66% of teens text, only 8% tweet: Study

Though adult blogging remains steady, teen blogging has decreased by half since 2006 – from 28% of teens then to 14% now, according to a Pew/Internet report released yesterday. Eleven percent of Americans 30+ maintain a personal blog right now, Pew adds. Blogging by 18-29-year-olds has decreased, too, but not by quite as much: from 24% of that age group in 2007 to 15% now. Social networking continues to grow – 73% of teens use social sites now (compared to 47% of adults), up from 55% in 2006 and 65% last February – but Twitter use among teens is not high. Only 8% of 12-to-17-year-old Net users use Twitter, compared to about a third of 18-to-29-year-olds (the age group that uses Twitter the most). Compare that teen Twitter use to virtual worlds (about the same) and texting (a whopping 66%). Moving from media to devices: 75% of teens and 93% of 18-to-29-year-olds have cellphones. It's not surprising to parents, I think, when Pew says that, "in the past five years, cellphone ownership has become mainstream among even the youngest teens." That's where the biggest growth has been: "Fully 58% of 12-year-olds now own a cellphone, up from just 18% of such teens as recently as 2004."

'Teens would ignore texting-while-driving laws'

With texting up 10-fold over the past three years and as momentum for a nationwide law against texting while driving builds, there are indicators that the driver demographic that texts the most would benefit the least. "Already 19 states and the District of Columbia ban texting by all drivers, while 9 others prohibit it by young drivers," Reuters reports, but "at least one major study has found that, with mobile devices now central to their lives, young people often ignore laws against using cell phones or texting in the car." Police say such a law would be tough to enforce for the mere fact that they can't see the phones when drivers are texting. "The California Highway Patrol has handed out nearly 163,000 tickets to drivers talking on hand-held phones since mid-2008" partly because the phone is at the ear and can be seen through the window. When texting, drivers' phones are in their laps, out of sight. Reuters talked to four teens in the Phoenix area, where there has a ban on texting while driving since 2007. Three of them "admitted texting while driving and a fourth said he had stopped only after his cousin caused a serious traffic accident while sending a message." Parents, at least be sure you never text your teens while driving; I recently heard an interview in which a teenager said that even when she texts her mom to stop texting her while driving because it's unsafe, her mom won't stop!

Teen texting while driving: Data

A quarter of teen drivers in the US (26%) say they have texted while driving and "half (48%) of all teens ages 12 to 17 say they’ve been a passenger while a driver has texted behind the wheel," the Pew Internet & American Life Project reports. "Boys and girls are equally likely to report texting behind the wheel as well as riding with texting drivers," Pew adds, and the likelihood of riding with drivers who text grows as teens get older. It's not that they don't understand the risks, Pew senior research specialist Amanda Lenhart suggested, it's just that teens' strong desire to stay connected can outweigh safety. Some related data: 75% of all US 12-to-17-year-olds own a cell phone, and 66% use their phones to text; 82% of 16- and 17-year-olds have a cellphone and 76% of them text. [See also: "Teen drivers: Take a text stop."]

Wonder how much teens tweet?

Not much, if we can extrapolate from just-released Pace University figures on 18-to-24-year-olds. A study by Pace and the Participatory Media Network found that, "while 99% of 18-to-24-year-olds surveyed say they have profiles on social network [sites], only 22% say they use Twitter," CNET reports. And the researchers offered a bit of insight into how that 22% use Twitter: "85% of them follow friends [in real life, I'm assuming], 54% follow celebrities, 29% follow family members, and 29% follow companies." I think it's safe to extrapolate similar if not less interest on the part of tweens - at a recent conference, a Pew/Internet researcher told us teens aren't really on Twitter. At 140 characters or less per message, Twitter's a bit like texting, and texting - which pretty much replaced instant-messaging for youth - rules for short messages in that age bracket, I think. Pew says 77% of US 12-to-17-year-olds own a cellphone, and that percentage is growing.

When does texting get unhealthy?

