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Teens and Social Media

Teens and Social Media

New Report from PEW Internet & American Life

Teens and Social Media: The use of social media gains a greater foothold in teen life as they embrace the conversational nature of interactive online media.

Content creation by teenagers continues to grow, with 64% of online teenagers ages 12 to 17 engaging in at least one type of content creation, up from 57% of online teens in 2004.

Girls continue to dominate most elements of content creation. Some 35% of all teen girls blog, compared with 20% of online boys, and 54% of wired girls post photos online compared with 40% of online boys. Boys, however, do dominate one area - posting of video content online. Online teen boys are nearly twice as likely as online girls (19% vs. 10%) to have posted a video online somewhere where someone else could see it.

While it seems we can see some gendered patterns of technology use (for example, that girls blog more - perhaps more journals and diary types of blogs), girls are starting to become more of the creators than simply users of technology - this is a good sign. What's not clear is why teen girls are less likely to post video. Is this a tech issue? Many cell phones have photo & video capabilities, but is this about the social affordance of media technology, or is this showing us a gendered tech-divide?

Amanda Lenhart et al also note:

There is a subset of teens who are super-communicators -- teens who have a host of technology options for dealing with family and friends, including traditional landline phones, cell phones, texting, social network sites, instant messaging, and email. They represent about 28% of the entire teen population and they are more likely to be older girls.

More evidence of gendered communication patterns; girls as the communicators and kin-keepers - at any age.

PDF HERE

posted by Netwoman @ 9:30 AM