" of
the people they know use the Internet.
- Just 6 percent say that very few of the
people they know use the Internet.
- 45 percent of teens have cell phones and
33 percent are text messaging.
Close to half of teens (45 percent)
own a cell phone, and 33 percent have used a
cell phone to send a text message. Texting on
cell phones is particularly common among those
who already go online frequently and use other
Internet tools often. Teens who have cell phones
are heavy users of online communication tools.
One in four cell phone-owning teens have used
their phone to connect to the Internet.
Email is still a fixture in teens'
lives, but IM is preferred.
For many years, email has been
the most popular application on the Internet—a
popular and "sticky" communications
feature that keeps users coming back day after
day. But email may be at the beginning of a
slow decline as online teens begin to express
a preference for instant messaging.
The presence of email in teens'
lives has persisted, and the number that use
email continues to surpass those who use IM.
However, when asked about which modes of communication
they use most often when communicating with
friends, online teens consistently choose IM
over email in a wide array of contexts.
Teens who participated in focus
groups for this study said that they view email
as something you use to talk to "old people,"
institutions, or to send complex instructions
to large groups. When it comes to casual written
conversation, particularly when talking with
friends, online instant messaging is the clearly
the mode of choice for today's online teens.
Instant messaging has become the
digital communication backbone of teens' daily
lives. About half of instant-messaging teens
— or roughly 32 percent of all teens —
use IM every single day. As the platforms for
instant messaging programs spread to cell phones
and handheld devices, teens are starting to
take textual communication with them into their
busy and increasingly mobile lives. IM is a
staple of teens' daily Internet diet and is
used for a wide array of tasks — to make
plans with friends, talk about homework assignments,
joke around, check in with parents, and post
"away messages" or notices about what
they are doing when they are away from their
computers.
- 75 percent of online teens
— or about two-thirds of all teenagers
— use instant messaging, compared to
42% of online adults.
- 48 percent of teens who use
instant messaging say they exchange IMs at
least once every day.
TEENS SHARE MORE THAN
WORDS OVER IM.
IM is a multi-channel space of personal expression
for teens. They typically converse in text,
but they also share links, photos, music, and
video over IM.
- 50 percent of IM-using teens have included
a link to an interesting or funny article
or Web site in an instant message.
- 45 percent have used IM to send photos
or documents.
- 31 percent have sent music or video files
via IM.
THE LANDLINE PHONE LIVES
ON.
While teens have a great appetite for new information
technologies, the landline telephone remains
the most dominant communication medium in teens’
everyday life. Overall, when asked about how
they prefer to communicate with friends, just
5 percent of all online teens say they most
often choose email to communicate with friends.
In comparison, nearly five times as many teens
(24 percent) prefer instant messaging when talking
with friends. Nonetheless, the telephone remains
the tool of choice for the majority of teens:
- 51 percent of online teens usually choose
the landline telephone when they want to talk
with friends.
- 24 percent said they will most often use
instant messaging.
- 12 percent prefer to call friends on their
cell phone.
- 5 percent use email most often to communicate
with friends.
- 3 percent prefer to use text messages.
FACE-TO-FACE TIME STILL
BEATS PHONE AND SCREEN TIME FOR TEENS.
Even with their great affection for technology,
teens still report, on average, spending more
time physically with their friends doing social
things outside of school than they report interacting
with friends through technology. An average
youth between ages 12-17 reports spending 10.3
hours a week with friends doing social activities
outside of school and about 7.8 hours talking
with friends via technology like the telephone,
email, IM or text messaging.
The size of the wired teen population
surges at the seventh grade mark.
This article appears in the
KLCC Bridge with permission. |
