Thursday, December 20, 2007

Teens: Social Media, Not Email


Some 93 percent of teens use the Internet, and more of them than ever are treating it as a venue for social interaction. Those of you around children and teens know that much of their social life is programmed and scheduled. To a greater extent than used to be the case, their lives are restricted for safety reasons. Social networking is a substitute for "hanging out" in the physical world with friends.

Despite the important of email for adults as a major mode of personal and professional communication, it is not a particularly important part of the teen communications pattern.

Only 14 percent of all teens report sending emails to their friends every day, making it the least popular form of daily social communication on the list researchers at the Pew Internet and American Life Project found.

Even among highly-connected teens who have access to multiple communication modes, just 22 percent say they send email to their friends daily.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has found that 64 percent of online teens ages 12-17 have participated in one or more among a wide range of content-creating activities on the internet, up from 57 percent of online teens in a similar survey at the end of 2004.

About 39 percent of online teens share their own artistic creations online, such as artwork, photos, stories, or videos, up from 33 percent in 2004.

About 33 percent create or work on Web pages or blogs for others, including those for groups they belong to, friends, or school assignments, basically unchanged from 2004 at 32 percent.

Some 28 percent have created their own online journal or blog, up from 19 percent in 2004. About 27 percent maintain their own personal Web page, up from 22 percent in 2004.

About 26 percent remix content they find online into their own creations, up from 19 percent in 2004.

The percentage of those ages 12-17 who said “yes” to at least one of those five content-creation activities is 64 percent of online teens, or 59 percent of all teens.

It isn't rocket science to suggest that social networking is a fundamental trend, not a fad, as some seem to think.

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