The teen texting rate keeps climbing. US teens sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages a month in the fourth quarter of 2008, the New York Times reports, citing Nielsen figures. That's "almost 80 messages a day, more than double the average of a year earlier." The Times cites one psychotherapist as saying that adolescents' huge interest in what's going on with peers plus huge anxiety about being out of the loop spell the potential for "great benefit and great harm" from excessive texting. Other healthcare professionals pointed to potential "anxiety, distraction in school, falling grades, repetitive stress injury and sleep deprivation." As interesting to me, if not more, were comments from MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle, who wonders whether all the texting allows teens the "peace and quiet" they need to do their jobs as adolescents: separate from their parents and figure out who they are and will be. Turkle makes two other important points: that parents often don't set the right example with their cellphone use, and adolescence is a time when people need the kind of undivided attention from their parents that cellphone-addicted parents aren't giving them. "I believe the 'cure' doesn't lie so much in hand-wringing or policing usage as much as it does in having honest dialogues about the scientific and emotional side effects of tech dependence as experienced by both generations," writes Ypulse managing editor Meredith Sires in response to the Times piece. Well put. See also "'Continuous partial attention...'."

Teens' online friends = offline friends: Study

Fresh evidence this week that most teens use the Web to socialize with their "real life" friends - "people they already know rather than strangers who might turn out to be predators," USATODAY reports. A study of students in grades 9-12 by University of California researchers "will be presented at a meeting of the Society of Research in Child Development" this week, and similar findings were "published last year in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology." Among the former's key findings: For 44% of youth surveyed, using social network sites "had no effect on their relationship with their friends and 43% said it made them closer; 5% had "friends known only from the Internet."

Teen fashion blogs: Creative outlet

A New York Times style writer reads these teen fashion blogs and "weeps," according to the sub-headline. "Meet the next generation of style bloggers. They might not be able to drive yet, but their fashion sense is so incredible, it's actually intimidating," Elizabeth Spiridakis writes. Ten years ago, teen fashionistas would pore over their issues of Vogue. Now they have their own readerships. Spiridakis points out a number of them in her article. "These sites are part of a developing sense of fashion and self, today's equivalent of doing your hair 20 ways before bedtime. Only you use a digital mirror." And your audience is part of that mirror, posting comments and possibly shaping your fashion sense. This is participatory creativity, learning, maybe even career development. For more on teen design and artistry online, see this in the New York Times last February and this on the study behind these findings.

P2P online-safety ed program

By "P2P," I mean by peers, for peers, and I'm referring to the logical idea of teen-communicated online safety ed, not the adult-taught kind - though it starts with young adult trainers. What's even more intelligent about the LEO Project in Syracuse, N.Y., is that it's really leadership training with online citizenship and safety folded in (safety in a holistic sense, involving critical thinking and behavior that protects reputation as well as well-being), the Syracuse Post-Standard reports. "LEO" loosely stands for "The Leadership, Education and Etiquette - On and Offline," and it's a project of Power Unit for Motivating Youth, a Syracuse after-school and mentoring program co-founded by a school district staff member, Akua Goodrich, who told the Post-Standard the program's about developing youth leadership in "the city and the state and the nation and the world" simply because the Internet's not just local. In one four-day class, 26 "ambassadors" who are high school students learn about "cyber safety and social networking issues as well as peer-to-peer marketing and career preparations. They are now developing a Web site [as well as individual blogs] to help educate their peers on the same issues and plan to visit elementary and middle school students this year to pass on Internet safety messages." It seems to me this is the kind of program that gets closer to reaching more at-risk youth (since research shows it's the young most at risk offline who are most at risk online - see "Profile of a teen online victim").

Fictionalizing their profiles

Adults need to take what they see in teen social-networking profiles with a grain of salt. Case in point:

Six UK newspapers ran a story about a teenager's "wild party" that her mother said never happened. It was a bit of fiction lifted from the girl's Bebo profile. First there was an invite sent out promising "the party of the year" for her 16th birthday, CNET reports. "Subsequent posts on Jodie Hudson's Bebo account spoke of underage drinking, sex acts, and violence that occurred at the celebration." The papers said 400 teens showed up and, encountering the ensuing "chaos," Jodie's mother "punched her in the face out of anger." Amanda Hudson wrote the newspapers that there was no underage drinking, no sex, no violence, and no stealing, despite what her daughter posted in Bebo. She's "suing for defamation and breach of privacy." In its coverage, The Independent cited legal experts as saying "the case may be a legal landmark because there is no precedent in disputes involving third parties who use or publish information from social-networking sites."

The case is also a perfectly timed illustration of a point London School of Economics Prof. Sonia Livingstone makes in her latest study, "Taking risky opportunities in youthful content creation: teenagers’ use of social-networking sites for intimacy, privacy and self-expression" in New Media & Society (June 208).

