The latest report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project contained little suprises for anyone that’s witnesed a teen online in the past year. However, here are some of the items in the report that I found the most interesting.
- While boys generally dominate downloading and file-sharing activity online, the act of creating and sharing self-authored content, such as artwork, photos, stories, or videos, is one arena where older girls lead. Just 29% of boys ages 15-17 share their own creative content online, compared with 38% of girls in that age group.
- Blogging teens are more likely to have helped an adult do something online than nonblogging teens, this despite living in households with generally more tech-savvy parents. More than nine in ten, or (94%) of blogging teens report helping an adult do something online that they could not do themselves, while 79% of other teens report rendering similar assistance to an adult.
- Teens who report that they most often go online from home are also more likely to read blogs than those who favor other internet access locations. While 43% of these home users read blogs, 29% of teens who go online most often from school say that they read them.
- While public discussion has raged about whether blogs constitute legitimate journalism
or are a reliable source of information, for teens, blogs are much more about the maintenance and extension of personal relationships. When teens do read blogs, they mainly read the blogs of people they know. About 62% of blog-reading teens say they only read the blogs of people they know. The remaining group (36%) reports reading the blogs of both people they know and people they have never met. A mere 2% report only reading the blogs of people they do not know. - Out of the 622 teens in our survey who say they have tried music downloading, 75% agree with the statement that, “Music downloading and file-sharing is so easy to do, it’s unrealistic to expect people not to do it.” Just 23% disagreed with this statement.
- Bloggers generally have similar attitudes as non-bloggers toward free music downloading and file-sharing. Most feel that downloading is so easy to do that it is unreasonable to expect people not to do it. However, like most teen internet users, about half of bloggers think that it is never really okay to download or share files without paying for them or getting permission. Surprisingly, bloggers are slightly less likely to say that downloading is okay as long as people are still buying music and movies; just 59% of bloggers agree with this conditional statement compared with 68% of non-bloggers.