"It should not be assumed that profiles are simply read as information about an individual," the social psychology professor suggests. Referring to one of her research subjects, Livingstone writes: "Jenny, like others, is well aware that people’s profiles can be 'just a front.' For several of the participants, it seemed that position in the peer network was more significant than the personal information provided, rendering the profile a place-marker more than a self portrait."

Some teens have several profiles on various social sites, some with the peer group more on display than the profile owner. All in all, though, the profiles of the social networkers in her study apparently were more about the individual in relation to his or her group of friends than about the group itself. That blend of individual and group is key and what seems to drive the information that appears in the profile (photos, invites, comments, favorite whatevers). So great care goes into what is made private (to friends only) and what is made public, and - Livingstone indicates later in her analysis - the sites' severely limited choices where privacy's concerned (public or private) is a problem for young people wanting to display more gradations. "Teenagers must and do disclose personal information in order to sustain intimacy [as in sharing innermost thoughts or passwords]," Livingstone writes, but they wish to be in control of how they manage this disclosure."

One final observation I found fascinating, in response to what many adults are thinking these days (and which I'm adding here because the article costs $15 to download): Livingstone writes that "although it indeed appears that, for many young people, social networking is 'all about me, me, me,' this need not imply narcissistic self-absorption. Rather, following Mead’s (1934) fundamental distinction between the 'I' and the 'me' as twin aspects of the self, social networking is about 'me' in the sense that it reveals the self embedded in the peer group, as known to and represented by others, rather than the private 'I' known best by oneself."

My takeaway: There's no reason to overreact to a superficial surf through a bunch of social-networking profiles - even those of our own kids' peers. In many ways their profile fabrications are good. They're...

Protective - only real-life friends, not creeps, know what is and isn't true, which means strangers who try to contact them have zero credibility and usually get ignored.

A safe way to explore identity and social relating, which is part of adolescent development

A creative outlet with instant audience (mostly their friends and creative collaborators), something aspiring writers of the past could only dream about - see the last sentence of this item on the California-based Digital Youth research project.

Readers: Dr. Livingstone told me she'll send a pdf copy of her article to anyone interested. If you are, drop me an email at anne@netfamilynews.org, and I'll pass your request along to her.

Related links

Skewing a little younger: Note how 10-year-old Clementine creates and plays with fictional identities in various sites and worlds online, as told by her mother, New York Times columnist Michelle Slatalla in "Today, I think I'll be Hippohead" ("as of last month, more than 100 new virtual worlds had started up or were in development," Michelle reports).

The social sites teens use: In the UK, "Facebook dominates UK social networking with 45.29% of the market, almost double the share of second-placed Bebo and three times more than MySpace, as micro blogging site Twitter shows major growth," UK-based BrandRepublic.com reports.

"Just because they crave attention?"

Some US police don't take SN profiles at face value - see this on how some "gang members" in MySpace are just wannabes acting out.

Digital media's impact on youth: Fresh research

"America's young people spend more time using media than they do on any single activity other than sleeping," according to The Future of Children, a joint project of Princeton University and the Brookings Institution. So we all need to know how our children and students use media - the Web, phones, videogames, instant messaging, music, video, TV, etc. - and how they affect their users. The just-released new issue of the project's journal Children and Electronic Media, published semi-annually, "looks at the best available evidence on whether and how exposure to different media forms is linked to child well-being."

Among the key findings in the Executive Summary are....

"Content matters" to young people much more than delivery devices or platforms (I was glad to see this because my own observation has long been that "the message is [increasingly] the medium" where youth is concerned, seeing how fluidly they move from uploading to downloading, online to offline, and device to device when socializing and using media).

They use media to communicate better with their friends not strangers.

Their exposure to media "can enhance healthful behaviors—such as preventing smoking and alcohol and drug use, and promoting physical activity and safe sex—through social marketing campaigns."

"Some risky behaviors such as aggressive behavior and cigarette and alcohol consumption are strongly linked to media consumption," but others such as obesity and sexual activity "are only tangentially linked" or need more research.

Advertising is an "integral and influential" part of children's daily lives - just another message being communicated (they don't understand it's about getting them to buy stuff and not just information) - "and many of the products marketed to children are unhealthful."

Government regulation of media content either won't work or won't happen.

What should be done, then? Rather than regulate, the project says, government should help parents and educators do the regulating in homes and schools. It should also help the development of positive content that educates and counteracts negative or non-constructive messaging in electronic media - it should "fund the creation and evaluation of positive media initiatives such as public service campaigns to reduce risky behaviors."

Chapters of particular interest to anyone involved with children's online safety: "Media and Children's Aggression, Fear, and Altruism," "Online Communication and Adolescent Relationships," and "Media and Risky Behaviors."

Related links

A nationwide survey released today (5/9) by Common Sense Media and Joan Ganz Cooney Center (of Sesame Workshop) found that 83% of parents believe "digital media give their children the skills they need to succeed in the 21st century," yet 67% of parents "do not think the Web helped teach their kids how to communicate," 87% "do not believe the Web helped their kids learn how to work with others," and 75% "do not believe the Web can teach kids to be responsible in their communities."

"Internet porn ‘encourages teenagers to have sex early': Experts warn of increase in STDs among young" in Scotland's Sunday Herald about a study in the journal CyberPsychology and Behavior.

Teens' definition of writing...

...does not include all the texting, IMing, blogging, and commenting they're constantly doing online, and yet they're writing all the time as they compose phone text messages, IMs, blog posts, and comments in social-networking sites. This disconnect between what they're doing and their perception of it is a very interesting finding from a new study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Why does the disconnect matter? Because there's a debate going on among adults - parents, educators, etc. - about whether all this writing is hurting their formal writing and, just as importantly, Pew says in its description of the report, "because teens believe good writing is an essential skill for success and that more writing instruction at school would help them." The study "looks at teens’ basic definition of writing, explores the various kinds of writing they do, seeks their assessment about what impact e-communication has on their writing, and probes for their guidance about how writing instruction might be improved." Meanwhile, any writer will tell you that the two most important activities for aspiring professional writers are writing a lot and reading a lot. Here's coverage from The Times of London and CNET.

Teen social networkers: Thinking about privacy

For a good reality check on teens' privacy online and how they handle it, don't miss this report by National Public Radio's Laura Sydell. Parents may not be comfortable with what kids put online, but at least they can take comfort that most teens who use social sites take advantage of privacy controls and the young people Sydell spoke with are really thinking about the issue, not just blithely putting stuff out there. As they should be, and this is why parents need to continue encourage their kids to think critically in this way: Privacy conditions are constantly changing on them, with that gray area between ethical and unethical use of their information growing (see ArsTechnica). An example from Slashdot: "Because Facebook allows users to 'tag' photos with the names of friends, it is possible for third-party apps to distribute photos that a user might only want to be seen by their inner circle of friends."

Teen social networkers: Thinking about privacy

For a good reality check on teens' privacy online and how they handle it, don't miss this report by National Public Radio's Laura Sydell. Parents may not be comfortable with what kids put online, but at least they can take comfort that most teens who use social sites take advantage of privacy controls and the young people Sydell spoke with are really thinking about the issue, not just blithely putting stuff out there. As they should be, and this is why parents need to continue encourage their kids to think critically in this way: Privacy conditions are constantly changing on them, with that gray area between ethical and unethical use of their information growing (see ArsTechnica). An example from Slashdot: "Because Facebook allows users to 'tag' photos with the names of friends, it is possible for third-party apps to distribute photos that a user might only want to be seen by their inner circle of friends."

Teens info-swamped too

A head school librarian suggests that our digitally literate teens are no different from any of us as we slog through our collective information overload. "These kids manage to survive by bushwhacking through the muddle – while seamlessly dealing with an email, a Word document, or a 50-page PDF from the scholarly database JSTOR," writes Thomas Washington of the Potomac School in McLean, Va., in the Christian Science Monitor. "It's taken them just a few years to arrive at the same conclusion that I've reached after a lifetime of sustained reading: The pursuit of knowledge in the age of information overload is less about a process of acquisition than about proficiency in tossing stuff out." In other words, we're *all* reading less in-depth and filtering more. This is good in some ways - because, if Mr. Washington's right, teens are quite naturally, or by necessity, developing the critical thinking that will not only help them cope with the info flood, but also to maintain a safe skepticism not only about what's communicated to them online, but what they choose to communicate and upload themselves. Let's help them consciously cultivate that filtering capability!

The 'IWWIW' generation?

"I definitely think [technology] is a divider," Jane Buckingham told Rachel Abramowitz at the Los Angeles Times, "and it's something that will continue to be a divider. If you don't text message, if you don't twitter, it will change your day-to-day reactions. I don't think [technology] is horrific and negative. At some point, technology will become so integrated into our lifestyles, we won't notice it, but right now we feel its presence a lot." Buckingham is founder and head of The Intelligence Group, which interprets the consumption interests and patterns of Generation Y for marketers (who pay $2,500 a head to listen to her), the Times reports. That's a key point I'd like to highlight here: We parents notice technology; our children really don't. We know when we're online. Our kids do, yes, in that they're using a tech tool to communicate or socialize, but they don't make the distinction we do between online and offline. They don't think about it as they socialize. So right now, as Jane Buckingham says, "technology is a divider" between the generations. I disagree, though, that it will continue to be for the very reason that it is being "integrated into our lifestyles." It won't be a divider between our children and their children when they have them. Something new will divide those generations, I suspect. Kind of like something else Buckingham talks about, which I think divides us and our kids: the access they have to things, each other, info, etc. Buckingham's "mantra" for our children's generation, Abramowitz reports, is "I want what I want. I want it when I want it. And I want it how I want it," or "IWWIW," the acronym at the top of Buckingham's PowerPoint presentation. Kind of depressing, when you consider that's what marketers are paying big bucks to hear so they can go out and create advertising messages for our children that "say" our product/service will satisfy those very "legitimate" consumption needs. (I think I'm sounding very old. Maybe it's the turn of the year.)

Parents on kids' Net use: Study

We're a little more ambivalent about our children's Net use than we used to be - but that doesn't mean more of us think the Internet is bad for them, according to a just-released study on this by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

"While a majority of [US] parents with online teens [12-17] still believe the Internet is a beneficial factor in their children's lives, there has been a decrease since 2004" in the number of parents who believe so (67% then vs. 59% now), study author Alexandra Rankin Macgill reports. She adds, though, that there has not been a "corresponding increase" during the same period in the percentage of parents who see online activity as a bad thing (7% now vs. 5% then). "Instead, more parents are neutral about whether their children have been positively affected by the Internet, saying the Internet has not had an effect on their child one way or another [30% now vs. 25% then]." ["Now" should be qualified a bit, because the survey was conducted about a year ago.]

As for how we regulate our kids' Internet use, interestingly, as with videogames and TV, we tend to do so in terms of the content of the medium more than time spent on it - 68% have rules about what sites their kids can use, compared to 77% concerning TV shows they can watch and 67% concerning videogames they can play. So we're pretty engaged in their Net use - "despite the stereotype of the clueless parent," Pew/Internet found. Some 65% of parents say they've checked where their kids have been after they've been online, and "74% can correctly identify" whether their children have created a social-networking profile others can see.

There's a fairly predictable difference between teens' favorable view of technology and that of parents, though the percentage of parents with a positive view is high: 71% of parents say the Internet and cellphones, iPods and digital cameras make their lives easier, compared to 89% of teens. I noted with interest that 63% of US 12-to-17-year-olds now have cellphones, compared to 89% of parents. For iPods and other music players, it's the inverse: 51% of teens have them, compared to 29% of parents.

Related links

A pdf version of the full 6-page report is linked to here.

The headlines on this report from Pew/Internet ranged from "The Net is a bad influence" from a Fox TV news station in Indiana to the Associated Press's "Parents more ambivalent about Net."

In a closer, more local look at attitudes about the Net, the Orlando Sentinel found them "more nuanced" on the part of both teens and parents.

Increasingly connected online kids

For a long time in online safety talks, we've been stating what is probably obvious but deserves some family discussion: The number of devices on which and access points (friends' houses, wi-fi hot spots, etc.) at which youth can social network and otherwise use the Net is growing fast. The newest iPod is yet another example of the latter. It joins Microsoft's Zune as something that young people will probably deem a very cool way to access the Net. The new iPod Touch "is a touch-screen device that lets anyone in range of a wi-fi hot spot buy music or surf the Web. The version with 8 gigabytes of storage will cost $299 and the 16-gigabyte version $399," the Los Angeles Times reports. Microsoft has cut Zune's price in response, PC World reports. Apple also cut the price of the iPhone by $200. Here are a PC World blog's "Fifteen Random Thoughts about the New iPods." Google News linked to some 1,700 stories around the world on Apple's announcement. BTW, I mentioned family discussion up there. What I'm referring to is discussion about kids making good use of and developing the "filter" between their ears as they access the Net via all these places and devices.